~ Massimo De Angelis ~
Threshold event
Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela is neither an isolated incident nor a simple rash geopolitical move. It is a threshold event, a rupture that reveals what has long been operating behind the scenes: a profound recalibration of the throbs of command in a phase of global hegemonic crisis. To understand it, it is not enough to resort to the usual lexicon of international relations – sovereignty, law, balance between states – because it is precisely that lexicon that has entered into crisis. Instead, we need to shift our gaze from the level of state strategies to that of the systemic field of forces that traverses planetary social cooperation, putting the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of life in tension.
In my article Pulsazioni del comando e conflitto di riproduzione I proposed precisely this shift in perspective. The underlying argument concerns the interpretation of hegemony on two levels. On the one hand, there is hegemony between actors (those who dictate the rules in the field of power) and systemic hegemony (the reproduction of capitalist command as the dominant form over other ways of organising social cooperation). Distinguishing between the two levels is important because it is on the second level that we can make relevant distinctions in order to construct alternatives to capitalism and imagine non-hegemonic counter-pulsations.
Systemic hegemony does not coincide with a state or a power, but with a systemic configuration of command, more or less turbulent, whose purpose is to regulate the entire planetary social cooperation as capitalism. In every historical phase, it emerges through recurring pulsations, what I call throbs of command, set in motion by its multiple actors within a variable field of forces: the redefinition of goals, the selection of legitimate actors, the production and management of crises, the choice and extension of instruments, the shifting of social and ecological costs, the recalibration of the thresholds of what is considered tolerable. States do not govern these pulsations from the outside: they are historical operators, nodes traversed by forces that exceed them. War, sanctions, unilateral actions and sudden authoritarian accelerations should be read within this field of forces, not as exceptions.
The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the United States under the Trump administration should therefore not be interpreted as a ‘personal aberration’ or an irrational gesture, but as a consistent acceleration of already existing trends. For years, Venezuela has been governed from outside through a combination of sanctions, intermittent negotiations, selective openings and economic blackmail. Direct intervention marks the moment when this indirect grammar is suspended: the command ceases to pretend to mediate and acts directly on a node it considers strategic. In fact, despite the univocal rhetoric that paints only the dramatic aspects, in the years prior to the current upheavals, Venezuela had made significant progress in social reproduction, a direct legacy of the Bolivarian policies inaugurated by Hugo Chávez and favoured by high oil prices: a drastic reduction in extreme poverty, a decrease in inequalities, a massive expansion of literacy, and an extension of social protection, results that remain impressed in the daily lives of millions of people and cannot be explained solely as a reflection of an ‘authoritarian regime’. This does not mean ignoring the fact that under Maduro, Chávez’s legacy has hardened into an increasingly authoritarian management of power, marked by growing institutional closure, repressive practices and an accentuated dependence on oil revenues just as the price cycle was reversing, aggravating already existing structural fragilities. Added to this was the impact of US sanctions, which, while not formally targeting humanitarian goods, had a heavy indirect effect on access to currencies, financial channels and imports, with documented consequences on the availability of medicines and treatment and thousands of deaths . However, this ‘brutal’ Maduro dictatorship remains difficult to compare in terms of intensity, scale and systemic function with other authoritarian regimes openly supported by the West, confirming the selective and instrumental nature with which the category of ‘authoritarianism’ is mobilised in geopolitical discourse.
The underlying issue
It is precisely this gap between a social reality that is more complex than propaganda admits and the brutality of the intervention that forces us to shift the focus of analysis: not on the political-moral judgement of the ‘regime’, but on which material issue the command intends to reorganise and bring under control.
The issue at stake is not Venezuelan democracy in the abstract, but the governability of a crucial resource, oil, in a context marked by energy crisis, geopolitical competition and increasingly stringent ecological limits. The statements following the operation showed unusual frankness: the problem is not Maduro as an individual, as an authoritarian symbol, and even less as a drug trafficker, but the control of an energy infrastructure historically integrated into the metabolism of North American capitalism. When Trump talks about ‘taking back’ Venezuelan oil or evokes the possibility of the United States ‘managing’ the country for a certain period, a throb of command emerges that redefines its goals in an increasingly naked way, reducing ideological mediations.
This clarifies a central point: in times of hegemonic crisis, the aims of command tend to become simpler and more rigid. Democracy, human rights and international law do not disappear as language, but are subordinated to a more basic objective: to re-establish conditions of governability of valorisation, even at the cost of openly breaking the legal forms that until yesterday legitimised it. Command does not abandon the law; it bends it, merging law enforcement and political intervention into a single gesture.
