• But, instead of installing the right wing opposition led by María Corina Machado in office, the administration left Maduro’s regime intact. It is now led by Delcy Rodríguez. Despite her anti-imperialist rhetoric, she is collaborating with the Trump administration. Now Trump has his sights set on further interventions and regime changes from Colombia to Nicaragua, Cuba, and Greenland to bring the Western Hemisphere under Washington’s thumb.

• But it’s also surprising. Before the coup Maduro was offering the U.S. all sorts of concessions and deals, but Trump opted to kidnap him anyway. Why?

  Negotiations between

• This was based on an acknowledgement that while Washington’s traditional allies in the right-wing opposition were too weak to dislodge Maduro from power or provide stable governance, the Maduro government could meet Trump’s needs, particularly with regards to deportations and access to oil. And Trump was proven right: the Maduro government accepted deportation flights, released several U.S. citizens in its custody, and publicly offered the U.S. access to its oil. The only thing it was not willing to offer up was one of its own.
• The reason for this is that Trump realized it was untenable to simultaneously launch his new “ Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine — which, as his National Security Strategy states, seeks “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” — while allowing Maduro to stay in power and negotiate with his government.

• Having achieved this, Trump’s government is now dealing with the new government, headed by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, on a fundamentally different footing: one in which all the cards are in Trump’s hands. He plans to use this to humiliate the government and essentially convert Venezuela into a twenty-first century protectorate.

• For the two reasons. First, the understanding that Machado and the right-wing opposition could not stably govern the country, primarily because it has no influence in the military and security forces. Moreover, while those who support the government are a minority, they represent an important section of society and would have mobilized against the imposition of such a government. The most likely scenarios would have been street mobilization and maybe even civil war.

• Second, the Trump government assessed that any new government sans Maduro would maintain Maduro’s policy of seeking accommodation with the United States. It recognized that the Maduro government had already been dramatically weakened by the loss of support and legitimacy inflicted in the 2024 presidential elections — where the government refused to publish verifiable results, strongly indicating fraud was committed.

• Any new government would therefore be highly dependent on the U.S. for maintaining power. Given the Maduro government’s control over the military, and the role it had played in dismantling the radical process of change led by Chávez — commonly referred to as the Bolivarian revolution — Trump officials assessed a new dependent “Madurismo without Maduro” government would best provide stability while securing its interests.

• There are two other points worth making. First, my belief had always been that successive U.S. administrations preferred to replace the Chávez and then Maduro governments with an undemocratic transitional authority. For a long time, this was essentially a necessity, as the opposition was unable to win popular support at elections.

• More importantly, such an authority would be best placed to completely wind back the remaining gains of the Bolivarian revolution. An unelected authority would not be encumbered with concerns about popularity or electorate mandate and would therefore be less beholden to pressure from below. Instead, it could swiftly implement what the U.S. sought (and apply the repression required), so that by the time any elections came about, all the main decisions had been made.

• What I failed to foresee was that such an authority could ultimately be best run by figures that maintained the rhetoric of the Bolivarian revolution (even if they had presided over its destruction), and not the opposition. Ironically, the Rodríguez government has an advantage over a Machado government in that the latter would almost certainly be subject to more popular pressure, given the large vote that her preferred candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, seemingly obtained in the last presidential election, as indicated by voting tally sheets collected by the opposition.

• These crucial levers of power were used to try and overthrow Chávez in 2002-03. However, the defeat of the April 2002 military coup attempt and December 2002-January 2003 oil bosses’ lockout — both through the mass mobilization of the poor majority, the working class (particularly oil workers) and patriotic sectors of the military — fundamentally altered the balance of power. In form, the Chávez government was the same before and after these events, but in content it was fundamentally different.

• The same is true now, though somewhat in reverse. The balance of forces has not shifted away from the working class and poor, whom the Maduro government pushed aside and repressed. Instead, it has shifted away from the new base it relied on to government; namely the military and security forces, the new capitalist class it nurtured through access to state funds, and, in more recent years, the old capitalist class (with even Fedecamaras making its peace with the government).

• Today, the government’s main base of support is the U.S. government. The dramatic loss of popular support exposed in the 2024 presidential elections revealed the regime’s fragility. The January 3 U.S. military assault completely pulled the rug from under the government.

• The result is a transitional authority with no popular mandate and whose hold on power ultimately depends on Washington: a tremendously dangerous situation for the Venezuelan people and their sovereignty.

