End All U.S. Military Aid to Israel!
Working People Need a New Party to Fight the Two Parties of War and Wall Street!
Working people must completely oppose any war by the Donald Trump regime and U.S. imperialism against Venezuela. This assault on Venezuela is incredibly dangerous. Thousands of lives are at stake. This conflict is not in the interests of U.S. workers, the people of Venezuela, or the working class anywhere.
We must reject the lies and false justifications of Trump, shamefully echoed by many Democrats, that this attack would somehow be an act in defense against illegal drugs. It has nothing to do with drugs — Venezuela does not even play a significant role in the drug trade. As always, when the capitalists beat the drums of war, the truth goes out the window.
Let’s be clear: If this conflict is allowed to go forward, it will be a war for oil, for obscene profits for the billionaires , and for violent regime change.
My campaign for the U.S. Congress is calling for:
- NO WAR on Venezuela or any other Latin American nation
- No new War on Drugs
- End the genocide in Gaza and all U.S. military aid to Israel
- Stop all deportations and shut down ICE and the detention centers
- End the travel ban on African and Middle Eastern immigrants, including Somalia
- Tax the billionaires and multimillionaires to fund free healthcare for all, public schools, and affordable housing
We urgently need mass protests, mass strikes, and mass civil disobedience against the threat of war on Venezuela. We need broad left and working-class unity against this impending attack with organizations working together to build mass opposition.
I call on rank-and-file union members to demand that the labor leadership organize protest actions, including a national one-day coordinated protest opposing any U.S. military action against Venezuela. We also urge rank-and-file union members to bring resolutions in their unions demanding the labor leaders break their ties with the Democratic and Republican parties, both of which are warmongering parties of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Union members must demand that the leaders must instead support independent working-class candidates like myself as a step towards building a new independent workers’ party.
While this current threat of war on Venezuela is being led by Trump and the Republicans, working people cannot afford to put any faith in the Democratic Party, either. Violent regime change in Venezuela has been a longstanding bipartisan policy of U.S. imperialism since the rise of Hugo Chavez and the “Bolivarian revolution” against colonialism and Western imperialism nearly three decades ago.
It is no accident that the Democratic Party’s two-faced opposition to Trump’s saber-rattling against Venezuela has shamefully been limited to talking about how Trump has not sought Congressional approval!
This language of “congressional approval” is what Democrats speak when they support a war but they want to cover their asses. It is a way to protect themselves against the broad opposition to war among their own base.
Not a single Democratic politician has been willing to clearly oppose war on Venezuela. Not one member of the so-called Congressional Progressive Caucus, including AOC, has been willing to present, let alone fight for, an antiwar position.
How is this rhetoric about Congressional approval any sort of check against imperialist war and bloodshed? Most of the Democratic and Republican politicians in the U.S. Congress just approved tens of billions of dollars that are funding the holocaust in Gaza by the Israeli state, which has taken more than half a million Palestinian lives.
How is Congressional approval of any consequence when wars, bloodshed, and imperialism abroad, along with vicious attacks on American working people, has long been a bipartisan agreement? From the wars on Vietnam and Iraq to the attacks on multiple nations in Africa and the Middle East in the 2010s to the ongoing holocaust in Gaza, both the Democratic and Republican parties have unapologetically carried out the murderous agenda of imperialism.
The Democrats and Republicans are the world’s most powerful parties of capitalism and imperialism. They are collectively responsible for the deaths of countless millions.
A number of Democratic House and Senate members have been posturing against Trump’s war cries by saying that he should come to Congress for approval via the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). This was a resolution brought forward by reactionary and warmongering Republican President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. The AUMF grants the President broad legal authority to use military force if approved by Congress. In the name of “Congressional approval,” the AUMF has been used by both Republican and Democratic Presidents — Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. They have used it to carry out indiscriminate and lethal military attacks against Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger, killing millions of people. And while the AUMF resolution was initiated by Bush and the Republican party, it was approved by OVER 99 percent of all Democratic politicians in the House and the Senate in 2001, with Democratic House Member Barbara Lee being the lone exception. The warmongering resolution was approved by “progressive” independents like then House Member Bernie Sanders. Sanders is still independent in name, but he has completely capitulated to the Democratic Party. It’s certainly no surprise that my opponent, billionaire-backed Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith, with his 29-year warmongering record, voted YES on the AUMF.
