Category: Statement

This statement is by the United Left Platform (ULP). This is an initiative of a group of revolutionary and independent socialist organizations to actively seek opportunities for joint work, given the unprecedented authoritarian assaults facing the left, oppressed communities, and the working class as a whole in the U.S. and internationally. It is united by a commitment to political independence, a strategic focus on social struggle and mass action, and democratic organizing in all efforts. The organizations of the ULP are International Marxist Humanist Organization, Socialist Horizon, Solidarity, Tempest Collective and Workers Voice.

The United Left Platform expresses its absolute solidarity with the heroic resistance of people in Minnesota to the U.S. state’s war against its citizens and non-citizens alike. We call on people everywhere to join in the resistance wherever they are and however they can.

In the Twin Cities, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good for protesting ICE deportations. Another ICE agent shot a Venezuelan immigrant in the leg while trying to arrest him. Since last year, 36 people have died at the hands of ICE, including four since January 1st.

Faith groups, unions, and community organizations have all organized against the ICE occupation. They have called for workers to stay home from work, students to miss school, and consumers to stay out of stores this Friday, January 23rd, to protest the ICE attacks on the city. The ULP supports this call to action.

The recent back to back events in Venezuela and Minneapolis show us that the Trump regime is committed to fighting one imperial war abroad and one domestic war at home.

Before beginning its assault on Minneapolis, the United States illegally invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its President, Nicolas Maduuro. It killed at least 80 people during the invasion. Also since the start of this year, the Trump administration has requested a 1.5 trillion dollar military budget, making it far and away the largest amount of money spent on killing in human history. Last year, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” increased the budget for ICE more than four times from 8 billion to 170 billion over four years.

The war abroad and at the war at home are signs of U.S. capitalism in crisis. Unable to restore profits or its hegemony in a multipolar world, a declining U.S. empire has resorted to what United States Homeland Security Advisor Steven Miller describes as “strength…force..and power.” State violence against the people of Venezuela, militarized takeovers of oil and resource extraction, and occupying ICE armies murdering U.S. citizens for protest against an unpopular and failing capitalist state are two sides of the same coin. Neither the traditional “rules-based” order of international law nor bourgeois democracy are any longer convenient for the U.S. ruling class. The question for the Trump regime is not “guns or butter.” The question is how many guns and how many soldiers needed to fire them.

This two-sided war is also an attempt to eliminate any and all opposition to the current regime. Destroying civil rights for immigrants and protesters is a step towards destroying them for all of us. In Trump’s first year as President, the percentage of arrests for people with no criminal record has increased 2,450 times: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/press-release/report-trump-immigration-detention-2026/ J.D. Vance declared “full immunity” for the murderer of Renee Good even before an investigation began. The state now reserves the right to define all forms of civil disobedience to ICE as “domestic terrorism.”

The United Left Platform believes that the battle against US imperialism and the battle against ICE must become one battle. To prepare to reconquer Latin America, the MAGA forces believe they must crush basic civil and human rights for working people, both immigrant and native-born, here at home. We will be stronger if we unite all those in the world subject to US state terror into an unstoppable force.

This is especially true as the Democratic Party refuses to become an opposing force to the regime’s authoritarian aspirations.. Now more than ever we need an independent working-class movement that be a brake on Trumpian barbarism.

On Tuesday, January 27th at 8 p.m. EST/7 p.m. CST/5 p.m. PST the United Left Platform will host a national virtual meeting “U.S. Out of Venezuela!/ICE Out of Our Communities” with speakers from Venezuela and the United Left Platform.

Register for the event here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/LWiwPsKIRrmA-c4xFeBowg

The United Left Platform, a coalition of revolutionary socialist organizations in the U.S., completely and unequivocally condemns the Trump administration’s illegal and unwarranted military attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicholás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, the former President of Venezuela’s National Assembly. This aggression poses an ominous threat to any power or person that stands in the way of Trump’s effort to secure U.S. imperial control over Latin America, its most important “sphere of influence.”

In the dead of night in the early morning of January 3, U.S. military forces attacked the Fuerte Tiuna military in Caracas where Maduro was thought to be residing as well at the La Carlota airport and Higuerote airport to the east of Caracas. Air strikes by planes and helicopters were also reported at La Guaira and Aragua state. The elite army unit Delta Force captured Maduro and Flores and flew them in chains to a prison in New York.

In comments made hours after the assault, code-named Operation Absolute Resolve, Trump made it clear that the attack is but the beginning of his effort to take direct control of Venezuela. “We will run the country until we have a just transition—we can’t take the chance that someone other than us takes over Venezuela,” he stated, adding, “we are willing to wage a second and much larger attack—we are ready to do so right now.”

We should be under no illusions that Trump intends to allow any political power or personage to run Venezuela that is not under the control of the U.S. This is not just regime change—it is a formula for possible occupation, beginning with the U.S. taking total control of Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources.

Whether or not the Trump regime succeeds in this outrageous display of imperial arrogance depends on developing the strongest and broadest possible opposition to his efforts by those of us in the U.S., in Venezuela, and internationally. We urge everyone opposed to war and neocolonial domination to make your voices of opposition heard in the streets, workplaces, and unions.