• While a deal cannot be ruled out, no definitive evidence has been provided, Moreover, there are two strong arguments against such a deal being made.

• First, it is more likely that those in the government thought they could call Trump’s bluff, believing he would not go so far or ultimately accept a deal that kept Maduro in power. This helps explain why the Venezuelan armed forces were so ill-prepared for the January 3 assault, despite months of warnings.

• More importantly, a key factor in the Maduro (and now Rodríguez) government’s hold on power has been the ability to keep the quite diverse factions within it united. A deal to hand over one leader would have caused great concerns among all factions, worried about who might be next, potentially fracturing this unity that was so vital for them until now—and will be moving forward.

• That said, whether a deal was or was not made, it does not change much in terms of the Rodríguez government’s policies or discourse.
• But even as the U.S. ramped up its military deployment in the Caribbean, Maduro went to great lengths to play down the situation and avoid directly speaking out against Trump and his actions.

• First he claimed the videos of boats being bombed in the Caribbean were simply AI. Then he sought to blame Secretary of State Marco Rubio for leading Trump astray. Then he sent Trump a private letter explaining how he had “publicly acknowledged the significant efforts [Trump is] making to bring an end to the war [sic] [he] inherited in other regions” and hoped that “together we can defeat the falsehoods that have sullied our relationship”. And just days before his kidnapping, Maduro once again publicly offered to grant U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil.

• This discourse has essentially continued under Rodríguez who, less than two weeks after Maduro’s kidnapping, met with the CIA director and posted on her social media about “a long and courteous” phone call with Trump regarding “a bilateral work agenda for the benefit of our peoples.” She has justified the reestablishment of diplomatic ties and the reopening of embassies in both countries as the means by which the government will pursue Maduro and Flores’ freedom.

• Regarding the last part of your question, it is not so much an issue of what Rodríguez wants to do as what she will be allowed to do. Again, Washington is now calling all the shots.

• Take the oil industry: Trump has seized large stores of Venezuelan oil, sold it via foreign intermediaries, placed the proceeds in Qatari bank accounts and told Venezuela how its share must be used, namely as funds to private banks to sell as foreign currency.

• In response, the Rodríguez government has sought to portray this as some kind of victory, rather than an act of international piracy and extreme violation of sovereignty. At the same time, the National Assembly has just held its first vote to partially reform Chávez’s hydrocarbon law, which will legalize Trump’s plans for the sector, including essentially handing over control of oil extraction, production and sales to foreign companies.

• These rallies largely reflect the more right-wing elements of the diaspora, removed from the daily realities of their country (particularly the bombings). Much like their leadership, they had placed all their hopes in some kind of U.S. intervention to remove the government, believing this would allow them to return. But those protests were short-lived, particularly after they realized the same government was still in place and their preferred leader, Machado, was being sidelined by Trump.

• Within the country, the government has made sure that no similar mobilizations could occur. Moderate right-wing politicians have spoken out against the attack. But there have also not been signs of spontaneous mobilizations against it.

• It took several days for the government to recover from the shock and start organizing protests. Participation at these rallies have been largely limited to the governing party’s support base and been relatively small — in the thousands or, at most, several tens of thousands.

• This is because, for many years now, most Venezuelans have withdrawn from politics and turned their back on the entire political class, both the section in government and the opposition. Many may have voted for the opposition in 2024, but primarily with the determination to vote out the government rather than to support the opposition, much less its political program.

• But we cannot turn a blind eye to the actions of those governments, which fundamentally weaken anti-imperialist sentiment in their own country. The lack of response to the January 3 imperialist intervention is a direct result of the Maduro government’s anti-worker and anti-democratic policies, which have alienated the precise base required to resist imperialism.

• Today, most Venezuelans believe things cannot continue as they were. That explains both the lack of mobilization and a sense of anxious hope among a significant section of the population that things might get better, as they seemingly could not get worse — even though imperialist intervention will only ultimately make matters worse.

• The difference reflects how the working class and poor viewed the Chávez government in 2002, compared with the Maduro government in 2026. When Chávez was overthrown, there was a real sense that it was their government and their rights that were being taken away, sparking widespread organized and spontaneous mobilizations.

• Fast forward to 2026, the majority views the Maduro government, rightly or wrongly, as the main problem. This does not mean they all supported the military attack; many felt a deep opposition or profound sense of complete demoralization in the face of this imperialist attack. Yet they did not mobilize against it. Instead, they largely preferred to sit on the sidelines — as they have for most of the past decade — and see what happens next, hoping something good might come out of this tragedy.