The Trump administration has already carried out 21 airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific waters, murdering at least 83 people. They have failed to provide any evidence whatsoever that the boats were carrying illicit drugs. Needless to say, even if such evidence were provided, it would in no way justify what is, in reality, cold-blooded murder.
Trump claims that Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro is leading a “narcoterrorism” operation, also without any evidence. This is effectively a declaration of a new War on Drugs, and an attempt to conceal U.S. imperialism’s real goal: bloody regime change in Venezuela to hand over power to a far right government that will be in lockstep with the global billionaire class.
It is shameful that “progressive” Democrats, including NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, have not only refused to clearly condemn war on Venezuela, but have contributed to the pro-war rhetoric of calling the Maduro government a “dictatorship,” which is being used to justify the attacks and potential war. In reality, U.S. imperialism has no love of democracy at all, and supports actual dictatorships and despotic regimes wherever and whenever they serve their interests in maximizing profits and strategic interests. In Latin America and all around the world, including countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This year is not the first time Trump has threatened regime change in Venezuela. Neither is it new for the Democratic Party, including the self-described progressive Democrats, to tacitly or overtly support it. When Trump attempted a coup and undemocratically declared right-wing Juan Guaido as the leader of Venezuela in 2019, the Democratic Party enthusiastically supported this. When Trump invited Guaido, as the supposed Venezuelan head of state, to Washington D.C, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gushed that she was “honored to welcome” him to the U.S. Capitol. She said she was thrilled that Guaido was at Trump’s State of the Union address, and crowed about the “overwhelming bipartisan welcome” of Guaido. Pelosi and Chuck Schumer also gleefully applauded Trump’s statement in his State of the Union speech that, “we will never be a socialist country.” This, of course, was a rebuke of Maduro’s defiance against U.S. imperialism and the social democratic reforms that took place in Venezuela after Chavez was elected. In the history of both these murderous parties, regime change in the interests of U.S. capitalists is as American as apple pie.
The Democratic Party has also supported Trump’s crippling sanctions on Venezuela since 2017, which had already killed an estimated 40,000 people by mid-2019 and devastated the nation’s economy. The Biden government lifted the sanctions for six months in a mostly performative gesture, before reinstituting them. As part of the bipartisan sanctions, the U.S. cut the Venezuelan economy off from the international financial system and oil exports, froze billions of dollars of assets, and imposed “secondary sanctions” on countries that tried to do business with Venezuela.
According to the economists who authored a study on global sanctions, Venezuela experienced the worst depression ever in capitalist history, with the economy contracting by over 70 percent between 2012 and 2020, over three times as severe as the Great Depression in the U.S. According to the study, most of the ravaging of the economy is attributable to the barbaric sanctions.
As a revolutionary socialist, I reject all sanctions carried out by imperialist powers, as they overwhelmingly hurt, and frequently kill, working people and the poor. As a study by The Lancet medical journal estimates, such sanctions have taken more than half a million lives annually over a decade. The study also found that the deaths of children under five years of age accounted for over half of the total deaths caused by sanctions over the 1970–2021 period.
Another example of the Democratic Party in its role as equal instigator of the bloody interests of the capitalists is the 2009 coup in Honduras to oust the government of Manuel Zelaya. The coup happened under Obama, with Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. The American ruling class wanted to punish Zelaya for introducing mild reforms such as a minimum wage. Any example of social democratic reforms, however modest, is a threat to capitalism and imperialism because it risks emboldening the working class and the exploited masses to fight for more. It also has the potential of spreading widely across continents. In stunning contrast to Democratic and Republican claims of wanting to combat drug cartels, it was the U.S.-backed coup that has led to nearly two decades of “narco-dictatorship” in Honduras. This was, of course, combined with brutal and widespread privatization, violence, repression, and a huge wave of forced displacement and migration of poor and working-class people.
The real opposition of the U.S. capitalist class to Maduro, and Chavez before him, is the anti-U.S. imperialist positions taken by those governments, the partial nationalizations of oil resources and the social democratic policies. From the point of view of U.S. capitalists, these things are a bad example. They don’t want any kind of threat to their domination, and they don’t want anything resembling a left or social democratic government, particularly in Latin America.
