It may be obviously about oil, but it’s also less obviously about rare earths. I don’t know how much of it Venezuela or their other neighbors have but here in Brazil there’s a lot, and as the regime’s meddling for the last many years hasn’t led to as much theft as they wanted they might be trying to use their attack, theft and murder against Venezuela to make moves here too. Though if those moves will be just threats or attacks will depend on what they can get away doing against Venezuela…
It’s also about so-called domino theory, Venezuela having nationalized oil production creates popular pressure for other Latin American countries to nationalize their oil production. That’s been the reason for US hostility to Venezuela since forever. Also also, capturing Venezuela would then make it easier to go after Brazil and every other country in the region.
So, yeah, there’s lots of economic and geopolitical reasons for war in Venezuela. I just mean it has nothing to do with freedom lol
Normally I’d agree but domestic considerations are the main drivers of geo-politics and Trump has ALOT of need to distract his citizenry. Successful military operations historically provide a huge boost in popularity to leadership and Trump craves public adoration like a man who wasn’t loved enough as a child. I could rattle off all the other reasons the Trump regime would want a war: weak economy, Epstein files, etc etc so for once I think the oil is a secondary or tertiary motivation.
Sir, you are doing a big oversimplification of how politics in real life works, and this is why many of your comments look silly to many people in this community.
First of all, Trump is not an all powerful single person. He represents many different interests, be them big oil billionaires, Zionists, arms industry, big tech and the financial sector. Distraction of US domestic politics is a minor concern, as the US has always been participating in wars in the last century. Please do an exercise and count how many years the US existed without participating in a war, a coup or a plot in a foreign country. The US has always been an warmongering country and its industrial prowess had always been tied to its ability of waging war on foreign soil.
Secondly, the reason why domestic politics is bad in the US is because of the same parties that like waging war abroad. These parties, the capitalist plutocracy, are responsible for many unpopular domestic policies. The capitalist plutocracy does not give a single shit about the will of the people and this is why the situation of Americans get bleaker at every passing day. US citizens serves only a few purposes, such as consumers, labor power for the industry, rent extraction from the financial capital and as cannon fodder for the military adventures of big capital. They see your rights only as a nuisance, therefore their grand objective is to have them removed from you, so you can be more effectively dominated. However, they need to do in a way so you won’t notice, this is why you have two parties, Democrats and Republicans, which have different approaches of reducing you to an object, but with the same goal in mind.
Third of all, there are many different motivations. Please take some time to understand your own country’s history. Study about what is Manifest Destiny, the Monroe doctrine, operation Condor, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the Jakarta method, the real reasons behind the expansion to the West, the Spanish-US war, the many independence moves of Cuba, US failed invasion of Canada etc. The US has always been an imperialist country, meaning it always acted in a way to submit other countries to its economic interests, by securing markets or cheap raw resources and to prevent other global powers from accessing the same resources or markets.
Please read about your country’s imperialist past, because your ignorance is so blatant that it’s almost offensive in this instance. Many people here belong to countries which were invaded or couped in the past with US direct or indirect involvement. So your statement about distracting from domestic policy sounds extremely annoying.
Yeah, the commentor is very obviously not a Marxist. The main driver of geopolitics is pursuit of resources. Venezuela has oil and Brazil has rare earths. A puppet regime in a resource rich region that doesn’t have another super power to counter the US is valuable to US Imperialist ambitions, especially if the ME intensifies.
Even using that logic by itself, the bigger “Domestic Consideration” would be resources to exploit from the country we’re invading than the Epstein Files that have done fucking nothing, wouldn’t it?
There’s several reasons. Trump wants a war with Venezuela so he can use the Enemy Aliens Act to round up all migrants into camps, and he chose Venezuela specifically because they’re the second largest oil producer in South America and have the largest oil reserves in the world. Those factors, in addition to wanting to be a popular wartime president, are what’s driving this.
Now, with all of this in mind, do you think it would be a good thing if Trump removed Maduro from power?
Now, with all of this in mind, do you think it would be a good thing if Trump removed Maduro from power?
No, no good can come of it. Only if the Venezuelan people overthrew him would I consider supporting it. That Trump is considering military action against Venezuela is an outrage and if he goes thru with it, I genuinely hope other nations enact sanctions and travel bans against US political leadership.
He’s arming his own people to defend against US aggression, 8 million volunteers being the most recent estimate I’ve seen, which is somewhat more than a full quarter of the entire population.
That doesn’t sound like a people that want their government overthrown.
