The Decline of Trumpism and the Crisis of Capitalism

The chaotic Trump reign over US politics is showing critical signs of weakening on many fronts: Trumponomics is failing: Trumpian immigration policy has stirred a powerful backlash; Teflon Trump has been tarnished by his clumsy, slippery handling of the Epstein scandal; his foreign-policy contradictions and outrages have confused both international friends and foes alike; and his violation of his “end to endless wars” campaign has caused a break with some of his most ardent supporters.

It is easy to forget that this Trump regime has been in power for only a little more than a year, while enjoying a majority in both the House and the Senate, as well as a favorable majority in the Supreme Court. In such a short time, he and his cohorts have managed to do extraordinary damage.

Unlike in his first term, where Trump included some of the Republican Party old guard, the new administration was outfitted with hard-core MAGA-- a cabal that proved to be craven sycophants, unhinged racists and nationalists, and intellectual reactionaries.

Whatever traction Trump may have gotten with those angry with two-party betrayal, his already shattered promises are reflected in his falling poll numbers. With the mid-term elections coming, significant numbers within his coalition are questioning his policies or distancing themselves from his positions despite his brazen threats to destroy them politically for their heresy.

It would be more than misleading to credit the decline of Trumpism to the resistance, the Democrats, or the broad left. For sure, there have been remarkable centers of mass struggle against Trump’s policies, most notably, the impressive Minneapolis resistance to ICE that successfully organized tens of thousands into a powerful force driving the Trump forces into an embarrassing retreat. Those hoping to reverse the Trump onslaught would do well to study the Minnesota phenomenon rather than deferring to Democratic Party leadership.

The labor unions-- potentially a formidable adversary to Trumpism-- are paralyzed by a leadership afraid to defy their members who might support Trump. They are willing to close their eyes to MAGA’s clearly anti-union program in order to maintain the internal tranquility of business unionism. As support for Trumpism declines with working people, careerist union leaders remain on the sidelines. When union organizers and leaders have stood up in the past, they have made the difference between surrendering to reaction or defending the interests of working people. The left-led CIO unions of the thirties were the bulwarks of the resistance to the far-right “answers” to the Great Depression.

Similarly, the Democratic Party has demonstrated both its inability and unwillingness to defeat the Trump steamroller. Trump’s reelection itself proves that the Democratic Party has failed to create a program that will deliver voters from the fears and anxieties that animate Trump support. Tolerating-- if not welcoming-- the admission of billionaires, war mongers, spies, hucksters, and careerists into their inner circle, Democratic Party leaders are counting on Republican failure and Epstein-sleaze to propel them back to power, instead of developing a popular agenda. 

Recent local and by-elections have shown a hunger among Democratic Party voters for progressive, populist candidates of the Sanders/Mamdani ilk, but party functionaries have sought to cultivate ex-military, CIA, FBI hawks with corporate-friendly agendas to fill their electoral slates. The Democratic Party has evolved into a massive fund-raising machine more than willing to wait its turn in the two-party back-and-forth. Candidates of substance have no place in the strategic vision of their bankrupt leaders.

The Democratic Party response to the ongoing war against Iran (and the recent invasion of Venezuela) evidences its cynical, corrupted posture. Sensing a vulnerability with Trump’s naked aggression, they attack the Republicans-- not on moral or humanitarian grounds-- but on procedure! The slaughter of the innocent victims of Israeli and US bombs is passed on uncritically, but the failure to consult Congress counts as a grievous sin!

This is a party that long left its New Deal image in the rear-view mirror.

But because of the deeply entrenched two-party system, expressions of popular struggle, of resistance, of progressive change too often feel it necessary to tether to a corrupted Democratic Party.

Especially after the shock and awe of massive deindustrialization and a devastating economic crisis, many mistakenly envisioned Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party as a possible break from the indifference of the elites leading both parties. Trump presented himself as such, trading on desperate hope and the desire for change, just as his Democratic Party predecessor stirred a wave of optimism based on vague promises. With economic inequality-- the benchmark for all kinds of inequality-- relentlessly advancing, Trump’s empty promise of restoring manufacturing jobs nonetheless resonated with the disenchanted.

He promoted the idea that a heavy dose of sanctions, tariffs, and other forms of arm-twisting would secure for the citizens a bounty of wealth that had been cheated from them, stolen from them, or given away by the treacherous Democrats. This let’s-make-a-deal economic policy was the basis for the delusion that billions of lost wealth would be recovered for the public good. 

Couple these fantasies with a regressive tax policy to appease the hard-headed corporate bosses, and you have the essence of Trump’s economic plan.

Meanwhile, the serious problems of stagnation and inflation carried over from the Biden administration remain unattended.

Like the Democrats, Trump had no immigration policy that balanced guaranteeing labor-market stability with humanitarian concerns. Instead, he chose to not only expel all undocumented immigrants, but to also whip up hysterical waves of xenophobia, much of it rabidly racist. Unleashing a Gestapo-like ICE on communities and cities played poorly in even the corporate media, costing him dearly in support.

The Epstein scandal-- unlike other exposures of ruling-class libertinism and debauchery-- will not go away because both the Democrats and Republicans will not let it go away. Both parties are thoroughly devoted to throwing slime on their opponents, since both parties own prominent friends of Epstein. However, the Epstein affair has done serious and costly damage to Trump because he already exhibits extraordinary vulgarity, he has clumsily mishandled suspicions of his involvement, and his attorney general has botched the investigation. 