• Importantly, these factors explain the most important change: that of the character of the Maduro government. As I mentioned before, sometime during the Maduro government, between 2015-17, it became clear that the section of society for whom it governed was shifting. A combination of circumstances and choices led it to break with the poor majority and working class base that had supported the Chávez government and formed the backbone of the Bolivarian revolution. Instead, it consolidated a new base among the military, security forces and the new capitalist class, and started a process of counter-revolution.

• That is why I argue that although the sanctions may not have succeeded in terms of regime change — if we understand this as a change in the personnel running the state — they did succeed in helping to change the class basis and political project of the existing regime.

• Unlike the Chávez government, the Maduro government was undeniably a pro-capitalist government. It represented both the interests of the new capitalist class, which had enriched itself through its connections to the “Bolivarian” state (the so-called Bolivarian bourgeoisie that Chávez denounced), but also the traditional capitalist class. The Maduro government ultimately won over the support of Fedecamaras, while the head of the Caracas Stock Exchange said after the 2024 presidential elections that the government, not the opposition, best represented economic stability.

• The Maduro government was also decidedly anti-worker. Often sections of the Left excuse the government, saying its policy decisions were due to the sanctions. But this ignores that government policies led to a dramatic upward redistribution of wealth even before the sanctions, Moreover, even under the sanctions, it is not the case that the Maduro government had no other options. From 2018 onwards, it deliberately chose to shift the burden of the crisis onto the working class.

• The pro-Maduro Left counters this with claims that the government has not privatized public services, provides subsidies, and supports the building of communes, therefore meaning it is still progressive. This ignores the privatizations (full and partial) that have occurred in various sectors, most importantly agriculture, but even in the strategic oil industry, where privatization-by-stealth has been enacted under the guise of the Anti-Blockade Law.

• At the same time, while state companies have been established under Maduro, particularly in the minerals sector, these were set up as vehicles for incorporating the military into circuits of capital accumulation, and have been responsible for environmental destruction and dispossession of indigenous lands, not wealth redistribution. History is replete with examples of state companies benefitting capitalists — starting with PDVSA, which was state-owned right through the neoliberal period that preceded Chavez.

• The same is true for policies such as food, transport and fuel subsidies, which even reactionary governments such as those in Egypt and Indonesia maintain. More often than not they serve as clientilistic means for maintaining some level of social support (as the Maduro government has done with its food packages distributed by local governing party officials). In other cases, they are too difficult to roll back without facing substantive resistance. Overall, the impact of these subsidies have been far outweighed by the deliberate policy of pulverising workers’ wages as a means for dealing with hyperinflation.

• As for the promotion of communal councils and communes as evidence of the Maduro government’s progressive nature, these leftists ignore the government’s own data, which show that far from having promoted “thousands of communes” as vehicles for self-government, the government presided over their cooptation and decline. The Minister of Communes’ figures shows a sharp, consistent decline over the past four years in the number of communal councils re-electing their authorities (down from about 19,000 in 2022 to just over 2000 last year). Meanwhile, of the almost 4000 communes that have been registered over the past more than a decade, less than 20 percent have been able to maintain at least one functioning body, such as a communal government or communal bank. A big factor for this has been government attempts to subordinate them by placing them under the control of local party officials.

• The reality is that the policies the pro-Maduro Left point to are largely legacies of the Chavez era, which have since been transformed into channels for corruption, clientelism, and capital accumulation; been completely nullified by the depression of workers’ wages; or remain in place because the political cost of reversing would be too high — though, as the proposed oil industry reform indicates, even measures considered taboos yesterday may no longer be considered sacred tomorrow.

• Of course, such a turn in economic policy had to be accompanied by a ramping up of repression. Outside Venezuela, we hear about repression against the right-wing opposition — though never about their anti-democratic, violent and illegal actions. But the Left and working class forces in Venezuela have arguably faced greater repression.

• There is a further component that needs to be considered; namely the use of security forces to terrorize working class and poor communities. As discontent with the government rose among traditional Chávez-voting sectors, the Maduro government stepped up its policing of these neighborhoods through its “Operation Liberate the People” and creation of the elite death squad, FAES (Special Action Forces).