The Venezuelan people elected him, dummy. Would you have preferred a US puppet like Guaidó or González? The only people who want him overthrown are temporarily embarrassed compradors.
If one denigrates those fighting imperialism then one isn’t against imperialism; the ivory tower of idealism is built on the bones of the Global South.
Someone can do good in one way but be a shithead in many other ways. There’s nothing idealistic about holding people accountable, unless you frown on speaking truth to power.
Saying you want the same regime change outcome as Trump but disprove of his method is not the potent anti-imperialist argument you think it is.
For the Western Leftist, never having to consider to what it means to dirty their hands in revolutionary pragmatism, empty idioms devoid of historical literacy sound profound.
Wanting Venezuelans to have a say in their own governance and wanting workers to control the means of production is not wanting the same outcome as Trump.
You haven’t explained how he’s betrayed the revolution nor how the movement could have done better given the cards they were dealt. A big problem with Western leftists’ plans are their prefigurative politics. “Be the change you want to see in the world” doesn’t cut it while the world is significantly controlled by imperialist states. Until those capitalist states are dispensed with, socialist states don’t have the luxury of prefiguration, or they go the way of Allende’s Chile.
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.
The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism — not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience — could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:
How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? … Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life.
The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.
Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:
It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe — and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them — all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. …
These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make].
To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.
For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.
Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta);” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”
Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency — which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack.
One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.
You talk about a country under seige and sanctions, under several attempts at coups and assasinations by the most murderous regime known to mankind, and you have made a choice to believe the propaganda by the latter against its target.
You are not brainwashed or stupid. As a Western Leftist you have material gains from the exploitative relationship the West has through imperialism, so your personal political sieve of what narratives you choose to believe in fit that mould. Your bigotry betrays your crocodile tears which is why you echo the same regime change outcome as Trump.
This is the point where you could make the choice to investigate why we understand what we do in a way that you could convincingly make our arguments.
Chances are high you will choose not to but I am more than happy to be proven wrong. If you are actually interested in unlearning your racism then please let me know and I will send you information on articles, youtube videos and books (if there are certain formats you prefer then please let me know and I will tailor my response accordingly). A lot of us were also liberals too (and by that definition means also bigoted by the imperialist lens), your fate is not set in stone.
They do have their own say in their governance, that’s why they fucking elected Maduro. You really have no clue what the fuck you’re talking about do you?
Okay, start with holding the western empire accountable, including its decades of atrocity propaganda fabrications about the leaders of other countries. Then when you have some clarity from that and have consulted the regular people of a country in detail through sources that are trustworthy (rather than CIA-backed sources), you can begin to form a reasonable position toward holding the given country’s leader accountable.
Saying “the western empire is bad but also the people who it says are bad are bad too” is not a principled or consistent take. It’s a step toward understanding what is going wrong, but falls back on trusting in the western narratives.
Not be a puppet to the US oligarchy. That’s a crime so heinous there is no limit to the number of deaths the west iss willing to cause in order to punish.
Are you suggesting that the US needs to consent for the Venezuelans to take war trophies or are you suggesting that Venezuelans wouldn’t consent to taking said war trophies? What are we manufacturing here?
All I have to say is I hope Venezuela causes as much suffering, pain and hardship to the military and every U.S soldier who partakes in this unjust invasion. At no single point in history has these regime change operations been asked for and they have NEVER been successful in improving the material conditions of the country that is targeted.
You are doing nothing more than towing the line for the invasion of a sovereign nation and deposing of a leader who was democratically elected by his people against an opposition that is currently split on justifying the invasion of their own country in comparison to a strong revolutionary leader that is in opposition to the global hegemony martially and in trade who now seeks to terminate his position and his revolution.
If you are in open support of this invasion I wish for you to enlist and suffer the same fate every rabid gringo dog will have on the beaches of Venezuela; choking on sand and blood. I love seeing how confident your type gets before they choke and/or sink just like they did off the coast of Yemen, in the jungles of Vietnam and hopefully more in the future!
I hope every single US soldier that puts a foot on Venezuela gets fucked and gets such horrible PTSD that they go home and blow themselves up and hopefully other military assets of the US too. Every last one should face the worst possible mental trauma and cause that same pain to Americans
Maduro deserves to go back to bus driving. But the Venezuelan people deserve a nose cone.
White Liberal in chat
This is so fucking obviously a war for oil that it’s shocking anyone is acting like it’s anything else.