Despite running on a nationalist platform disclaiming foreign entanglements, Trump has been baited by the neo-conservative, Marco Rubio wing of MAGA to embrace regime change. After the Venezuela invasion, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro Moros and Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, and the government’s subsequent capitulation, Trump grew “dizzy” with his perceived success. The Wall Street Journal has dubbed his novel regime-change strategy as “decapitate and delegate.” Now Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has wooed Trump into applying the strategy to Iran, launching a joint war that threatens to escalate into a regional war with profound implications for the global economy.

Trumpism’s decline comes at a time of the deepening crisis of capitalism. Since the devastating economic crash of 2007-2009, the world economy has failed to recover fully from financial stress, stagnation, and inflation. 

Under the management of political and central bank leaders, rapidly rising inequality, deteriorating standards of living, social stress, and widely expressed dissatisfaction afflict all the advanced capitalist countries. The most dramatic mass expression of this rising discontent is the growing rejection of centrist political parties—parties that have shared rule in most countries for many generations of voters. Trumpism and other, European and Asian, right-wing populist parties and movements reflect this bitter discontent with conventional governance.

Some of the so-called lower-middle or higher-middle-income capitalist or capitalist-accommodating countries have high growth rates that-- in spite of great inequality-- have generated growing middle strata and relative political stability. Insofar as they enjoy high growth from the migration of capital and industrial production to their economies, they also sustain high rates of labor exploitation along with modestly rising living standards. Their ruling classes have traded extreme labor exploitation for a competitive advantage against the advanced capitalist countries. 

Of course, the poorest countries remain tragically stunted from the legacy of European colonialism, denied any but the grimmest future in the capitalist economy.  

Competition between the advanced capitalist countries, rivalry with the emerging economies, and the desperate conflict between the have-nots for a place in the imperialist system constitute a global tinder box. 

Headlines understandably report US-Israeli aggression in the Middle East (now engaging nearly all of the countries in the region) or US brazen meddling in the Americas. 

Less acknowledged are the wars, conflicts, and civil wars stoked and conducted in nearly every region: Russia-Ukraine, Pakistan-Afghanistan, China-India, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Rwanda-DRCongo, Sudan, Thailand-Cambodia, Sahel, Myanmar, China-Taiwan, China-Japan, China-Philippines, Haiti, Colombia, are part of a list that grows almost weekly. Millions of lives have been affected by, even sacrificed to national ambitions to acquire markets, to attain resources, or to secure advantage over others directly or indirectly.

While the US remains the biggest capitalist bully in the imperialist system, it is simplistic and misleading to assume that its action is the only global expression of capital’s ruination upon the world’s people. Nor should it be forgotten that capital oppresses and immiserates the people of the US as well. It is an entire system in dysfunction.

As more and more people recognize that the current system and its managers are failing us, they will necessarily look for a more radical alternative. It should be apparent that recycling the same leaders, the same ideas, the same parties will simply not do. 

Yet there are those who insist that bringing down Trump or his global counterparts is enough. They see Trumpism and right-wing populism as a plague that visits the world periodically and must be collectively turned back to restore some kind of normalcy. They conjure an idyllic past that Trump and his ilk disturbed. This is the fantasy of privileged elites who have not felt the sting of inequality, insecurity, and misery persistently and increasingly inflicted by capital on many millions and for many generations.

To escape the trap of nostalgia for a decadent past and to avoid the return of right-wing snake charmers, socialism must be pressed on the people’s agenda. Socialism must not be pushed down the road as an ideal, as a far-off destination. The fact that polls show a popular acceptance of socialism, even a preference-- especially with the young-- for socialism, should demand its serious advocacy. 

The future can be brighter.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Mr. Ip and the Wall Street Journal Discover Wealth Inequality

It was in 2013 that Thomas Piketty rediscovered the problem of wealth inequality with his celebrated book Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Published by Harvard University Press and selling several million copies, the book turned prevailing mainstream economic thinking on its head. Academic economists and capitalist apologists had long assured us that capitalism persistently created wealth and distributed it fairly to all the factors of production, with deviations from this fair distribution attributable to unusual or exceptional intervention in the process.

But Piketty’s look at all the available, relevant data showed just the opposite: capitalism-- absent any external or exceptional circumstances-- invariably generated growing inequality. Using sources dating to the eighteenth century, Piketty showed that, with the exception of the destruction of capital or the rare active measures to redistribute it, wealth inequality was bound to grow. Piketty offered no deep explanation of why this is a feature of capitalism, but he did offer the usual social democratic panacea-- tax the rich!

Coming only four years after the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Piketty’s opus was well received by a wide audience. As a consequence, one might think that the idea of overthrowing the system responsible for more than two centuries of growing inequality would accordingly enter the popular conversation.

But it was not to be. Though a new gilded age of conspicuous consumption, new manifestations of privilege, and raging demand for luxury emerged, no serious threat to the capitalist system sprung forth. Anger was contained effectively in the US by a rotten, corrupt two-party system. Fear and a deeply ingrained hostility to socialism gripped older generations. And younger people-- facing a desperate future-- were open to an alternative to capitalism, but saw no clear road for it.

Now, thirteen years later, The Wall Street Journal’s top economic commentator, Greg Ip, has again rediscovered inequality. He writes about today’s economy:

Its rewards are going disproportionately toward capital instead of labor. Profits have soared since the pandemic, and the market value attached to those profits even more. The result: Capital, which includes businesses, shareholders and superstar employees, is triumphant, while the average worker ekes out marginal gains.

