Venezuela: Imperial Revenge

Joti Brar – Venezuela and Unified Global War

Published the day after US invaded Venezuela and abducted its democratically elected and immensely popular socialist president Nicolas Maduro, this presentation on “Venezuela and The Unified Global War” was delivered by Joti Brar, chair of the CPGB-ML, at an inaugural meeting of the British Chapter of the Antifascist International, held in Bolivar House on 15th November 2025.

It is an important contribution that puts the events of the last days and weeks into their proper global context and answers the question: why does imperialism seek regime change and colonisation of Venezuela? Beyond even the direct question of oil, it examines the global anti-imperialist struggle and the relationship between the USA and the rising BRICS nations, in a period of the declining of Anglo-American imperialism, intense economic crisis, and its intense struggle to hold down Russia and China in particular.

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Transcript

Thank you comrades.

So it’s a big topic this topic of the unified global war and although I have also been to Venezuela and could talk at great length and all of you who know me know I can talk at great length I would love to talk more and enthused about what’s happening in Venezuela and why we need to support Venezuela practically as much as possible in its current fight.

What I want to do, that job’s been done pretty effectively, I think, by all the speakers you’ve heard so far. I can’t really make a better job than they’ve already done.

What I want to do is put the drive to war against Venezuela in its global context because it’s very important that we understand that the attack on Venezuela didn’t start yesterday, but it also is not a passing policy of this or this or that politician.

Now, in fact, Francisco said to us earlier today, didn’t he, the US aggression, the imperialist aggression, because it’s not only US imperialism, it’s all the imperialist countries.

Their aggression against Venezuela has been continuous since the start of the Bolivarian process, which is 26 years old. And that again is not an isolated event.

It’s not an isolated hostility. They don’t only pick on Venezuela as we know.

How do we actually make sense of today’s world? The first thing of course is to understand that the global capitalist system is a imperialist system.

And when we’re trying to understand events of the world right now, we have to keep in mind that the global economic system of capitalism, the imperialist financial system is in a deep, deepening, deepest ever crisis. The economic capitalist global system is teetering on the brink of total financial collapse. This is something we have to understand.

It’s only when you understand this that you can also understand the desperation and the necessity of the drive to war of the imperialists.

It’s not a choice. It’s not a foreign policy option. It’s not a good idea or a bad idea. It’s a logic of the capitalist system.

The need to keep producing profits. The fact that profit has been centralized to such an extent that a huge proportion of the wealth of the world is now controlled by a tiny handful of people and they have so much wealth that they find it difficult to keep reinvesting it at a profit which is the only function of their wealth.

It’s not capital unless it is continually being invested at a profit. It comes back bigger right? If you read Kapital, you know it’s M to M dash, right? Capital to capital plus a bit more. And then again and again. And each time you have to reinvest, you’ve got more to reinvest. And that’s the constant cycle by which the financiers of the world are sucking up. They’ve created this global machinery for sucking the wealth of the world towards themselves.

And it’s the only reason for everything they do to keep reinvesting capital at a profit is the primary motivation for every piece of economic activity and therefore every piece of military activity, every state policy, every war policy is driven by this need to make capital turn into more capital.

And right now with a with a deepening economic crisis, the people of the world have been impoverished to such an extent they can’t buy the goods that have been produced by monopoly corporations. The markets are gutted in order to bring back profitability to their system.

The imperialists need an orgy of looting. Trade is not going to fix this problem. There’s no way to continue trade in the normal way. They need first and foremost looting.

And in the while they’re trying to get it, they are pushing down on the people everywhere with austerity, trying to find ways to ring out a bit more profit by pushing wages down, pushing conditions down, making the proportion of wealth that goes to the masses smaller and the proportion that goes to the capitalists bigger.

The wars that they need to fight are to conquer and loot sovereign and independent territories.

They need to reassert their control over territories that are starting to break free.

And of course, their main targets, as we know, in this desperate quest to rebalance and bring back profitability to their system are Russia and China. These are the main targets of the war drive.

Russia and China are home to huge natural resources and the imperialists are constantly outraged that those resources are not theirs for free looting.

They’re home to huge markets that the imperialists want to exploit, huge reserves of manpower that the imperialists want to super exploit. And of course, besides all of that, Russia and China both play a pivotal role in the global anti-imperialist movement. It’s not an accident.

It’s not an accident that those are the two countries that had the most significant and far-reaching socialist revolutions of the 20th century.

The Soviet Union is no more. But Russia’s ability to stand up and defend its sovereignty is entirely based in the old Soviet legacy. The technological legacy it left, the economic legacy it left, the industrial legacy it left, the agrarian legacy it left, the educational legacy it left. These are the strength of Russia.

These are the traditions into which Russia is increasingly leaning as it becomes a pillar of the anti-imperialist world in order to defend its sovereignty. That is the logic that the Russian capitalist class has been pushed into. That in order to defend their sovereignty and not turn not allow Russia to become simply a neocolony for plunder and domination, they have had to lean into their anti-imperialist history, which of course was also their socialist history.

They’ve had to lean into their history and experience of planning in the economy. They’ve had to lean into their traditions of internationalism, of giving fraternal and receiving fraternal solidarity with the struggling peoples around the world.

And this is why we see today every country that’s trying to break free from the imperialist strangle hold looks to China for technological and developmental aid and looks to Russia for military help. and Venezuela is a perfect example of both.