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• China is the world's largest burner of coal. Western imperialist countries have turned China into their capitalist manufacturing center, and the Western countries are importing green technology that's produced by burning coal in China. If this continues, we will lose any chance of staying below 1.5C while we produce green energy commodities for some date in the future.
• That's not what we should be looking at. We need fossil fuels to be reduced rather than the total energy production increased, which China and other capitalist countries are doing by leveraging both types. The US oil industry makes great use of wind and solar because flow-generated energy works well for their applications. In other applications, stock-generated energy like oil, gas, and coal work better - and are cheaper. The capitalists will tend to go with the least costly or most profitable solution. As long as China's energy needs are expanding to make more plastic shit for export, the Chinese state and capitalists will likely not reduce overall GHG production in Chinese industries.

• "The bad news is that, if history teaches us one thing, it is that there never has been an energy transition. There was not a movement from wood to coal, then from coal to oil, then from oil to nuclear. The history of energy is not one of transitions, but rather of successive additions of new sources of primary energy. The erroneous perspective follows from a confusion between relative and absolute, local and global. If, in the twentieth century, the use of coal decreased in relation to oil, it remains that its consumption continually grew; and on a global level, there was never a year in which so much coal was burned as in 2014."

• Russia could not conquer all of Ukraine and would not try, as this would require an occupation army many times the size of the entire Russian military and would almost certainly encounter sustained Ukrainian guerrilla attacks.

• South Africa’s development finance institution has committed $20 million to a domestic rare earths project aimed at helping the European Union reduce its reliance on China for critical minerals.

   

                     

   

             

• Never mind that it was the Soviet Union, not today’s smaller and weaker Russia, that won World War II, or that the Red Army was a multinational force. Millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, and others fought and died, and Ukraine and Belarus, in particular, suffered catastrophically under German occupation. Russians don’t even bother to deny these facts—they have simply erased them from history. By a master stroke of mythmaking, Russia has recast the Soviet victory as an exclusively Russian achievement, hoarding all the glory, all the victimhood, and all the symbolic capital of anti-fascism. The result is the myth of the Russian steamroller—historically righteous, militarily unstoppable—that grinds enemies to dust and makes resistance not only futile but immoral.

   
• On Jan. 12, “we can do it again” curdled into a bitter joke for Russians. That day, Moscow’s war in Ukraine officially surpassed 1,418 days, a number drilled into every Soviet and Russian schoolchild. It marks the time it took to achieve victory in World War II—from the moment the Nazis invaded their ally in 1941 to Germany’s capitulation in the smoldering ruins of Berlin.
• Russians are now faced with incontrovertible evidence of their failure to live up to their chosen historical standard. The comparison is even more painful when set against the thousands of miles that the Red Army drove Nazi forces across Europe, versus the few yards of frozen farmland that Russian troops have struggled to seize this winter

• The demoralizing effect of crossing this symbolic threshold is difficult to quantify, yet it is visibly unsettling even to the most fervent Russian patriot. The enormity of the invasion’s failure is now impossible to deny—or to dismiss as illegal defeatism or foreign propaganda. Ukraine did not perish—not in the planned three days, not in nearly four years of war. Instead, it now poses a serious threat to Russia itself, in a darkly ironic self-fulfilling prophecy of Moscow’s own justifications for the invasion.

   

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• The Global South must revive the Bandung spirit—but this time through alliance, not non-alignment. The Non-Aligned Movement arose at a specific historical moment when navigating between superpowers could create space for newly independent nations. Times have changed. Today, non-alignment has become equivalent to tacit alignment with imperialist powers, who exploit neutrality rather than respect it. The Global South needs internal alliances to collectively oppose the West's capitalist-imperialist system, forging a new internationalism that pools material resources rather than merely declaring positions in discourse.

   

• China is doing its best. The Belt and Road Initiative constitutes the foundational infrastructure for the most significant alternative development path in human history. The Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, Global Civilization Initiative, and Global Governance Initiative are concrete frameworks for organizing the world around construction rather than destruction, dialogue rather than coercion, and mutual benefit rather than imperialist plunder.

   
• China has demonstrated that rapid development outside Western control is possible and that a civilization can modernize without submitting to Atlantic hegemony

• However, nations will not achieve this automatically. Too many ruling classes in the Global South have already reconciled with imperialism. These comprador bourgeoisies, who profit from subordination, will not act unless compelled. Mass mobilization is therefore essential: the people must force the state to act when it is captive to comprador interests, defend progressive governments from imperialist subversion, and create the political conditions that enable alliances. Anti-imperialist mass mobilization must emerge at all levels—from the streets to the state, from local to regional—because history waits for no one who is unprepared.