The divergence between capital and labor helps explain the disconnect between a buoyant economy and pessimistic households. It will also play an outsize role in where the economy goes from here.

The brute financial force of all that wealth means market fluctuations, like last week’s, matter more for consumer spending. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence could funnel even more of economic output toward capital instead of labor. Last week may be a taste. Amid reports that layoffs are climbing and job openings plunging, especially for professionals exposed to AI, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 50000 for the first time…

The shift to capital from labor has actually been under way for more than 40 years. Labor received 58% of the total proceeds of economic output, as measured by gross domestic income (conceptually similar to GDP), in 1980. By the third quarter of last year that had plummeted to 51.4%. Profits’ share, meanwhile, rose from 7% to 11.7%.

Ip’s charts show that S&P 500 profit margins have doubled over the last 15 years, with corporate profits rising 43% since the end of 2019.

Where Ip tells us that this is an alarming trend over the last 40 years, Piketty tells us that growth in inequality is the long-term trajectory of the capitalist economy. Both are right.

What is disconcerting is that the victims of this trend, the vast mass of working people, have no voice, no representation, no program to address this inevitable-- if we are to believe Piketty-- consequence of a capitalist system.

What is even more disconcerting is that voices on the left that purport to advocate for working people offer such unimaginative, weak alternatives.

Now Ip only raises the specter of growing inequality to alert ruling circles of the danger that the masses will sharpen their pitchforks and rebel against the privileges of capital. Piketty proposes redistributing wealth through mechanisms-- like taxation-- that the system controls with its most loyal agents. The idea that bourgeois political parties will substantially tax the bourgeoisie is truly fantastic. 

Unions-- one of the few remaining mass organizations supporting workers-- offer a poor record of staunching the flow of wealth to capital, even in industries where unions are well represented and strong. And union leaders seldom have any vision beyond that offered by center-left parties. 

Sadly, too many of the left’s public intellectuals are mired in side shows: cooperatives as an answer to international monopolies, romanticizing the capitalist order existing before Thatcher and Reagan, or cheering on an abstract “global south” bringing capitalism to its knees. 

Others paint a dire picture of wealth being cannibalized by a cabal of rentiers, scorning the Marxist theory of bourgeois and exploited proletariat. This novelty finds currency in the fashionable, but deeply incoherent idea of “technofeudalism.”

Missing from these distractive theories is any understanding of capitalism’s fundamental logic: the contradiction between workers and capital. Oddly enough, a capitalist apologist, a conservative writer, Greg Ip, understands this contradiction all too well in his observations about growing inequality, as does Piketty in his writings. 

For many of those offering their thoughts to working people, the working class is inconsequential or decimated by deindustrialization in their relatively small part of the world (typically, English speaking or Eurocentric). As a result, they spin arcane theories of inequality or oppressions. They overlook the reality that there are over a billion and a half workers in Asia alone, most of whom are working under conditions of capitalist exploitation as described by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. They have forgotten that while industry has shifted globally, while there is a constant change in the global division of labor, the material wealth is still created by working people. 

The mobility of production and the division of labor are permanent features of capitalism that have only accelerated in recent decades. New technologies and industries have sprung up, where older technologies and industries migrated to areas of cheaper labor. A country like the United States is hollowing out, with a diminishing manufacturing sector, but a high-value, high-income technology sector at one level and a precarious, lower-income service sector at another level. Workers at all levels in all countries where capital employs labor are exploited by capital. 

The lengths to which so many supposed leftists go to ignore or deny the fundamental relationship between workers and capitalists-- the ultimate cause of growing inequalities-- is startling. The dawn of the industrial age gave new meaning to the word “exploitation.” Marx and Engels refined that meaning, giving it a rigorous role at the center of their analysis. And it remains essential to our understanding of the world today.  

Workers are exploited.

Reformers seek to blunt exploitation’s sting.

Revolutionaries act to eliminate it.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Mark Carney’s “Eulogy” to a Fractured International Order

Mark Carney-- Canada’s premier-- shocked many with his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He spoke bluntly about illusions and realities that were features of the post-World War II international order.

He reminded listeners that until recently, it was accepted among global elites that economic life was conducted under a set of rules, governed by institutions, and protected by military alliances that guaranteed free markets, fair exchange, and integration. Granted, it was constructed and maintained by the US. But it was thought that this constituted a post-war consensus that, despite its hierarchical structure and occasional bullying of the weaker by the stronger, created a formidable framework, offering the best outcomes for all.

Now, Carney tells us that widely-held belief is an illusion. To underscore this point, he treats his audience to a silly Cold War parable about neighborhoods of greengrocers in Peoples’ Czechoslovakia, a clumsy knockoff of the tale of the Emperor without clothes, but crafted to get a chuckle out of the rabidly anti-Communist business people and politicians present.

By pandering to Cold War prejudices, Carney unintentionally reveals the context for the post-war international order. The ruling classes of countries assented to the order because they saw it as a bulwark against Communism. They allowed the US to construct the order under its own terms because the US promised to anchor the fight against the Soviet Union and its allies. Institutions, alliances, military bases, and ideological unity constituted a formidable structure to meet a new post-war balance of forces more favorable to socialism and the many social, political, and economic alternatives offered by the socialist bloc. Economic liberalism was showcased as the moral and rational response to Communism. Fear of Communism was the glue that cemented US rulers and their allies to this new order.

