The attack on Venezuela and Trump’s declaration that the US is going to run the country is about as naked a demonstration of imperialism as one can get.  It is also a crystal clear expression of the new ‘multipolar’ world order that many on the far right and on the left have supported.  You think not?  Do you think the ‘multipolar’ world will not have a pole that includes United States imperialism?

The dust has hardly settled before speculation on future attacks on Cuba and Iran.  Apparently the one on Venezuela was held back because Trump wanted to bomb Nigeria first. Under the cover of the latest events the Brits and French bombed Syria while the war in Ukraine drags on amid European forecasts of war with Russia in a few years.

The nauseating assent by the leaders of European imperialism was displayed by agreed statements that so reeked of hypocrisy that they would have been better to say nothing.  We support international law but it’s great that Maduro was ousted and can we now please have peaceful regime change! What will they do if Trump decides he would like Greenland?

The plea for peace is not without self-interest.  The European leaders know that their own legitimacy is undermined by naked US aggression, and at a time when for many people their support for genocide in Palestine already damns them.  It further isolates them not only from their own populations but also from the rest of the world and places a question mark over how they can find a way out of it while preventing total subordination to the United States.

The attack on Venezuela is also an attack on Chinese and Russian interests as both are heavily invested in the current regime, both politically and economically, with Trump making it plain in his own vulgar way that it’s about oil.  Control of the world’s greatest reserves would weaken the power of Russian ownership, the supply to China, and permit lower risk in attacking Iran.  So, no one thinks the attack on Venezuela is simply about Venezuela.

Yet that is how much of the left behaves.  As I wrote in a post nearly a week ago, ‘it seems to think European imperialism is the alternative to US imperialism, which used to be the alternative to Russian imperialism.’  This is illustrated in its solidarity with the Ukrainian state, which is supported by European imperialism, to take the place (or rather to complement) that of the US. Ukraine proclaims its support for European imperialism in return, and seeks to lock it and the US into a formal alliance far into the future.  This left thinks it can support Ukraine in its alliance with European imperialism while it also seeks the continuation of US support, and at the same time defend Venezuela by opposing the same US imperialism and the European assent for its aggression!

It thinks it can pick and choose what imperialism to support in each conflict; now defending the intervention of European imperialism in Ukraine while damning its hypocrisy over Venezuela; damning US imperialism today while supporting its intervention in Ukraine a year ago and seeking it to continue, while still absolving it of any responsibility for the war starting in the first place.  It is wilfully blind to the accumulation of conflicts and wars, of which Ukraine is just one, that discloses a World conflict and presages a World War that will involve every imperialist power.

The myopia is admitted when they state that the war in Ukraine will only become an inter-imperialist one once Western troops are directly fighting on the ground.  Do they not know that this is already happening? In which case, how many will there have to be for them to recognise it?

Imperialism is not a feature derived from individual states, governments or regimes but of the imperatives of the international accumulation of capital and the irreconcilable competition it involves. It is this that destroys the illusions that ‘multipolarity’ is a step forward; as if the development of new and stronger imperialist powers is good because it weakens the older ones.  The left suffers a derangement of ‘anti-imperialism’, which prescribes an arbitrary checklist to allow the surrender of working class political independence to support for one or other imperialist pole.

And just as this ‘anti-imperialism’ allows one to un-recognise one or other imperialism, so does it prevent one from recognising what isn’t, and therefore what is, socialism.  It’s a long time since many declared illusions in Venezuelan or Chavez ‘socialism’ and the current Maduro regime lacks legitimacy, although it now exceeds anything that Trump could attempt to put in place.

There is no insuperable obstacle to the existing regime being made to accommodate US interests but the demand to allow the US to ‘run’ the country is certainly one of them.  It is not possible to achieve this, and Trump’s limited action may betray some dim awareness of it, while his dismissal of the main opposition leader reveals the weakness of any of his plans.  The Venezuelan regime may or may not seek to cut a deal although Trump may stupidly seek more than he can get if recent history is any guide.

We have been told that US policy is pivoting away from Asia and towards its own hemisphere but even this involves global geopolitical consequences, as we have seen, and does so because imperialist competition encompasses the globe.  Whoever fails to see this has not learned the first thing from two world wars.  In any case, it is very doubtful that the new US national security strategy means any such thing.

The absence of the working class from the global class struggle has allowed many on the left to pick one imperialist camp against another, with further delusions that they are fighting campism!  The failure to establish the political basis on which the working class should take a stand means that we have leftists in my own country opposing Irish NATO membership, and the presence of British rule in the north of the country, while supporting the Ukrainian state, which currently declares the absolute necessity for a NATO-like agreement and for the presence of British and French troops on the ground as part of its ‘solution’.

The attack on Venezuela is widely accepted by the left as an exercise by imperialism that will have a worldwide impact but much of it currently displays no coherent understanding of the reason for these consequences, never mind a consistent policy to oppose it.