It may be obviously about oil, but it’s also less obviously about rare earths. I don’t know how much of it Venezuela or their other neighbors have but here in Brazil there’s a lot, and as the regime’s meddling for the last many years hasn’t led to as much theft as they wanted they might be trying to use their attack, theft and murder against Venezuela to make moves here too. Though if those moves will be just threats or attacks will depend on what they can get away doing against Venezuela…
It’s also about so-called domino theory, Venezuela having nationalized oil production creates popular pressure for other Latin American countries to nationalize their oil production. That’s been the reason for US hostility to Venezuela since forever. Also also, capturing Venezuela would then make it easier to go after Brazil and every other country in the region.
So, yeah, there’s lots of economic and geopolitical reasons for war in Venezuela. I just mean it has nothing to do with freedom lol
Normally I’d agree but domestic considerations are the main drivers of geo-politics and Trump has ALOT of need to distract his citizenry. Successful military operations historically provide a huge boost in popularity to leadership and Trump craves public adoration like a man who wasn’t loved enough as a child. I could rattle off all the other reasons the Trump regime would want a war: weak economy, Epstein files, etc etc so for once I think the oil is a secondary or tertiary motivation.
Sir, you are doing a big oversimplification of how politics in real life works, and this is why many of your comments look silly to many people in this community.
First of all, Trump is not an all powerful single person. He represents many different interests, be them big oil billionaires, Zionists, arms industry, big tech and the financial sector. Distraction of US domestic politics is a minor concern, as the US has always been participating in wars in the last century. Please do an exercise and count how many years the US existed without participating in a war, a coup or a plot in a foreign country. The US has always been an warmongering country and its industrial prowess had always been tied to its ability of waging war on foreign soil.
Secondly, the reason why domestic politics is bad in the US is because of the same parties that like waging war abroad. These parties, the capitalist plutocracy, are responsible for many unpopular domestic policies. The capitalist plutocracy does not give a single shit about the will of the people and this is why the situation of Americans get bleaker at every passing day. US citizens serves only a few purposes, such as consumers, labor power for the industry, rent extraction from the financial capital and as cannon fodder for the military adventures of big capital. They see your rights only as a nuisance, therefore their grand objective is to have them removed from you, so you can be more effectively dominated. However, they need to do in a way so you won’t notice, this is why you have two parties, Democrats and Republicans, which have different approaches of reducing you to an object, but with the same goal in mind.
Third of all, there are many different motivations. Please take some time to understand your own country’s history. Study about what is Manifest Destiny, the Monroe doctrine, operation Condor, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the Jakarta method, the real reasons behind the expansion to the West, the Spanish-US war, the many independence moves of Cuba, US failed invasion of Canada etc. The US has always been an imperialist country, meaning it always acted in a way to submit other countries to its economic interests, by securing markets or cheap raw resources and to prevent other global powers from accessing the same resources or markets.
Please read about your country’s imperialist past, because your ignorance is so blatant that it’s almost offensive in this instance. Many people here belong to countries which were invaded or couped in the past with US direct or indirect involvement. So your statement about distracting from domestic policy sounds extremely annoying.
“domestic considerations are the main drivers of geo-politics” Is this not an idealist argument? Material conditions would be, no?
Yeah, the commentor is very obviously not a Marxist. The main driver of geopolitics is pursuit of resources. Venezuela has oil and Brazil has rare earths. A puppet regime in a resource rich region that doesn’t have another super power to counter the US is valuable to US Imperialist ambitions, especially if the ME intensifies.
Even using that logic by itself, the bigger “Domestic Consideration” would be resources to exploit from the country we’re invading than the Epstein Files that have done fucking nothing, wouldn’t it?
Just so galaxy-brained on their end.
Either way, the US has absolutely no right to interfere with Venezuela.
There’s several reasons. Trump wants a war with Venezuela so he can use the Enemy Aliens Act to round up all migrants into camps, and he chose Venezuela specifically because they’re the second largest oil producer in South America and have the largest oil reserves in the world. Those factors, in addition to wanting to be a popular wartime president, are what’s driving this.
Now, with all of this in mind, do you think it would be a good thing if Trump removed Maduro from power?
No, no good can come of it. Only if the Venezuelan people overthrew him would I consider supporting it. That Trump is considering military action against Venezuela is an outrage and if he goes thru with it, I genuinely hope other nations enact sanctions and travel bans against US political leadership.
He’s arming his own people to defend against US aggression, 8 million volunteers being the most recent estimate I’ve seen, which is somewhat more than a full quarter of the entire population.