It is important to emphasize that the referenced international order was constructed by ruling groups and not by the people. And it was elite interests behind the construction. Too often commentators blur the distinction by loosely attributing policies or actions to countries, as though state policies or actions represent the will of a uniform, homogeneous population. Whatever else the highly-regarded post-war international order was, it was not a popular, democratic, equality-based system, but a structure to grease the wheels of capitalist commerce.

Before conceding too much to Carney’s challenge to this order, it must be remembered that it was challenged earlier with the demise of the bête noire-- the Soviet Union-- in 1991. As a result of losing the arch enemy, the US and its closest allies responded in the following ways:

1. “naturalizing” the international order, painting it as the natural order of things. Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no Alternative” insists that free markets, profit-seeking, and unrestrained competition constitute the most rational way to organize economic activity. Another Pied Piper of the post-war order is the neo-Hegelian, Francis Fukuyama, who maintained that the post-Soviet world was the result of the synthesis of all that came before it-- marking the “end of history.”

2. Finding another "ugly beast" to replace Communism. The war on drugs, the war on terrorism (and the newly minted war on narcoterrorism), the war on Islamic fundamentalism, and the war on immigrants and criminal gangs became replacements for the war on Communism.

Thanks to these responses to the demise of the long Cold War, a fragile world order was maintained with the US remaining its police officer and chief beneficiary.

But the real challenge to the post-war global order came with the twenty-first-century economic crises, especially the deep downturn of 2007-2009. Like the great powers in the Great Depression, the major players sought both individual solutions and solutions that would push the problems onto their neighbors and “allies.” In the wake of the so-called Great Recession, I wrote of “centrifugal forces” breaking apart existing alliances, coalitions, agreements, and institutions. Crisis-induced economic stress threatened to fracture formations like the EU, changed the relationship between US capital and Peoples’ China, fostered an international retreat toward economic nationalism, and intensified rivalries.

That process continues to shape our world today. The European war-- between Russia, Ukraine, and its puppeteers-- reflects that process. The radical rearrangement of the Middle East and Central and South America reflect that process. The 2007-2009 disruption of the post-war economic order changed China from a tasty morsel for Western capital into a powerful rival, thanks to China’s successful navigation of the severe global turbulence. Today’s rise of nationalist, protectionist political movements and parties is certainly related to the failure of the existing world order to survive the twenty-first-century crises intact.

Predictably new economic, political, and military alliances and coalitions are springing up in response to the shattering of the old order. Ruling classes are seeking to promote their national interests at an especially volatile, uncertain moment by realigning, by seeking more favorable terms through courting opposing great powers, or by establishing and dominating spheres of interest.

That is the message that Mark Carney sought to convey with his address at Davos:

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints…

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

While these remarks shocked many for their candor and implied a break with his government’s long-standing intimate relationship to the US ruling class, they simply reflected capital in Canada’s search for a more advantageous affair with a more appreciative suitor.

Similarly, some EU states are opting for warmer relations with Russia, while others are looking East, threatening to exit their abusive marriage with the US. The fragility of these new affairs, their basis in the immediate interests of ruling classes and in the capturing of markets and investments should not escape Communists and progressives. Russia’s rulers can pull Assad’s chestnuts out of the fire and pivot swiftly and throw those same chestnuts under the bus, while maintaining solid relations with both Israel and Iran. That illustrates the opportunism of capitalists seeking to restore order out of disorder.

Attempts to establish a new order to be centered around new arrangements, new alliances, new coalitions, and new rules should not be taken for a repudiation of the imperialist system, unless those attempts also repudiate capitalism. Re-centering the global capitalist order around a rival power or rival powers in no way guarantees a more just or equitable world for working people.

This an especially unpleasant conclusion for those who have invested deeply in the BRICS and BRICS+ formation-- an unlikely, heterogeneous, ideologically diverse, and largely capitalist grouping of states loosely organized around various grievances against the existing order. They offer no trade or investment strategies directed specifically at working people, not to mention any rejection of the exploitative imperialist system.

While Carney’s exposure of the “rupture” in the international order may have led some to believe that it signaled a positive reform of global economic relations, it did not sway the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada. In a response to Carney’s address, they stated:

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos has been noted for its blunt talk about a “rupture” with the “old order” of U.S. hegemony. This has been seen as a breath of fresh air for some in Canada who are rightly concerned with escalating threats to our sovereignty and the U.S.’s descent into war and reaction. However, Carney’s newly articulated vision does not mark a fundamental shift towards policies that will make lives better for working people, nor does it signal a Canadian foreign policy of peace and respect for the sovereignty of all countries.

Carney’s speech confirms the sharpening contradictions within the global capitalist system and the decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony. He identifies a “rupture” in the post-WWII order, correctly noting that U.S. imperialism is moving away from leadership through dominating international institutions and toward unilateral coercion, even directed against its own allies. But we must not forget who he was addressing: the main bankers and representatives of global finance capital. His message is a strategic one for their benefit.

Indeed, the old order-- a system of predatory monopoly capitalism, maintained by finance capital-- may undergo restructuring and realignment, but it remains a system of predatory monopoly capitalism maintained by finance capitalism. A facelift should not be taken for a revolution.




Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Michael Parenti: An Appreciation

.…for nearly two decades, every evening in the week, the dean of American newscasters, Walter Cronkite, would end his CBS television news show with the statement: “And that’s the way it is.” On the eve of his retirement in 1980, Cronkite admitted that isn’t the way it is: “My lips have been kind of buttoned up for almost twenty years…. CBS doesn’t really believe in commentary,” he charged. Quoted in Inventing Reality, Michael Parenti, p. 7.

Michael Parenti joins a pitifully small number of US intellectuals who, when facing death, could say that they never bent a knee to the official religion of anti-Communism. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Herbert Aptheker, Phillip Foner, Paul Robeson, Victor Perlo, WZ Foster, Claudia Jones, and damn few others, he willingly paid the price of principle: the denial of a well-deserved, comfortable career as a public intellectual. Instead, he faced insurmountable barriers to mainstream influence that were placed before him by an unforgiving ruling class. Nonetheless, he was one of the most important Marxist thinkers of his generation.

Michael Parenti died on January 24, 2026. From a working-class family, Parenti found his way to academia, attaining a PhD from Yale University. From his early academic employment during the sixties, he combined civil rights and anti-war activism with his Marxism to earn an unspoken blacklisting that denied him a platform for dissent. 

Nonetheless, Parenti committed himself to publication, lecturing, and seizing every opportunity for public engagement. His writing was prolific, ranging over explaining Marxist theory, revealing unpleasant truths, peeling away hypocrisy, deepening history, and reinvestigating “established” truths. He did this without the support and resources afforded by university tenure. 

He published over two dozen books, writing effectively, without patronizing the reader or burdening the reader with look-at-me academic jargon or pretension. Reading Parenti was truly a delicious pleasure.

Perhaps his best-known books were Democracy for the Few, a no-holds-barred account of the hollowness of bourgeois democracy and Inventing Reality, an exposé of the inherent biases and the partisanship of the mass media. The book is a scathing study that predates the far more widely known and cited Manufacturing Consent of Herman and Chomsky, while making many of the same points in Parenti’s transparent style.

His Blackshirts and Reds exposed and condemned the harm of knee-jerk anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism, placing fascism in the anti-Communist current. 

But perhaps the best insight into Parenti’s intense, passionate, engaging practice of Marxist analysis are the many video lectures made available by Parenti’s circle of dedicated admirers on YouTube, DVDs, or CDs. They reveal a witty, wry, entertaining personality cruelly denied access to the university classroom.

Parenti was not afraid of Communism. Indeed, he embraced the Communist world view, defending its legacy without hesitation. He saw the world through the lens of class, weighing events by their impact on working people. 

I never met Michael Parenti. He wrote to me many years ago, asking if he could nominate one of my articles for Project Censored. I have long-forgotten the article, but still feel honored by the warm gesture.

Michael Parenti lives!

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Is It about the Oil?

“No War for Oil” is one of the most popular slogans in the many emergency demonstrations sprouting up around the world in response to the criminal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores from their residence in Caracas, Venezuela and their forced removal to detention in the US.

For many outraged by the naked military aggression on Venezuelan sovereignty, the abduction is an escalated step toward the capture of Venezuelan energy resources by the US government, given that Venezuela has the largest proven petroleum reserves of any country at this moment. 

The argument goes that-- when you pull the curtain back-- the ultimate goal of US imperialist designs is the control over and possible exploitation of Venezuela’s most important resource.

Having argued frequently that oil-imperialism or energy-imperialism is often an important-- if not decisive-- factor in capitalist foreign policy, this claim is appealing. Since the time when Britain in the early twentieth century turned from coal-burning naval ships to oil, petroleum has become more and more essential for the functioning, growth, and protection of capitalist economies. Consequently, intense competition for a rapidly diminishing, increasingly hard to discover, and growing-costly-to-exploit resource dictates the actions of great power rivals.

History gives us important examples of resource-scarcity spurring devastating imperialist aggression by capitalist powers. Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum program had at its core the necessity of acquiring energy resources to propel its imperialist designs-- a program that led to world war. Similarly, Hirohito’s Japan-- a resource-poor island nation-- launched its Pacific offensive largely to acquire the oil to continue its war against China in the face of a US embargo.

The US embargo to deny oil to Republican Spain was, conversely, an aggressive act in oil imperialism, as is today’s blockade of Cuba. The war in Ukraine is indirectly a war over energy resources, since US resolve was stoked by the opportunity to win the vast EU market from Russia-- a convenient, inexpensive, and formerly reliable supplier.

Less well known, the major oil and gas suppliers are constantly influencing global politics through manipulating production and prices. The most well-known example is the 1970’s OPEC oil strike against Israel’s Western supporters (an act that the Arab countries have lost the stomach for in recent times).

As a wise friend speculated once: “Why do you think the US never occupied Somalia after the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 left 92 US casualties? Because there was no oil!”

Yet many believe that the attack on Venezuelan sovereignty was not about the oil… even with the President of the aggressor state saying that it was! 

Instead, they believe it was about Western values, the rule of law, democracy, petty grievances, hubris, or even drug smuggling. Those in the loyal opposition-- Democratic Party leaders-- share many of these same explanations, but fault the Trump administration for its procedural or legalistic errors.

The center-left, the bogus-left, and the anti-Communist left deny that oil could be the motive because they imagine that it might bolster the case for an explanation based upon classical Leninist imperialism-- that the invasion of Venezuela was motivated by corporate interests, by exploitation of resource-rich countries.

Thus,  widely-followed liberal economist Paul Krugman scoffs at the idea that Venezuela was invaded for oil: “... whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.”

