The Historical Crisis of Capitalist Reproduction, the Return of Colonial Conquest, and the Decay of Ideological Apparatuses
After months of a de facto siege of Venezuela, with U.S. military forces deployed around the country’s coastline and a display of power involving the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, the residents of Caracas woke in the early hours of Saturday, January 13, to the sound of explosions and the flight of military helicopters. Reports spoke of air strikes on several locations in the capital and operations carried out by special forces. A few hours later Donald Trump announced that the military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been “successful,” stating that they had been abducted from their residence and transferred to the United States. The official justification followed the familiar and repeatedly tested formula: claims of “illegitimacy due to electoral fraud” accompanied by accusations such as “terrorism” and “drug trafficking.” Yet behind this mask the reality appeared more naked than ever. The United States has intervened not for “democracy,” but to secure control over the resources and the political-economic management of a country that possesses some of the largest oil reserves in the world. This implicit—and at times explicit—acknowledgement clarifies the true nature of the operation: a return to the methods of old colonial conquest, conducted through force, blockade, abduction, and paternalistic administration.
This event cannot be understood simply as a “legal crisis” or a “violation of rules,” because such a framework unintentionally reproduces the illusion that the capitalist world is founded on a neutral and humane order that has merely deviated from its principles. What is unfolding in Venezuela instead signals a stage in the development of global capitalism that must be described as a historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital. At this stage, the normal mechanisms of accumulation, trade, and crisis management are no longer sufficient. In order to preserve the possibility of its own reproduction, capital increasingly resorts to direct violence: war, blockades, and the forcible seizure of resources. In such a phase the liberal meaning of “order” collapses and the world increasingly resembles a jungle in which the stronger devour the weaker. This does not mean that “law” has suddenly lost its validity, but rather that law has always been valid only insofar as it corresponded to the requirements of accumulation and the balance of power of capital. Under the conditions of a historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital—when ideological, political, and juridical apparatuses lose their previous function—the mask falls away and naked force takes its place.
Venezuela is not an exception. The same logic appeared in Iraq through the lie of “weapons of mass destruction,” followed by occupation, privatization, and social collapse. It was reproduced in Afghanistan through the “war on terror” and two decades of occupation and devastation. In Libya, the slogan of “protecting civilians” resulted in the disintegration of an entire society and permanent civil war. In Syria it advanced through proxy war and sanctions that reshaped the region. And in Gaza it has manifested in its most naked form through open genocide and collective siege. The chain is one and the same: in its historical crisis capital transforms violence into a normal instrument of politics in order to secure geopolitical positions and control over resources and routes of accumulation. To legitimize this process, the immense ideological and media apparatus abandons any pretense of journalistic neutrality and directs the media—like weapons—straight toward its targets.
At this point the ideological decay of capital and the role of concepts such as peace and human rights become central issues. When María Corina Machado described the recent operation as the “hour of freedom” and demanded the immediate transfer of power to the candidate backed by the pro-Western opposition, this was not merely a political statement. It revealed the ideological mechanism of war: occupation and abduction are called “liberation”; blockade and attack are presented as a “transition to democracy”; and regime change under the tutelage of dominant powers is marketed as “peace.” In this context the awarding of the Nobel “Peace” Prize to Machado is not a mistake or misunderstanding but an explicit declaration of the class function of bourgeois ideological institutions in the stage of capitalism’s historical crisis. Within the vocabulary of the capitalist world order, “peace” often becomes another name for regime change and the stabilization of the world market through sanctions, blockades, and interventions.
From Oslo to the Caribbean
The meaning of this “peace” must be understood precisely. The Nobel Committee celebrates as a symbol of “civil courage” and “peaceful transition” a figure who openly circulates within the orbit of the global far right, aligns herself with Trump, Netanyahu, and other right-wing blocs, advocates militarism and intensified military pressure, and acts as an internal lobby for imperialist intervention. Here we are no longer dealing with scattered contradictions of liberalism but with a structural confession: the institutions that legitimize bourgeois rule have reached a stage where, in order to reproduce domination, they are compelled to invert even their former masks. Warmongers are called “peacemakers,” and policies of blockade and conquest are presented as “democratization.” This inversion itself signals the exhaustion and crisis of the ideological apparatus, for capitalism in its historical crisis can no longer even stably reproduce its former moral appearance and is therefore compelled to express its violence in the language of virtue.
This ideological decay is not confined to the Nobel Prize. At the very moment when “peace” is celebrated in Oslo through praise for allies of the war bloc, the same bloc proceeds in the real world with bombardment, siege, and mass killing, while the same media and institutions—through selectivity and double standards—reverse the boundary between victim and executioner. In such a world “human rights” become an ideological weapon: dossiers are constructed against rival powers, while moral immunity is produced for allied ones. The language of law is used to justify war, and the language of silence to conceal crimes. This mechanism is an inseparable part of the jungle logic of capital in its historical crisis of total reproduction: when the market and diplomacy are insufficient, bullets enter; and when bullets enter, “peace” and “democracy” must be redefined in their service.
For this reason the question of Venezuela is neither a choice between governments and bourgeois factions nor a matter of hoping for reform of ideological institutions.
What is unfolding in Venezuela is a warning of an era: capitalism, in its historical crisis of reproduction, increasingly returns to conquest and direct plunder while transforming concepts such as peace, democracy, and human rights into instruments of war.
The internationalist response can rest only on one principle:
no to capital’s war, no to occupation and tutelage, and no to the ideological veneers that call crime “virtue.”
Against war, against the states engaged in proxy wars
Toward anti-war and anti-capitalist networks
4 January 2026
Internationalist Workers’ Organization