Maduro’s capture also led to an immediate recalibration of who is considered a legitimate actor in Venezuela. Without any international mandate, the United States decided who should be removed and who, at least temporarily, could guarantee institutional continuity. The installation of Delcy Rodriguez as interim president and the fact that the Venezuelan power apparatus has remained largely in place – armed forces, state bureaucracy, territorial and infrastructural control – responds to a logic of systemic functionality: to avoid the collapse of the state, to ensure administrative continuity and to keep open the channels through which external command can operate. This was not a ‘regime break’, but a controlled recomposition. At this stage, legitimacy does not derive from law or popular consent, but from the ability to reduce systemic risk in the short term, even at the cost of producing new political and social fractures in the medium term.
The operation is also exemplary in terms of crisis engineering. The crisis is not a side effect of the intervention: it is its intentional product and, at the same time, its resource. It is the intervention itself that generates and intensifies a power vacuum in Venezuela, a radicalisation of internal repression, a spread of fear and a tightening of control mechanisms, which become an integral part of a new command structure. This structure is tightening just as it presents itself as a solution to the chaos that it itself has helped to produce. At the international level, condemnations at the UN remain largely symbolic: the system does not have effective tools to impose real consequences on the hegemonic actor. International law survives as moral grammar, but not as an operational limit.
European stammering fits perfectly into this gap. The European Union continues to ritually reiterate the principles of sovereignty and international law, but stands by helplessly – and in part complicitly – as they are systematically violated. The Italian case is emblematic: the Meloni government has defined the US intervention in Venezuela as ‘legitimate’ and ‘defensive’, invoking the delegitimisation of the Maduro regime and the fight against drug trafficking, effectively aligning itself with Washington’s narrative. This position, one of the most explicitly pro-US in Europe, shows how a significant part of the European camp not only tolerates American unilateralism, but actively justifies it when it coincides with the Atlantic geopolitical axis. Europe’s embarrassment over Venezuela thus echoes its silence or selective justification on Gaza, as well as the ambiguities that have emerged in recent discussions on Greenland, where positions remain cautious and lacking in any real capacity to deter possible unilateral US moves. In this context, the European discourse based on a clear distinction between ‘aggressor’ and ‘victim’ in the case of Ukraine is exposed by the reality of the facts because it is applied selectively, revealing itself to be a political tool rather than a universal criterion. Europe thus appears too weak to oppose armed imperialism and, at the same time, too compromised in its strategic subordination to offer a credible alternative based on rights, self-determination and real political autonomy.
A revealing element of the command’s ability to absorb violence without turning it into systemic risk is that, despite the seriousness of the event, global energy markets have reacted in a relatively restrained manner. The possible ‘reopening’ of Venezuela is already incorporated as a factor in future supply. Here we see the throb of cost shifting: the political and social trauma falls on local social reproduction – workers, families, forced migration – because sanctions, blockades, instability and restructuring directly affect and will continue to affect incomes, access to essential goods, public services and daily security, while global capital remains protected by redundancies, diversification of flows and the ability to offload risks elsewhere. Violence does not become systemic loss, but further precariousness of life.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is the recalibration of the thresholds of what is considered possible. The kidnapping of a foreign head of state, unthinkable until recently, becomes a viable option, justified as a security operation. It does not matter that the justification is fragile or contradictory: what matters is that the action takes place and that the system does not react in such a way as to discourage its repetition. This is Trump’s gamble. When the threshold is shifted by the hegemonic actor, it becomes the heritage of the entire historical phase.
Gunboat conditionalities
Subsequent statements on the use of oil as leverage – a sort of ‘energy quarantine’ to influence Venezuela’s future structure – show that military action is only the beginning of a broader regime of government by conditioning. It is not necessary to directly occupy a territory if it is possible to govern it through infrastructure, financial flows, licences, selective sanctions and controlled access to markets. In this sense, what is emerging in Venezuela is not entirely new, but rather a historic transformation of old policies of conditionality.
During the heyday of neoliberalism, global command operated to a large extent through the Structural Adjustment Policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: financial conditionality imposed on indebted states in exchange for credit and monetary stability. Privatisation, deregulation, liberalisation of capital movements, cuts in social spending and the dismantling of welfare systems were then at the heart of the attack on social reproduction. It was a form of economic and financial conditionality presented as technical, neutral and inevitable, but deeply political in its effects: restructuring entire societies for the benefit of capital appreciation. Society often defended itself with so-called IMF riots.
