War today no longer always begins with bombs. In Venezuela, it begins with markets, sanctions, and media narratives, instruments of imperialism masquerading as diplomacy and “human rights.” The United States, the apex predator of global capital, is constructing what Achille Mbembe calls a death world, a social order where life is systematically stripped of value, where human beings are reduced to disposable labor and political obstacles to accumulation. This is not random cruelty. It is the logic of capital in decay, the imperial center extracting value from the periphery by any means necessary, even through organized starvation and economic asphyxiation.
1. Economic Warfare, Sanctions as Class War
U.S. sanctions against Venezuela are not a response to tyranny or corruption, they are a response to disobedience. Venezuela’s attempts to assert sovereignty over its oil, to use national resources for social development rather than foreign profit, made it intolerable to the empire. Sanctions are therefore a counter-revolutionary weapon, a means to discipline a rebellious periphery. These economic measures function as a kind of imperialist enclosure, denying the Venezuelan people access to their own wealth. Food shortages, medicine scarcity, and currency collapse are not side effects, they are deliberate acts of economic violence. This is class warfare waged across borders, the capitalist class of the Global North punishing a working people who dared to dream of socialism.
2. Ideological Warfare, The Nobel Prize as Imperial Spectacle
The Nobel Peace Prize, far from being a neutral accolade, has become a tool of ideological warfare. Awarding it to an opposition figure who has publicly courted Western capital and even spoken with Donald Trump Jr. is not “recognition”, it is recruitment. It transforms the prize into an instrument of moral laundering, a way to paint imperial aggression in the pastel colors of humanitarian concern. The figure of the “humanitarian opposition leader” replaces the worker, the peasant, the revolutionary. In this narrative, the oppressed must accept their chains for their own good, and those who refuse are demonized as terrorists or tyrants. (The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado.)
3. Military Warfare, The Empire’s Right to Kill
When U.S. forces strike vessels or fishing boats in or near Venezuelan waters under the pretext of combating “narco‑terrorism”, they are not merely attacking individuals, they are asserting the empire’s sovereign right to kill. To declare who is “terrorist” and who is “civilian” is to play god with human lives. In Marxist terms, this is the ultimate expression of capitalist necropolitics, the use of death as a mechanism of control and accumulation. The fishermen become expendable subjects of a global system that has no need for their labor but every need for their subjugation. Their deaths are test runs in the empire’s project to make resistance itself unthinkable.
4. The Imperial Logic of the Death World
Marx taught us that capitalism carries war in its bloodstream. When profit rates fall and crises deepen, the system turns outward, seeking new territories, new markets, new scapegoats. Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves and a political project that resists foreign control, is precisely the kind of nation that must be disciplined for the system’s survival. What we are witnessing is not merely foreign policy, it is the reassertion of imperial class power. Washington’s campaign against Venezuela is an attempt to reimpose capitalist normality on a people who have glimpsed the possibility of a world beyond capital. The “death world” is thus not a metaphor. It is the lived reality of late capitalism, a planet divided into zones of consumption and zones of abandonment, where entire populations are rendered disposable so that the circuits of profit can continue to flow.
5. The Task of the Living
To remain neutral is to stand with the empire. The working classes of the world must recognize in Venezuela’s struggle their own future. The same forces that bomb Venezuelan fishermen are the ones conducting ICE raids and dehumanization of the working-class migrants in the core, rise in child poverty and homelessness in London and militarizing police in Nairobi . Venezuela is not an exception, it is a mirror. The empire’s death world begins at the periphery but ends at the center, consuming its own children when there are no more others to kill. The task, then, is not simply to condemn imperialism, but to abolish the system that gives birth to it, to dismantle the global machinery of capital and build in its place a world organized around life, not profit.