Krugman collects and endorses the most popular arguments against the “war for oil” viewpoint:

1. Venezuela reserves are a lie.

2. Venezuela's heavy crude oil is uneconomic, undesirable, and unwanted.

3. The Venezuelan industry is so decrepit that it is beyond rescue.

4. The US has so much sweet, light crude oil available at low cost that no one would want Venezuelan oil.

The Nobel prize award-winner’s dismissal could easily be dismissed by simply asking why-- if acquiring Venezuelan oil is so pointless-- did Chevron ship 1.68 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil in the first week of January, according to Bloomberg?

And then there is the ever-voracious, parasitic Haliburton-- the consummate insider corporation-- that announced that it's ready to go into Venezuela within months!

It is worth looking a little deeper into the reasons that Venezuela’s oil is a possible target of imperialist design.

If Venezuela’s oil reserves are even one-third of what OPEC, The US Energy Information Administration, or The Energy Institute concede, their reserves would still be double those of the US. 

While Venezuela's heavy, sour crude is costlier to extract and refine, it remains as a legacy with many refineries in the US that were established before the shale boom. Naked Capitalism concedes that “[i]t is true that the US has motive, in that our refineries are tuned so that 70% of the oil they process is heavier grades, despite the US producing light sweet crudes.” It further quotes The American Fuel and Petroleum Manufacturer's website:

Long before the U.S. shale boom, when global production of light sweet crude oil was declining, we made significant investments in our refineries to process heavier, high-sulfur crude oils that were more widely available in the global market. These investments were made to ensure U.S. refineries would have access to the feedstocks needed to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Heavier crude is now an essential feedstock for many U.S. refineries. Substituting it for U.S. light sweet crude oil would make these facilities less efficient and competitive, leading to a decline in fuel production and higher costs for consumers.

Currently, Canada exports 90% of its very heavy, sour oil to the US, accounting for approximately a quarter of its total exports to the US. Oil from the Alberta oil sands is also expensive to extract and refine, but nonetheless amounts to 4 to 4.5 million barrels per day exported to the US. It must be acknowledged that future Venezuelan oil counts as powerful leverage in the recent and continuing political and economic friction between the US and Canada, especially as Canada is defying the US by building “a new strategic partnership” with China.

Much has been made of the state of the Venezuelan oil industry, today producing around a million barrels a day, down from its peak at over 3.5 million barrels per day decades ago. Indeed, the US blockade has stifled investments, shuttered export markets, and denied technological advances. Nonetheless, Venezuela has produced as much as 2 million barrels a day as recently as 2017. Admittedly, it would take significant investment to return to the 2017 level and vast investment to restore the level of the 1970s. 

Many commentators are “shocked” by the enormous capital required to upgrade the Venezuelan oil industry. They forget earlier “shocking” assessments of the fracking revolution: “The U.S. shale oil industry hailed as a “revolution” has burned through a quarter trillion dollars more than it has brought in over the last decade. It has been a money-losing endeavor of epic proportions.” 

Still, the Trump administration's gambit has many competitors concerned that US control over Venezuela’s oil “would reshape the global oil map--putting the US in charge of the output of one of the founding members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and, along with America’s own prodigious production, give it a potentially disruptive role in a market already struggling with oversupply.” According to The Wall Street Journal, US oil production, US political and corporate domination of Guyana’s emerging energy sector, and now Venezuela’s reserves, may place the US in a position to unbalance the market, particularly at the expense of the OPEC alliance, a move of enormous political consequence.

The critics of oil-imperialism fail to understand all of its dimensions. They crudely simplify the politics of oil to the immediacy of extraction and its costs of the moment, ignoring indirect impacts, the wider prospects, and the longer term.  

Nor do they grasp the issues that are facing the US domestic oil industry. While fracking has allowed the industry to return to being the largest crude oil producer in the world, the industry faces the perennial question of peak production for a given technology-- the ever-present problem of rising costs of discovery and extraction. Further, the exalted Permian Basin is “becoming a pressure cooker”, pressing upon both costs and public acceptance. “Swaths of the Permian appear to be on the verge of geological malfunction. Pressure in the injection reservoirs in a prime portion of the basin runs as high as 0.7 pound per square inch per foot, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology.” As The Wall Street Journal also reports: “A buildup in pressure across the region is propelling wastewater up ancient wellbores, birthing geysers that can cost millions of dollars to clean up. Companies are wrestling with drilling hazards that make it costlier to operate and complaining that the marinade is creeping into their oil-and-gas reservoirs. Communities friendly to oil and gas are growing worried about injection.”

Because of the current glut of oil (likely retaliation by OPEC+ producers seeking to drive down US production below its cost of production and recover market share) the number of operating rigs is down 14% in the Permian. Oil markets are volatile, competitive, and transient. Where Venezuelan crude will fit into these equations remains an open question.

And then there is the Essequibo, a region currently within the borders of Guyana, but disputed by Venezuela. Recent discoveries in the area promise a potential of over 11 billion barrels of oil, with Exxon estimating a production of 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030. This economic plum is now off the table in the conflict between the Maduro government and Guyana and Exxon. As OILPRICE.com puts it succinctly: Trump’s Venezuela Takeover Will Make Guyana Oil Safer… for the US and Exxon. 