Starting with Hugo Chavez, who came to power in 1999, the social democratic governments have presented a challenge for the capitalist class in Venezuela, in the United States, and globally. Harnessing the genuine anger at U.S. imperialism, Chavez became President on the promise of delivering social reforms to Venezuelan working and poor people. Chavez did carry out many reforms, such as increasing the minimum wage and funding housing, healthcare, and education by taxing the oil companies. He took some of these oil companies into state control. Venezuela is home to the world’s single largest concentration of proven oil reserves, and the capitalists want them all back.
Chavez carried out crucial reforms and did stand up to the ruthless oil billionaires and U.S. imperialism. He even survived multiple assassination attempts and a coup attempt backed by U.S. imperialism. But Chavez failed to understand that the only way to defeat Western capitalism and the ruling class in Venezuela was to push for actual socialism, taking all the major corporations into democratic public ownership of workers.
Had he moved towards revolutionary socialism, Chavez and the Venezuelan working class would undoubtedly have further provoked the global capitalist class. It would have been necessary to fully expropriate the capitalists and along with that, call for a socialist transformation across Latin America, and for the U.S. working class to join in international solidarity. Because Chavez stopped far short of this, the logic pointed towards him attempting to make deals with various capitalist entities and resorting to repressive measures against working-class movements. Socialism needs to be international, it cannot survive in one country, embattled against all the forces of global capitalism. It needs to spread. It needs to base itself on international working class solidarity and revolution, not on compromises with the capitalists,
These fundamental mistakes by Chavez, and then Maduro, catastrophically undermined the anti-imperialist goals of the Bolivarian revolution. It also led to the development of the “Bolibourgeoisie,” a wealthy bureaucratic layer that developed out of Chavez’s centralized bureaucratic project and rejection of workers’ democracy and socialist revolution.
The billionaire class and the Republicans and Democrats have attempted to bring to power one reactionary, right-wing figurehead after another. During Trump’s first term, it was Guaido. Now, it is odious figures like Maria Corina Machado.
Machado, who comes from an extremely affluent family, has been referred to as Venezuela’s Margaret Thatcher. Machado is known for her worship of Milton Friedman, the guru of neoliberalism. She is a darling of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States for her zeal to aggressively privatize the oil and energy industry in Venezuela. She is an ardent supporter not only of the horrific sanctions against Venezuela but also the Israeli state’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Many people were shocked that the Nobel committee awarded Machado the Nobel Peace Prize. It would be more stunning were it not that the prize has already been rendered meaningless by being awarded to Obama, who carried out brutal military invasions in seven nations, and Henry Kissinger, the butcher of U.S. imperialism who has the blood of many millions of people on his hands.
International institutions under capitalism, like the Nobel Committee, the IMF, and the World Bank are really just tools of the capitalists. Most of the time, they are all effectively under the thumb of the major imperialist powers. But this latest episode with the Nobel Peace Prize does help expose to a new generation how liberalism is deployed by the ruling class to carry out their savagery. It’s also why publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times have spilled a lot of ink supporting regime change in Venezuela while asking superficial questions about Trump’s war agenda.
After Chavez’s early demise, Maduro continued the approach of refusing to take the banks, oil conglomerates, real estate companies, and other corporations into democratic worker ownership. Instead, Maduro has further entrenched the corrupt, bureaucratic layer, and made further deals with corporations, plying them with sweetheart government contracts in an attempt to make peace with them. This has predictably had disastrous results, leading to further repression of working-class movements and undemocratic measures, as well as further isolation of Maduro, making him increasingly vulnerable to attacks from U.S. imperialism.
The so-called War on Drugs has also been jointly carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties for well over half a century. It was a thinly-veiled pretext for the American capitalist class to carry out a campaign of retribution against left-wing and working-class rebellion in Latin America. The second half of the twentieth century saw coup after coup, war after war, against virtually every single Latin American government that had the temerity to push back against the domination of U.S. corporations and bring about a semblance of workers’ rights. At the same time, the War on Drugs also became a principal vehicle for the capitalists to launch a decades-long bipartisan campaign of attacks on American working and poor people, especially Black people, as a bludgeon against mass movements. That includes Democratic President Bill Clinton, who enacted some of the most cutthroat policies.