   

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• The Imperial Gold Standard

   

  The classical gold standard that emerged in the 1870s and operated until World War I was fundamentally an imperial system, with Britain at its center.
• Control of African minerals and indirect control of corporations via alliances with Belgium and the Netherlands rendered Britain as the preeminent imperial power by 1914. British banks were dominant in this period in the same way that the British navy was dominant on the high seas.

• In his 1915 Atlantic Monthly essay "The African Roots of War," W.E.B. Du Bois argued that World War I was fundamentally rooted in European competition over colonial exploitation—a process he termed "the rape of Africa." He contended that the conflict's origins lay not in European nationalism or militarism, but in imperialist rivalries over the resources and labor left unresolved by the Berlin Conference. Central to this struggle was a system of super-exploitation for gold mining, which Du Bois characterized as a "jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races." Du Bois was prophetic in linking the war to the color line, arguing that any lasting peace required dismantling colonial systems entirely, not merely redistributing colonies among victors. His analysis anticipated later anti-colonial and dependency theorists who centered imperialism rather than treating it as peripheral to understanding modern warfare and capitalist development.

   
• German industrialists depended on Military Keynesianism to propel the economy, instead of depending on the financial sector.

• The Great Depression destroyed interwar monetary arrangements. Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931, and in 1933-34, Roosevelt's administration devalued the dollar by raising gold's official price to $35 per ounce—a nearly 70% increase that reflected both deflation's impact and a deliberate strategy to reflate the economy and improve U.S. export competitiveness. This $35 price became the anchor for the Bretton Woods system established in 1944, which made the dollar the world's reserve currency convertible to gold at this rate.

   
• The CFA system also meant France could oppose dollar hegemony from a stronger position—de Gaulle's famous 1960s challenges to Bretton Woods, including demanding gold for dollars and advocating return to gold standards, were enabled by France's ability to extract resources and monetary tribute from Africa. France wasn't genuinely advocating "neutral" monetary systems; it was defending its own neo-imperial arrangements against American encroachment.

• As in the First World War, the United States emerged out of World War II as the strongest industrial power. From the declaration of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, there had been negotiations between the British and US bankers about the post war financial system. Britain entered these negotiations from a position of profound weakness.  Even before the end of the war, Franklin Roosevelt had outlined the post war imperial order dominated by the United States. The USA would support anti colonial elements so that these former colonies could be dominated by US banks and corporations. Financially exhausted by the war, heavily indebted to the United States, and facing the imminent collapse of its imperial economic system from massive anti colonial revolts such as that of India and Africa, the British was trapped under the Lend Lease system. 

   
• The collapse of the Gold Pool in 1961

• The Bretton Woods System Collapsed in 1971.

   
• Gold prices, which had begun recovering in the early 2000s as China and other emerging markets accelerated accumulation,

• A Pan-African Gold Council would function as a continental institution challenging extractive imperialism by monitoring illicit gold flows and corporate exploitation, supporting artisanal miners against criminalization and displacement, and promoting resource sovereignty through transparent revenue tracking and renegotiation of predatory mining contracts. It would be the opposing end of the World Gold Council that serves the interests of imperial states. 

   

• The proposal is inextricably linked to the common currency for Africa to accelerate African social and economic integration.

   

• The price surge intensifies militarization around gold-producing regions, particularly in Africa. As the preceding analysis noted, high prices make previously unviable deposits profitable, spurring both corporate expansion and artisanal mining explosions. This generates multiple military dynamics: increased private military company deployments protecting mining operations; state military forces securing extraction zones against insurgencies or rival claimants; cross-border conflicts over gold-rich territories (DRC-Rwanda dynamics intensify when gold values soar); and armed groups financing operations through illicit gold trade. The estimated $30 billion in gold leaving Africa illegally annually funds various military actors—from jihadist groups in the Sahel to militia networks in eastern DRC. French and U.S. military presences in Africa, officially justified through "counterterrorism," also function to secure extraction networks and maintain access to strategic minerals. As gold prices rise, the military premium on controlling production zones increases proportionally.

   

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• Het budget daalt het sterkst voor natuur en milieubeheer: van 123 naar 82 euro per inwoner.