Let us not forget China. The People’s Republic of China has granted around $106 billion in loans to Venezuela since 2000. Daniel Chavez, writing in TNI, notes that those loans place “it fourth among recipients of Chinese official credit globally.” Estimates vary, but the PRC imports between 400,000 and 600,000 barrels per day from Venezuela, at least doubling since 2020. While it is less than 5% of PRC usage, it is not inconsequential. And it represents a serious penetration of capital and trade in the Western hemisphere-- the US sphere of interest.

It underscores the reality that oil-politics is not merely about the immediacy of reserves, extraction, costs, and price, but also about competition and rivalry within the imperialist system. The competition and conflict between the US, Venezuela, Guyana, Canada, PRC, OPEC, and other oil-producing countries is intrinsic to a system that lives and breathes thanks to its exploitation of energy resources. In that regard, it is still most clearly viewed through the prism of Lenin’s theory of advanced capitalism devised over a hundred years ago. 

I give the last word to the informed and serious student of the oil industry, Antonia Juhasz:

If the greatest lie the devil ever told was to convince us that he wasn’t real, the greatest lie the oil industry ever told us is to convince us that they don’t want oil. Where do we even begin to think about that as possible? They want to control when they produce it and how, and under what terms. They need to show a growing amount of oil that they can count as their reserves.

There are very few big pots of oil left sitting around anywhere unclaimed. The only way to get that is to increase technology, go into very expensive, technologically complex modes of production that face a lot of resistance. Venezuela is a country that [the big oil companies] were producing in not that long ago and making money in not that long ago and have wanted to get back into but on their own terms.

So I think when they protest publicly, one, it’s to distance themselves from Trump’s extremism, but two, it’s a great public negotiating tactic. They’re basically saying publicly, and the media is repeating it, “We wouldn’t want to operate in Venezuela. Oh, my God, it’s expensive, it’s technologically complex.” I actually think those are ridiculous things if you look where else they operate.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

A Tale of Colliding World Views

In December, documents were released asserting two radically different political perspectives. 

They could not be more different.

On December 4, under the President of the United States’ Seal, the White House published the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, expressing the government's current evaluation of the global challenges facing it. 

The next day, December 5, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) publicly announced its forthcoming 22nd Congress, followed by the publication of its Theses of the Central Committee-- the product of long preparatory discussions by the KKE’s members-- constituting an assessment of the state of the world and the Party’s approach to it. 

A comparison of the two documents presents a violent clash of class outlooks.

The US National Security Strategy

The US ruling class-- in its current incarnation-- intends to maintain or re-establish US economic domination and grease the wheels for US corporations to succeed internationally. In this regard, the Trump administration is no different than earlier administrations, except-- perhaps-- being more transparent in this goal.

More specifically, extracting policy from the section on the Western Hemisphere, the strategy includes:

1. Militarizing the seas and the oceans. Previous administrations portrayed military force as an instrument of guaranteeing free “access” to trade. This administration, under the “America First” ideology explicitly uses military force to promote US economic success, foregoing the charade of promoting free trade for all.

2. Accessing strategic resources. In the document’s laundered language, the goal is “to identify strategic points and resources… with a view to their protection and joint development with regional partners.” More candidly, US policy makers in this administration project power to privilege US corporations in resource-rich countries like Bolivia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

3. Making it hard for other countries to compete. “The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.” The strategy endorsed by the document uses economic leverage to deny success to others.

4. Helping US corporations to dominate. “[W]e will reform our own system to expedite approvals and licensing—again, to make ourselves the partner of first choice. The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by [other] countries…” Specifically and adamantly, “[e]very U.S. Government official that interacts with… countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

5. Accepting that “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.” Of course, this policy only reiterates what every US administration for more than a hundred years has sought since the intervention in Cuba and the Philippines: a free hand for US economic exploitation.

While these goals are extracted from Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, they are barely disguised as policy for the rest of the world. However, they represent considerable continuity with the foreign policy of earlier administrations, though shorn of any pretense to global fairness.

Commentators have been surprised with the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere over the often-bitter hostility towards the People’s Republic of China. Surely, that simply acknowledges the formidable economic and military power of the PRC. US policy makers of Trump’s world have been forced to recognize that-- no matter how much they would like otherwise-- the US is in no position to bully the PRC. Therefore, they accept that they can only adjust or modify their economic relationship. Competing with the PRC-- the US’s most formidable rival-- consists, instead, in bullying those who do business with their rival.

The administration is explicit on how to “compete” for the allegiance of their Chinese rivals’ economic collaborators: “China’s state-led and state-backed companies excel in building physical and digital infrastructure, and China has recycled perhaps $1.3 trillion of its trade surpluses into loans to its trading partners. America and its allies have not yet formulated, much less executed, a joint plan for the so-called ‘Global South,’ but together possess tremendous resources. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others hold net foreign assets of $7 trillion. International financial institutions, including the multilateral development banks, possess combined assets of $1.5 trillion. While mission creep has undermined some of these institutions’ effectiveness, this administration is dedicated to using its leadership position to implement reforms that ensure they serve American interests.” [my emphasis] Thus, the document reveals the carrot to the US stick.

Almost in passing, by merely observing the European Union’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the Trump administration demonstrates that it considers the EU to be another rival, albeit a rival retaining some important historical ties-- neither a protectorate, nor currently a competitor of great concern.

The US National Security Strategy paper offers the latest insight into the thinking now directing the still-greatest power in the imperialist system. It is a blue print for the security of US business interests and not of the security and well-being of the people.