Today, that same logic is re-emerging in a more explicit and brutal form. Where debt and credit are no longer enough, what we might call gunboat conditionality takes over: armed conditionality. No longer ‘reforms in exchange for loans’, but forced reorganisation of a country in exchange for the cessation of coercion. Marco Rubio’s words in his 4 January 2026 interview with CBS clearly clarify the meaning of the operation. When he points out that the United States will not formally ‘govern’ Venezuela, Rubio does not distance himself from Trump’s statement, but translates it into the effective language of command. The ‘government’ in question is not a territorial occupation, but an oil quarantine manu militari: the maintenance and coercive remodelling of the oil blockade as a central instrument of political pressure, guaranteed by force and removed from any multilateral mediation. In this way, the only major lever of the Venezuelan economy is effectively controlled; the economy is strangled and the conditions of social reproduction are severely affected. The implicit “deal” is not a negotiation between equals, but a restructuring imposed from outside: selective reopening of energy and financial flows in exchange for acceptance of a new ownership, regulatory and geopolitical structure.
The purpose of this state of emergency is clear: to reopen and reorganise Venezuelan oil exploitation according to criteria compatible with the interests of large US multinationals, making access to markets, investments and financial flows conditional upon acceptance of a new ownership and regulatory framework. In this context, it is not surprising that in the weeks and months leading up to the intervention, there was a reactivation and acceleration of legal and arbitration disputes against the Venezuelan state – cases that had been pending for some time in international courts (particularly those related to nationalisations in previous years) and now brought back to the fore as instruments of economic and legal pressure. This is not just a test of ‘preventive complicity’, but a structural alignment: the field of energy command is being prepared in advance, mobilising law, finance and military force as complementary instruments. The ‘normalisation’ evoked by Rubio is therefore not an internal political process, but a concession conditioned from outside: a form of government by conditioning in which oil, arbitration, sanctions and armed force combine to redefine the entire economic and institutional structure of the country from above.
The crucial point is that the very aims of structural adjustment policies – privatisation, forced opening up, subordination of social reproduction to valorisation – are now pursued through different, more direct and less mediated instruments. Where discipline is internalised through institutions, procedures and fiscal automatisms, command does not need gunboats. And yet the logic is the same: to force a strategic node – territorial, energy or monetary – to realign itself with the needs of a hegemonic segment of capital, using this local restructuring as leverage to more profoundly redefine the balances and hierarchies of global command, even at the cost of further precariousness in work, welfare, rights and living conditions. The difference is not in the objectives, but in the register of command: less technocratic, more openly coercive; less masked by economic necessity, more based on the explicit use of force, energy blackmail and military threats. International law and multilateral institutions do not disappear, but become accessories: discursive frameworks that are useful when needed, circumventable when they get in the way.
The dollar . . .
It is at this point that the monetary dimension of command also becomes clear. The link between oil and the dollar has been one of the material pillars of the international monetary order for decades. Since the 1970s, the petrodollar system has ensured structural demand for the US currency, allowing the United States to finance chronic deficits and project power far beyond its productive borders. Today, that mechanism is under pressure. In recent years, Venezuela has progressively diversified its crude oil sales channels, particularly to China, including through agreements linked to debt repayment and energy supplies settled in yuan or currencies other than the dollar, thereby partially circumventing the US-dominated financial circuit.
In this context, the Venezuelan operation takes on a significance that goes beyond regional geopolitics: bringing Venezuelan oil back within the perimeter of US governance also means bringing those energy and financial flows back into the orbit of the dollar, interrupting or scaling back trajectories of de-dollarisation which, although limited, signal a broader systemic trend. It is not a question of saving the dollar from imminent collapse, but of militarising the defence of its hegemony at a time when markets and institutions are no longer sufficient. Oil, sanctions, conditionality and armed intervention thus become complementary instruments of the same monetary command strategy.
Venezuela therefore represents the extreme case of a more general trend: when soft conditions no longer work, when debt is not enough to bring a state to its knees, or when the stakes involve strategic resources that cannot be replaced, control shifts to hard forms of conditioning. This is not a return to classic colonialism, but rather a systemic mutation of it.
