From Venezuela to Everywhere: The Logic of Rebuilding Empire

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with the way they frame this, are shrinking the historical reality of our moment. The issue today is not simply a few “misconduct” cases or the “illegality” of certain U.S. executive actions, and it can’t even be reduced to “oil” in the crude, literal sense. The real issue is a project to rebuild American political hegemony on a global scale. What we are witnessing is a deliberate return to the playbook of the 1960s and 1970s: a project aimed at redividing the world, redefining spheres of influence, and reorganising the order of power.

Reducing this blunt reality to a handful of legal disputes or a few instances of presidential overreach is, in itself, a political distortion. If you measure military action or foreign intervention only by the yardstick of “Congressional authorisation” or “violations of the law,” you miss the deeper question: what exactly is this state trying to rebuild, and which relationships of power is it trying to stabilise again? You could see the same pattern recently in the way some U.S. politicians reacted to Washington’s actions in Venezuela: they narrowed the whole discussion to a legal argument about executive authority, while critics warned that the path smelled like regime change and oil interests. But even if we assume oil is part of the motive, oil is just a code word for something bigger: a reshuffling of power.

If China has expanded its influence in Africa through massive spending, lending, and trapping states in cycles of debt; if Russia is waging war against Ukraine to control energy corridors and transit routes into Europe; then the United States is acting by the very same logic of power: trying to return to its previous hegemonic position, or at least preventing a stable multipolar order in which Washington is no longer the final rule-maker. This is not an exception, and it is not a deviation. It is the normal logic of the global capitalist order, reproduced in different forms.

This is exactly where we run into the classic mindset of the “neoliberalised left.” Inside the United States, the crisis is reduced to a few violations, a few instances of lawbreaking, or a handful of limited reforms—as if making the process “legal” automatically means power itself has been restrained. But the U.S. political system only allows change within a very tightly controlled framework. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, with all its symbolic and political weight, proves that cracks exist: you can win, you can mobilise, you can push back against urban oligarchies. But none of this is decisive or sufficient on its own. If the underlying power relations are not shaken, these gains are quickly absorbed into the system’s own logic, or neutralised through administrative, judicial, and media coalitions. Mamdani is the mayor of New York today, and Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are standing with him—but the real question is whether this win can become a lasting shift in the balance of forces, or whether it will dissolve inside the same urban-financial machinery that has always swallowed reforms.

Outside the United States, this distortion becomes even deeper. The same intellectual currents that, at home, strike an anti-corruption moral pose and limit the debate to legal procedures, show up internationally with vague “anti-imperialist” slogans—without any serious analysis of capital, state power, and global hegemony. The result is a double standard: in Washington, everything becomes a “violation of the law” that can supposedly be fixed through oversight and reform; in the wider world, everything becomes “defending nations,” covered up with moral posturing. This double standard is neither accidental nor innocent. It has a function: to hide the reality of political power and push class contradictions to the margins on a global scale.

In this framework, the truth that should be kept in full view is deliberately removed: capital is not just markets and companies. Capital is organised political power. Hegemony means the ability to set the world’s agenda—to decide what counts as “legitimate,” what is “illegal,” what is “security,” what is “terrorism,” and who has the right to use force and who does not. When a hegemonic project begins, its tools are not limited to tanks and sanctions. Banks, media, international legal regimes, financial standards, and intelligence networks are all part of the same machine. Focusing on legal violations is like talking about a massive hurricane and complaining only about a broken window.

That is why a real confrontation with this hegemony has one basic condition: we must accept that the political power of capital has to be destabilised. Not through moralism, not through legal case-building, and not by hoping for a “better” world order whose foundations are imperial rivalry and capital accumulation. Destabilising power means building independent social force: organisation, strikes, collective action, and turning scattered contradictions into a common will that can exert sustained pressure on both state and capital.

This is where Iran enters the picture. Because Iran is not just a geopolitical “case.” Iran is a living laboratory of our era’s contradictions: a society that, over the past two decades, has repeatedly produced different forms of organising, uprising, strikes, and resistance—against a state that treats survival as identical with securitisation and control. If the “hegemonic project” abroad takes the form of redividing the world and rearranging spheres of influence, inside countries it is completed through the same logic: shifting crisis onto society’s body, suffocating independent organisation, and turning everyday livelihood into an instrument of obedience. In these conditions, real politics moves beyond moral poses and legal games and comes down to one fundamental question: what force can push back the political power of capital—not just replace its managers?

This is what the neoliberalised left refuses to see, because seeing it comes with a cost: you have to leave the safe zone of moralism and procedural legalism and step into the terrain of power—where class, ownership, organisation, and real coercion are what decide outcomes.