The KKE Theses of the Central Committee 

How does the Greek Communist Party view the current state of the world?

The KKE is one of the few Marxist organizations relatively untarnished by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It conceded little to the mass retreat from Leninist principles. It refused to flirt with the widespread ideological marriage of markets and socialism. It held fast to the centrality of class in the analysis of the contemporary world. Where much of today’s left rails against an ever-changing, seemingly unrelated basket of grievances, the KKE defends the classical Marxist understanding that the central, determinative contradiction remains the contradiction between capital and labor, nationally and internationally.

Certainly, that should make Greek Communist thinking of interest to all those who question the strategic aims of the leaders of the most powerful state in the capitalist system.

KKE sees a class-divided world moving toward relative and absolute impoverishment of working people, long-term unemployment, and an unfavorable balance of power between capital and labor. Technological innovation is skewed dramatically in support of the interests of capital. Pursuit of profit continues to dangerously degrade the environment. 

As a result of the weakness of labor in confronting capital, the capitalist system is suffering from an overaccumulation of capital. Hyper-exploitation has produced a mass of capital, seeking-- with greater and greater difficulty-- to find (safe) profitable investment opportunities (one might well view the orgy of investment in AI as an attempt to create such an opportunity). 

KKE understands the recessionary pressures experienced in Europe, Japan, and Asia as the effects of this crisis of the return on investment. Efforts to manage this crisis-- Keynesian or otherwise-- have failed. Specifically, the liberal project of green technology (e.g., the Green New Deal) and the Central Bank project (e.g., interest-rate manipulation, qualitative easing) were unsuccessful in restoring a solid foundation for the rate of profit.

Further, the capitalist powers have invested in the war economy, both in response to inter-imperialist contradictions and to absorb capital.

Militarism serves to destroy and devalue capital through the never-ending conflicts arising from imperialist rivalries. They caution that this military buildup increases sharply the risk of even larger wars, possibly world wars.

The KKE stresses competition between existing nations-- great powers, alliances, and emerging blocs--- fueling the existing wars, flashpoints, and severe clashes endangering our world. They contend that:

The USA, which still holds the leading position, is trying to halt the shift in the balance of power in China’s favour. International financial institutions have already downgraded the US credit rating. This trend is reflected in the decline of the US share and the significant increase of China’s share in Gross World Product (global GDP) between 2000 and 2025, in the significant difference in growth rates between the USA and China, the large US trade deficit in bilateral trade with China and the EU, and the sharp rise in US public debt. 

Within the global imperialist system, both the PRC and Russia present challenges to US hegemony, and US nationalist, protectionist policies are also “... sharpening contradictions within the Euro-Atlantic camp and causing a deterioration in relations between the USA and the EU, Canada and Australia. They are exacerbating intra-bourgeois contradictions within the USA, which are also reflected in developments within the bourgeois political system. They are increasing the likelihood of the decline of the dollar as an international currency. They have a negative impact on international trade and reinforce the downward trend in the international capitalist economy.”

Of the major powers, the KKE sees the European Union as losing ground “relative to the USA and China”, which is feeding the existing turn to the right in many Eurozone countries.

The war in Ukraine is the result of today’s Great Power rivalries-- it is an imperialist war. The KKE asserts:

In the three-and-a-half years of this war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives, mainly young people of the working class and the poor popular strata. Approximately twenty-five million people have fled their homes. Homes and public infrastructure have been destroyed on a massive scale. Amidst the ruins, capitalist states and monopolies are competing for the “reconstruction” of Ukraine, viewing it as an “investment opportunity.” This will cost hundreds of billions of euros, a burden that the people will be made to bear… The outbreak of contradictions and realignments within imperialist alliances as imperialist conflict and competition unfold is neither paradoxical nor unprecedented, but a typical feature of imperialist wars. It can lead to former adversaries becoming allies, and former allies becoming adversaries.

Similarly, the KKE views the war in the Middle East as an imperialist war: 

The Israeli war machine supported by the USA and the EU, launched a massive operation in the Gaza Strip, using the Hamas attack as a pretext. This operation resulted in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of innocent people, including unarmed civilians, young children, women and elderly people….The imperialist nature of the war in the Middle East and the bourgeois character of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not invalidate the just struggle of the Palestinian people and other peoples in the region, who resist and fight against foreign occupation and other imperialist plans. Through this struggle, they can create the conditions necessary to free themselves once and for all from the system of exploitation and war.

For those who may be interested, the current assessment bears remarkable consistency and continuity with the Theses for the 20th Congress developed nearly a decade ago.

Serious-minded people seeking an understanding of the perilous, contentious, and confusing world in which we are living should welcome the revealing contrast between the two perspectives outlined here. One outlook only recognizes the interests of a minority of advantage-seeking, privileged individuals and soulless corporations, while the other recognizes the common fate and pressing needs of the majority of the world’s people who are found within a well-defined social class.

One doesn’t have to agree with all of the conclusions shared by the Greek Communists, but one must acknowledge that they are drawn from an effort to create a world far distant from the one arrogantly defended in the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Moreover, the KKE unabashedly supports a class line-- on the working peoples’ side of the barricades. It argues that exploitation is the crucial social relation that decides whether employment, equality, living standards, health care, education, security, or peace are won or lost. Moreover, KKE unequivocally sides with the exploited.

Finding our way free from the Trumpian world and those conditions that produced it will require a clear and deep analysis. The KKE Theses provide a solid foundation of both clarity and depth. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com