…and Gaia
This is where Gaia comes into play, not as a simple ecological backdrop or external limit, but as a field of material tension in which command is forced to reorganise itself. The transition from debt conditionality to resource conditionality signals a profound change in the material basis of command: it is not only that resources are becoming scarcer, but that the ecological crisis is simultaneously making natural cycles more unstable and the drive for extraction more aggressive. In classical neoliberalism, the main constraint was financial; today, in a world marked by climate instability, ecosystem stress and the geopolitical reconfiguration of supply chains, the decisive constraint becomes the control of strategic physical resources – oil, gas, water, rare earths, territories – even when their intensive exploitation exacerbates the crisis that makes them contested.
In the case of Venezuela, this contradiction is particularly evident: while the climate crisis would require a rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels, the command is responding by relaunching a potentially exponential exploitation of the oil reserves, treating Gaia not as a limit to be respected, but as a frontier to be forced. Conditionality is no longer exercised only on public budgets, but on the entire social metabolism of a country, on its relationship with energy, territory and ecosystems, pushing the reproduction of life into an increasingly direct conflict with the demands of valorisation.
In this sense, Greenland appears as ‘the canary in the coal mine‘ of the Earth system: a territory where accelerated ice melt, climate feedback and the dissolution of indigenous life forms make the planetary threshold we are crossing palpable. And yet, precisely where global climate cooperation based on adaptation, shared research, territorial protection and ecological justice would be necessary, the command responds with militarisation, the opening of new trade routes and mining. The same logic is at work in Venezuela: instead of international cooperation to facilitate an energy transition geared towards the reproduction of life, fossil fuel expansion is being relaunched at the sites of the largest oils reserves in the world. It is this bifurcation that makes Gaia not only a limit, but the decisive terrain of the conflict between the reproduction of life and the authoritarian restructuring of command.
Counter-pulsations and what is at stake
Command should not be understood solely as a pulsation, throbs ‘from above’ opposed only by counter-pulsations ‘from below’. Command is the somewhat organised set of throbs and counter-throbs to the extent that they are hegemonised by capital. In this sense, counter-pulsations do not come only from social reproduction, struggles and common practices, but also from other state actors and large economic entities acting in the same field of forces with different strategic horizons.
The reactions to the UN Security Council on 5 January by China, Russia and Brazil, among other countries, should be read in this light. Their formal condemnations of US action do not express a neutral defence of international law, but an internal counter-throb to global command, aimed at signalling a limit to US unilateralism and preserving their own room for manoeuvre. These are not systemic alternatives to capitalist command, but competing modes of hegemony within the same field.
Seen in this light, Trump’s interference in Venezuela shows that, at this stage, capitalist rule is becoming more explicit, more predatory, less interested in masking its violence behind now empty universal norms. It shows that the real conflict is not between states, but between the reproduction of capital, which, in crisis, resorts ever more openly to coercion, and the reproduction of life, which is systematically sacrificed.
The risk is to stop at moral indignation or at choosing sides between competing powers. The stakes are different: identifying where command materialises and reproduces itself, and where non-hegemonic counter-pulsations can emerge that are capable of reducing energy and security blackmail, strengthening social reproduction and putting Gaia’s limits back at the centre. Intervening at the points where the system pulsates does not mean opposing power in the abstract, but acting on the concrete nodes – energy, infrastructure, territory, labour, health, debt, security – where command offloads costs onto life and recalibrates the thresholds of the tolerable. In this sense, Venezuela is not only a theatre of conflict, but a mirror of our times: it shows how far command can go when mediation breaks down and forces us to ask the decisive question not about who will win the geopolitical game, but how to alter the very rhythm of the reproduction of capitalist command, removing life from the spiral of plunder, violence and permanent war that today presents itself as the new normal.
Finally, we must look at the internal frictions within the United States itself, which the Venezuelan turmoil has helped to make visible. The intervention did not produce a united front even within the Trump camp. Republican figures, who are in many ways reactionary, openly criticised the operation, not in the name of liberal pacifism or international law, but by claiming a different interpretation of ‘America First’. In this reading, security, strong borders and national priorities do not mean military projection abroad or forced restructuring of third countries, but rather direct investment in daily life within US borders: wages, infrastructure, healthcare, cost of living, household debt.
