"Despite early appearances, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela doesn’t seem to be a regime change operation. After all, America is leaving the regime, now headed by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in power. As of Monday, all of Venezuela’s ruling officials aside from Maduro appear to have remained in their posts, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and was known as one of Maduro’s most fearsome enforcers.

“That’s very odd, historically, to see something like this,” said Javier Corrales, a professor at Amherst and the author of “Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism.” “To see that you get rid of the leader, but the regime stays in place.”

But for Donald Trump, the preservation of something close to the status quo makes sense, given that his goal is extortion, not political transformation. Rather than the moralistic imperialism of George W. Bush, Trump’s foreign policy is imperialistic gangsterism. As one administration official put it to me, there’s “something refreshing about Trump just saying, ‘Yeah, we are taking the oil.’”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/opinion/trump-venezuela-regime-change.html

#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Imperialism #ExtractiveCapitalism #Maduro #Oil #FossilFuels

"This is not to dismiss the ideological or geopolitical dimensions of U.S. intervention—reviving the Monroe Doctrine, reasserting imperial spheres of influence.

But oil is the core motive behind this power play: control over the world’s largest petroleum reserves, long exploited with extraordinary returns by U.S. multinationals and their shareholders.

Maduro was a brutal and corrupt autocrat. But Trump has never had any trouble working with brutal and corrupt autocrats; such traits rarely trouble him.

The real goal of the Trump operation lies elsewhere: reclaiming Venezuela’s oil rents for the benefit of America’s economic elite—an arrangement that peaked in the 1950s, during the mythic “golden age” endlessly invoked by the MAGA movement

To understand what the White House is aiming for, one must revisit this largely forgotten history: a period of cross-border extractive capitalism pushed to its extreme, which Trump now seeks to resurrect—and possibly surpass."

https://gzucman.substack.com/p/understanding-us-intervention-in

#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #FossilFuels #ExtractiveCapitalism

"Political Scientist #LalehKhalili joins us to discuss her new book, #ExtractiveCapitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, out now from Verso."

https://thisishell.com/interviews/1861-laleh-khalili

#capitalism #extractivism #inequality #polycrisis #books #bookstodon @bookstodon

Learn about how the crisis in Iran and many of the tensions in the middle east are the result of the #ExtractiveCapitalism which has led to nearly unabated #ClimateChange.

#Iran
#ClimateCatastrophe
#war

https://mastodon.world/@paninid/114682928787916491

Excerpts from "From Taming to #Dismantling: #Degrowth and #AntiCapitalist Strategy" by Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, September 2020.

#SmallScaleRuptures

"As for ruptural transformation, this is not part of Wright’s vision of how to overcome capitalism. So far it has not featured in the work on degrowth either, which has largely followed Wright’s reasoning. A survey of the degrowth movement conducted at the fourth international degrowth conference in Leipzig (2014) found out that about 13% of degrowthers were oriented towards rupture. While this might be a minority position in the movement and while ruptures are to be cautious about, I would not fully dismiss rupture as a logic of transformation (and smashing capitalism, as its strategic logic). When speaking of ruptural transformation, Wright usually refers to it as a complete overhaul of the capitalist system, and as a direct attack on the state. However, rupture does not have to be understood this way, which Wright acknowledged also.

"There can be temporary or smaller scale ruptures and examples of smashing capitalism. Say, an act of #disobedience like blocking a coal plant or occupying a public space – something that is part of the degrowth imaginary – can be seen as an example of a #TemporaryRupture that #empowers and encourages other forms of #resistance. It includes, but also goes beyond resistance, by disrupting, even if temporarily, the rhythm of #ExtractiveCapitalism. Workers overtaking a bankrupt factory and making it a cooperative is another example of rupture and smashing capitalism, in a concrete organisation, such as #VioMe in Greece, #RiMaflow in Italy and the occupied factories in #Argentina. Had they been waiting for the legislation that would allow dismantling capitalism to come into place and support cooperative organisational forms, such pioneering examples of change would probably not exist. However, responding to the crises the way they did created a rupture that may encourage others to do the same, as well as demand policies that would allow cooperativisation. Thus, I would argue that temporary or smaller scale ruptures can be important, supporting interstitial and symbiotic logics of transformation."

Read more:
https://degrowth.info/en/blog/from-taming-to-dismantling-degrowth-and-anti-capitalist-strategy
#SolarPunkSunday #Dissent #CivilDisobedience #SmashCapitalism