The War on Drugs rhetoric, yet again today, is being used as a pretext for regime change in the case of Venezuela, given the very limited role it plays in the drug trade. In the case of fentanyl, which Trump has used to justify the recent attacks, Venezuela plays no role whatsoever in its production or trade.
It is again revealing that Democratic Party politicians, including the so-called “progressives,” are themselves peddling the lie that deposing Maduro and carrying out regime change is about drug cartels or addressing the drugs crisis. This is much the same as how they propped up Bush’s lies to justify the war on Iraq, which left more than a million dead.
My opponent, Democrat Adam Smith, was a cheerleader for Bush’s war on Iraq. Ever the chest-thumping warmonger, Smith has expressed the need to ramp up the new War on Drugs and has been implying the need for regime change in Venezuela. But because he’s afraid of our campaign, Smith is also talking out of both sides of his mouth. He’s now trying to whitewash his record and is claiming he opposes war and regime change. But a mere month ago, Smith said that transnational drug-trafficking gangs in the Western Hemisphere are “a problem for our national security” and that “You’ve got budding narco-states down there. … We need to be engaged and involved in that.” In other words, Smith is once again lending his support to yet another war, as he did for the invasion of Iraq, the genocide in Gaza, and every other war during his 29 years in office.
Smith has been an ardent spokesperson for the apartheid state of Israel and has funded the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands to the hilt. In addition to voting for the genocide, he voted to ban U.S. funds for United Nations food aid to Gaza. He also voted to create ICE and has voted repeatedly to fund ICE.
If we defeat the warmongering Adam Smith and win the election of the first-ever revolutionary socialist to the U.S. Congress, it will be nothing less than a political earthquake. The Seattle Times, which represents big business, had to admit that my socialist City Council office turned politics upside down in Seattle. They said I commandeered Seattle’s political agenda, and forced the Democratic Party to concede to our working-class demands. That is the kind of fighting approach that’s desperately needed in Washington D.C.
Our campaign is the most important campaign in the nation for another reason. Millions of working people are angry and want to see a fight for things like free healthcare for all, rent control, and an end to military aid to Israel. But there is absolutely no leadership being provided by progressive Democrats to do so. There’s also no leadership from the nearly 300 Democratic Socialists of America elected officials, the hundreds of labor leaders or the thousands of unelected NGO and social movement leaders. Virtually all these so-called leaders are tied to the Democratic Party by a thousand threads, and act as gatekeepers against working-class movements.
It was because my City Council office determinedly refused to be held in check by these rotten gatekeepers that we were able to win the nation’s highest minimum wage. Because of the historic victory my office won, Seattle’s minimum wage is going up from $9.19/hour in January 2015 to $21.30/hour in January 2026, a jump of over 131 percent! My office also won the Amazon Tax, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars annually for affordable housing, and unprecedented renters’ rights like a $10 cap on late rent fees, a ban on winter evictions, and six months’ notice for rent increases. We won by building militant movements, by refusing to accept civility politics, and by naming and shaming those who betray working and poor people. Help us take this fighting strategy to Washington D.C.! Join my campaign at kshamasawant.org
For the working and oppressed people in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America, the only solution is working-class revolutions, overthrowing of capitalism, and an ushering in of socialism. Nothing short of a socialist transformation will free the hundreds of millions of people from the yoke of Western imperialism and the exploitation by the capitalist classes in the United States and inside Latin America.
But this will remain a talking point unless the working class starts getting organized everywhere, seriously and urgently.
Imperialism and the pillaging and plundering of nations for natural resources is endemic to capitalism. The working class anywhere cannot afford to have illusions in the powerbrokers of any capitalist nation. We should expect the inter-imperialist rivalry between the United Nations and Western Europe, and China and Russia to lead to more wars. Working and oppressed people need to unite across national boundaries in working-class solidarity against all capitalist regimes. Wars, exploitation of natural resources, climate crisis, and the immense suffering of billions of working and poor people are the nature of capitalism. Working people need to build international revolutionary movements to take the major corporations into democratic public ownership, and run them in the interest of humanity and the planet.
This is why I am a revolutionary socialist.
Solidarity.