Here, a significant rift emerges. Part of the MAGA base seems to suspect that intervention in Venezuela will not bring material benefits to the US population, but will mainly generate profits for large oil multinationals, the military-industrial complex and the financial circuits that gravitate around the management of energy resources. It is a confused, often contradictory, and sometimes reactionary criticism, but it is not irrelevant: it signals that even within the heart of the empire, the link between global command and the impoverishment of social reproduction is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. Similar criticisms can be heard on the right in Europe as well.
In terms of the throbs of command, this internal friction should be read as a partial and ambiguous counter-pulsation, which does not question the centrality of capital or the nationalist horizon, but contests the distribution of the costs and benefits of command itself. It is a counter-throb that arises from the fact that war, imperial projection and the defence of the hegemony of the dollar do not automatically translate into material security, but often exacerbate precariousness, inflation and social insecurity. In this sense, the crisis of social reproduction cuts across the North and South of the world, the centre and periphery of the empire, taking different political forms but rooted in the same systemic contradiction.
It is precisely here that a strategic field of intervention opens up. Social reproduction is not only the terrain of ‘grassroots’ struggles or progressive movements: it is the point of friction where even reactionary and nationalist narratives intercept a real malaise, albeit translating it into distorted or exclusionary forms. Leaving this terrain to the right wing means accepting that the crisis of life will be channelled towards authoritarian and competitive solutions. Intervening, on the contrary, means recognising that social reproduction is today the decisive cross-cutting field, the one in which the possibility of breaking the link between global command, resource plundering and the impoverishment of life is at stake.
In this sense, the Trump disruption in Venezuela not only highlights the violence of external control, but also its internal fractures. It shows that hegemony is never total, that the pulsations of control encounter resistance and friction even at the centre of the empire, and that the decisive question remains the same everywhere: who pays the price for the reproduction of the system and who benefits from it. It is on this terrain – not on that of the choice between empires or competing geopolitics – that space is opening up today for counter-throbs capable of putting life back at the centre, against its continuous subordination to war, profit and endless valorisation.
If the ‘Trump disruption’ illuminates anything, it is that the hegemonic crisis does not automatically produce a more ‘multipolar’ world in the emancipatory sense of the term, but rather tends to organise itself as conflictual multipolarism (see Sandro Mezzadra’s contribution on Euronomade ), and as such is subject to the creation of a world of blocs: large selective spaces for the projection of power, held together by the promise of ‘stability and security’ and the threat of war, in which the command tries to recruit and expand reliable partners and close down spaces of insubordinate life. However, this tendency towards blocs does not eliminate the transnationalisation of production, energy and financial chains, which remain deeply interdependent on a global scale: what changes is not the existence of global chains, but their hierarchical, securitised and politically filtered reorganisation, with new regimes of access, exclusion and blackmail. The world of blocs is therefore not an end to globalisation, but its authoritarian mutation.
This is where the lens of the pulsations of command becomes decisive again. Because the object of contention is not only who sits in Caracas or Washington, but what rhythm of governance of global social cooperation is imposed: what goals are simplified and made non-negotiable; what thresholds of tolerability are shifted; what costs are offloaded onto social reproduction; what forms of conditionality – soft or hard, financial or manu militari – are normalised. In other words: the world of blocs is a forced synchronisation of throbs, a militarisation of them, and the risk is that state or corporate counter-throbs will merely recalibrate the internal dispute within the command without breaking its grammar.
For this reason, the strategic point is not to choose between blocs, nor to pursue the illusion of international law, which today survives only as rhetoric. The point is to build non-hegemonic counter-throbs capable of opening ‘escape routes’ from the prison nightmare of a world divided into blocs, where capital and war are so closely intertwined that they coincide. And today, that passage can only pass through social reproduction as a transversal field, not in the sense of a simple convergence of themes or sectors, but as trans-subjective transversality, capable of crossing and recombining subjectivities, bodies, territories and scales, beyond identity and national boundaries, reopening the possibility of a new internationalism rooted in concrete practices and places. Reducing energy and security blackmail, removing infrastructure and territories from the logic of extraction and permanent emergency, putting Gaia back at the centre as a limit and a condition, but also setting bodies in motion again, reactivating the social imagination and transforming everyday life into a laboratory for new forms of cooperation, care and shared decision-making, are inseparable moments in this process. Only a mass rejection – practical, material, organisational, emotional, symbolic and spiritual – of this authoritarian restructuring of social cooperation can alter the rhythm of command and transform disruption into an opportunity for structural misalignment between the reproduction of life and the reproduction of command, rather than a dress rehearsal for a new normality.