That doesn’t sound like a people that want their government overthrown.
The Venezuelan people elected him, dummy. Would you have preferred a US puppet like Guaidó or González? The only people who want him overthrown are temporarily embarrassed compradors.
maduro is fine.
The Western Leftist™.
If one denigrates those fighting imperialism then one isn’t against imperialism; the ivory tower of idealism is built on the bones of the Global South.
Someone can do good in one way but be a shithead in many other ways. There’s nothing idealistic about holding people accountable, unless you frown on speaking truth to power.
Saying you want the same regime change outcome as Trump but disprove of his method is not the potent anti-imperialist argument you think it is.
For the Western Leftist, never having to consider to what it means to dirty their hands in revolutionary pragmatism, empty idioms devoid of historical literacy sound profound.
Wanting Venezuelans to have a say in their own governance and wanting workers to control the means of production is not wanting the same outcome as Trump.
Betraying the revolution is not pragmatism.
You haven’t explained how he’s betrayed the revolution nor how the movement could have done better given the cards they were dealt. A big problem with Western leftists’ plans are their prefigurative politics. “Be the change you want to see in the world” doesn’t cut it while the world is significantly controlled by imperialist states. Until those capitalist states are dispensed with, socialist states don’t have the luxury of prefiguration, or they go the way of Allende’s Chile.
A (long) excerpt from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, Anticommunism & Wonderland:
💯
There should be more Parenti-bots.
You and I root for different Venezuelans.
You talk about a country under seige and sanctions, under several attempts at coups and assasinations by the most murderous regime known to mankind, and you have made a choice to believe the propaganda by the latter against its target.
You are not brainwashed or stupid. As a Western Leftist you have material gains from the exploitative relationship the West has through imperialism, so your personal political sieve of what narratives you choose to believe in fit that mould. Your bigotry betrays your crocodile tears which is why you echo the same regime change outcome as Trump.
This is the point where you could make the choice to investigate why we understand what we do in a way that you could convincingly make our arguments.
Chances are high you will choose not to but I am more than happy to be proven wrong. If you are actually interested in unlearning your racism then please let me know and I will send you information on articles, youtube videos and books (if there are certain formats you prefer then please let me know and I will tailor my response accordingly). A lot of us were also liberals too (and by that definition means also bigoted by the imperialist lens), your fate is not set in stone.
They do have their own say in their governance, that’s why they fucking elected Maduro. You really have no clue what the fuck you’re talking about do you?
Okay, start with holding the western empire accountable, including its decades of atrocity propaganda fabrications about the leaders of other countries. Then when you have some clarity from that and have consulted the regular people of a country in detail through sources that are trustworthy (rather than CIA-backed sources), you can begin to form a reasonable position toward holding the given country’s leader accountable.
Saying “the western empire is bad but also the people who it says are bad are bad too” is not a principled or consistent take. It’s a step toward understanding what is going wrong, but falls back on trusting in the western narratives.
Please enlighten us. What has Maduro done that is so bad?
Not be a puppet to the US oligarchy. That’s a crime so heinous there is no limit to the number of deaths the west iss willing to cause in order to punish.
Manufacturing consent 101 here, lmao. Do you have an explanation as to why???
Are you suggesting that the US needs to consent for the Venezuelans to take war trophies or are you suggesting that Venezuelans wouldn’t consent to taking said war trophies? What are we manufacturing here?
All I have to say is I hope Venezuela causes as much suffering, pain and hardship to the military and every U.S soldier who partakes in this unjust invasion. At no single point in history has these regime change operations been asked for and they have NEVER been successful in improving the material conditions of the country that is targeted.
You are doing nothing more than towing the line for the invasion of a sovereign nation and deposing of a leader who was democratically elected by his people against an opposition that is currently split on justifying the invasion of their own country in comparison to a strong revolutionary leader that is in opposition to the global hegemony martially and in trade who now seeks to terminate his position and his revolution.
If you are in open support of this invasion I wish for you to enlist and suffer the same fate every rabid gringo dog will have on the beaches of Venezuela; choking on sand and blood. I love seeing how confident your type gets before they choke and/or sink just like they did off the coast of Yemen, in the jungles of Vietnam and hopefully more in the future!
I hope every single US soldier that puts a foot on Venezuela gets fucked and gets such horrible PTSD that they go home and blow themselves up and hopefully other military assets of the US too. Every last one should face the worst possible mental trauma and cause that same pain to Americans