As revolutionary socialists, we have no illusions about the nature of the Maduro regime, which was neither revolutionary nor socialist. However, the present and future of Venezuela is not for anyone to decide other than the people of Venezuela. We stand with all who seek to defend its right to self-determination.

Trump’s claim that the administration is motivated by controlling the shipment of drugs to the U.S. has no more basis in reality that his assertion that “crime has been totally eliminated” in Washington DC and other cities by sending in the national guard. Less than 10% of drugs entering the U.S. come from Venezuela, while Trump recently pardoned one of the biggest drug kingpins in Central America, former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras. His attacks on vessels off the coast of Venezuela that have killed 110 people in recent months, like the January 3 assault and kidnapping that has killed untold numbers of others, is largely driven by his desire to obtain control of a country with the largest known oil reserves on earth.

However, the attack on Venezuela is not only about oil. Also in play is the effort to enact the Trump Doctrine that proclaims the U.S. now has the right to intervene anywhere it wishes at any time to secure total control of its most important spheres influence—while acknowledging Russia and China’ efforts to dominate their respective spheres so long as it coincides with U.S. interests. This is the multipolar imperialism that has now emerged with the collapse of the much heralded (but failed) neoliberal world order. As Trump declared in boasting of the U.S. seizure of Maduro, “America will never again allow foreign powers to drive us out of our own hemisphere.” We must combat this reactionary agenda by engaging in mass resistance to the U.S. attack on Venezuela.

This statement arises from collective discussions of the United Left Platform, an initiative of a group of revolutionary and independent socialist organizations to actively seek opportunities for joint work given the unprecedented authoritarian assaults facing the left, oppressed communities, and the working class as a whole, in the U.S. and internationally. We are united by a commitment to political independence, a strategic focus on social struggle and mass action, and democratic organizing in all our efforts. The organizations endorsing the statement are: International Marxist Humanist Organization, Socialist Horizon, Solidarity, Tempest Collective , and Workers Voice.

The present moment is exceptionally dangerous for the nations and peoples of Latin America and for communities across the United States. The actions of the U.S. government put us all at risk.

While the Trump regime’s murderous bombing of small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean are world-class crimes in their own right, they are not happening in isolation. They openly signal Trump’s and his administration’s intention to wage war on Venezuela in order to install a pro-U.S. puppet regime in that country or to compel the existing government to surrender Venezuela’s oil resources to U.S. corporate exploitation.

The pretext for the boat bombings is a transparent lie. Venezuela does not produce fentanyl, which is responsible for most U.S. drug-related deaths, and less than 10 percent of the illegal drugs that enter the U.S. go through Venezuela. These murders are not about “stopping narco-terrorism;” they’re about displaying imperial power to assassinate at will without even the appearance of arrest or trial.

They’re also intimately connected to the same contempt for judicial process or “rule of law” happening in U.S. cities and towns, where masked terrorist gangs called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) snatch and disappear people off the streets, work sites, stores and day care centers in immigrant communities, treating their people as subhumans without rights or recourse.

The racism of this campaign is undisguised. At the same time that Trump is assaulting Venezuelan asylum seekers and eliminating refugee admissions in 2026, he’s making an exception to bring seven thousand white Afrikaners into the U.S. on the absurd pretense of “white genocide” in South Africa.

The big, beautiful resistance rising up against ICE raids in our communities needs to be joined by antiwar mobilizations to stop Trump’s assault on Venezuela and Latin America. Trump ran for president deceptively promising his MAGA base that he would end the United States’ “forever wars.” In office, he’s not only continued support for a Israeli-U.S. genocide in Gaza, he’s now also pursuing a course that would produce continental chaos in Latin America.

The Trump gang’s goal is not only crushing whatever hopes remain from the early 2000s “Bolivarian Revolution.” It aims to isolate Colombia’s moderately progressive government, strengthen Trump’s alliance with the far-right regime of Argentina, and embolden the military forces hoping to restore neo-fascist rule in Brazil under Trump’s friend Jair Bolsonaro.

The Maduro government in Venezuela is repressive and unpopular. Despite its claims, it does not sustain a socialist economy. We are not supporters of this regime. Along with the crippling criminal sanctions imposed by U.S. imperialism on Venezuela, Maduro shares some responsibility for the catastrophic economic situation and social calamity which has driven millions of Venezuelans to leave the country.

Any regime change imposed by imperialism would only worsen this catastrophe. We demand “Hands Off Venezuela,” “End All U.S. Sanctions,” and we speak out in solidarity with the people of Venezuela and their right to national sovereignty and to organize for democratic rights in their country.

We understand that for the militarist-neocon wing of the Republican cult, notably Trump’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, Venezuela is an initial target toward the longtime fantasy of regime change in Cuba to complete the restoration of U.S. capitalist hegemony in Latin America.

How far will any of this go? In essence, as far as Trump and the far right are allowed before popular resistance stops them. Only mass mobilization of antiwar action in the form of protests, strikes, and direct action can stop the imperial war machine and Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional ICE terror and monstrous deportations.

These are not separate struggles. Blowing up boats in Caribbean and Pacific waters is not a sideshow, but a display of imperial-presidential arrogance and impunity with appalling implications for the hemisphere and the world. We call on all social movement and labor activists, unions, community and your organizations in the United States to oppose all U.S. aggressions against Venezuela, and be ready to take the streets in mass to defend the right of self-determination of the Venezuelan people.