But what we’re also seeing right now is that the imperialists, yes, they’re desperate and they’re driving to war and in many ways they’re dangerous and powerful. But what the NATO war in Ukraine has shown us is the weaknesses in the imperialist system.

They told themselves that Russia was just an oil well with a flag, an economythe size of Texas or Wales or whatever they like to say, and that their sanctions war, the economic war they waged against the Russian people at the beginning of the SMO would bring it down, would reduce the ruble to rubble, and would have the people of Russia out on the streets bringing down their own government and no further military reaction would be necessary.

But they were wrong. They weren’t just slightly wrong. They were catastrophically wrong.

And what we’re finding now is that the imperialists are having to look for other ways to achieve their goals. They’re finding that frontal attacks are not possible.

They had told themselves, you know, we’ve been hearing for years about the pivot to Asia, haven’t we? All the way back to Obama, the US ruling class was trying to shift its focus from the Middle East and from Europe to East Asia, i.e. to China because they realized that rising China was their biggest problem.

But they haven’t quite been able to. Now when the Russia hawks became supreme in Washington, their whole shtick, the cell that they gave in order to have their line implemented that Russia should be attacked first was “Russia is a stepping stone to China”. How often have we heard these nonsensical theories from the imperialists?

They don’t believe that people really exist. They see the world like it’s their grand chess board and they move the pieces around without any conception that the people themselves can learn and fight back.

So the Russia hawks said, “We’ll take down Russia and that will weaken China and then we can come for China.” So the China hawks went, “All right, fine. We’ll do it your way. Russia first.” And now they’re desperately scrambling to salvage the chaos they’ve made by failing.

And not only have they failed to bring down Russia, they’ve strengthened Russia in many ways, but they’ve also strengthened anti-imperialism all over the world.

I remember years ago during the time that the Iraqi resistance was fighting hard against the occupation and invasion of their country, fighting the British, fighting the Americans on the ground. I remember Hugo Chavez thanking the Iraqi resistance for the space it was giving to Latin America to get free and develop.

Well, all the struggling peoples of the world owe a debt of thanks to the Russian people and especially the people of the Donbas for the space they have given to the world’s struggling people.

They have bogged NATO down. They have exposed NATO’s weakness. They have sent confidence, injected confidence back into many movements that were on a downward turn for some years.

They’re coming back up. It’s not an accident that in this period we saw the emergence of the Sahel revolutions. It’s not an accident that it’s in this period that the Palestinian struggle went onto the offensive where before it had been on the defensive.

And meanwhile, the Imperials are having to readjust their plans. The frontal attacks aren’t possible.

So, we see them working increasingly to look for weak links in the anti-imperialist chain. They’re trying to work out, can they take down the weakest one and go from there step by step and that way weaken Russia and China so they can then make an assault that will somehow work or can they light enough fires around the perimeter of Russia and China to degrade their military to wear them down to degrade their economy to bring down the level of existence for the people.

This is where you understand, the genocidal approach of the imperialist is total. It’s not just Palestine. It’s not just Congo. Imperialists are genocidal in general. They don’t care how many people they destroy to get their way.

And that includes your own people. They don’t care how many people die from their own austerity policies at home. They don’t have a special value for the life of their own working class. They might pretend to you that they do, but they don’t. To the ruling class, 99.99% of the world’s people are entirely expendable. They’re fodder to be used for making profit, their labor to be sweated, they’re pawns to be moved around, their cannon fodder, but they don’t care about us as people.

So they are looking for weak links around the world, looking for ways to reassert the myth of their indomitability, the myth of their untouchable status and they are looking for ways to, as I said, step by step bring down an anti-imperialist world which is in fact strengthening and rising in front of us.

So their strategy of trying to cut off allies, they are creating proxy armies. Now this is not a new strategy for the imperialists, but it’s one that they’re increasingly having to lean into. Increasingly having to because they see how unpopular their wars are at home with their own people, how hard it is to mobilize their own people for those wars, how dangerous it’s going to be for them if they’re forced into conscription.

Yes. Because arming their people, it’s not like Venezuela where you can arm the masses and know that they’re going to use those guns to defend the country. In an imperialist country where the government and the system are unpopular and the people are unhappy, you arm and train the people in the use of weapons and you’re risking an awful lot, as the history of World War I and World War II gave us ample evidence.

So, they’re trying to create conditions for regime change in many countries around the world. And of course, oh my goodness, major targets, I’ve done too much talking.

Major targets in this global chain of war are of course Iran, the DPRK, and Venezuela. Three countries which are very important links in the chain of anti-imperialist solidarity.

Three countries that in the last year the imperials have repeatedly tried to provoke a war against and lost in each case. And I think Venezuela is going to see the same thing.

So I can’t do all the talk about all the things I wanted to talk about today, but I will just finish by reminding everybody that when it comes to the struggle against imperialism, yes, the anti-imperialist forces around the world are working together and doing their best to stand together and support one another. And we must help our people to see through the propaganda narratives and realize these people are on the same side as us.

But we also have to do more. Imperialism is only going to be defeated finally when it is defeated at home.

We cannot sit on the side. We cannot just sit on the side and applaud the efforts of our comrades in other countries and wait for them to liberate us.

We must recognize and especially here in Britain, here in the home of the oldest, most experienced, most vicious, most pernicious, most dastardly imperialist class in the world, we must understand we have a job to do to build right here.

We must build a mass movement of non-cooperation with the war machine at every level in our society, across all our mass movements.

And any leadership that gets in the way of that that is a leadership that’s no use to us and must be swept aside. Thank you very much.