Digital Socialism or Extinction

Venezuela’s Lesson Amid Capitalism’s Most Ferocious Phase

Photo credit: Jake Walker

1. The Lesson of Venezuela

At the dawn of an ordinary day in early January of this year, 2026, the world woke up to shocking news whose repercussions were not clear at first glance: a brutal US military aggression and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a complex operation executed with supreme military and intelligence precision. Although the operation included a direct military attack, intensive shelling, and systematic destruction of weapon depots and defence platforms, it relied heavily on a massive employment of digital technology, and this is the axis we will focus on analysing here. Mainstream media coverage focused on the political and diplomatic aspects of the event, without real attention—whether spontaneous or intentional—to the pivotal role that advanced technology played in this operation. It was not merely a traditional military intervention as some Western media attempted to portray it; rather, it was a comprehensive and organised digital war that preceded the arrest by long months, if not years of planning, monitoring, and preparation.

Before continuing, I would like to mention here my reservation regarding the policies of the Maduro regime in suppressing dissent, restricting freedoms, and tightening the grip on leftists and labor unions. Our critique of American capitalist intervention, the violation of international law, and the use of technology as a weapon of hegemony does not, in any way, mean justifying the repressive practices of the Maduro regime against progressive forces and the labor movement in Venezuela, especially the Communist Party of Venezuela. Standing against the aggressive militarism of American capitalism does not contradict the critique of internal tyranny; rather, it is a position consistent with leftist values. What we are highlighting here is the technological and strategic lesson that this incident provides to all leftist and progressive movements, regardless of our assessment of the Maduro regime itself.

According to what has been circulated in the media, the most advanced US satellite surveillance systems in the world were used in this operation to track the movements of the Venezuelan leadership via US satellites orbiting the Earth around the clock. Big data analysis was not limited to monitoring physical movements only, but extended to include drawing accurate and detailed maps of the Venezuelan government communication networks with all their complexities and branches. The breach of electronic systems was not a random process, but was meticulously planned to disable them as well as communications at the decisive moment, making the Venezuelan leadership completely isolated from its bases and supporters, within a pattern of operations that has become known in Western military literature as paralysing decision-making centres before direct confrontation.

The employment of Artificial Intelligence in analysing millions of phone calls, text messages, and emails was not just a traditional espionage process, but a complex operation to determine the locations of leaders with extreme accuracy, and to predict their intentions and next moves before they took them. Machine learning algorithms analysed behavioural patterns, monitored changes in communication methods, and extracted intelligence information from massive amounts of unstructured data. The programmed and systematic manipulation of media and social networks was an organised campaign relying on Artificial Intelligence to shape local and international public opinion in favour of the intervention, depicting the operation as “liberation from dictatorship and drug trafficking,” and not an aggression on the sovereignty of an independent state and a blatant violation of international laws; all this media and digital preparation was not an end in itself, but a means to tighten the grip on the country’s capabilities and plunder its vast resources, paving the way for the installation of a “cartoon” regime stripped of its will, revolving in the American orbit and implementing its agendas.

These are not scenarios from science fiction movies, but a documented and tangible reality we live today. The US National Security Agency (NSA) possesses the PRISM program revealed by Edward Snowden, the former US intelligence employee, which monitors global communications without discrimination or boundaries. Companies like Palantir Technologies, founded with funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), provide highly sophisticated data analysis systems to the US intelligence establishment, used under names such as the war on terror and tracking strategic targets, while they are in essence wars directed against leftist and progressive movements and regimes opposed to American hegemony.

The capitalist technological system today has become largely capable of total surveillance, accurate monitoring, and systematic tracking of political movements, organisations, and political actors. More dangerous than that, there may be many digital technologies and weapons that are still within the realm of science fiction or virtual studies, or have not yet been announced, as is the case with many technological developments that are developed and used secretly before they become available to the public. History bears witness that the Internet itself, and many other advanced technologies, were not revealed to the public until many years after their use within closed military, intelligence, security, and industrial circles.

2. Technology as a Tool for Capitalist Control and Hegemony

What happened in Venezuela is not an isolated or exceptional incident in the course of contemporary history. It is an essential part of a comprehensive and integrated digital capitalist strategy that we have seen evolving and repeating in multiple places in the world, used in a digital struggle parallel to the struggle in the streets and squares. The harshest and clearest lesson from the incident of Maduro’s arrest is that capitalism in its current stage no longer relies only on traditional hard military force, although it still retains and uses it when necessary. It has developed a complex and intertwined digital system capable of penetrating geographical and political borders, monitoring individuals and groups with amazing accuracy, manipulating information and shaping public awareness in ways that were not possible in any previous era, and restricting and paralysing leftist and progressive movements before they reach the stage of real danger to its interests. It is a war invisible to the naked eye, many of whose battles take place in digital cyberspace and in data servers and in algorithms and artificial neural networks, but it is more effective and less costly politically and materially than bombs, planes, tanks, soldiers, and repressive apparatuses. Artificial Intelligence has become the backbone of this digital war, providing unprecedented capabilities in predictive analysis, total surveillance, and accurately directed psychological warfare.

This new reality poses a fateful and existential question to leftist forces and progressive movements all over the world, a question whose answer cannot be postponed: How can liberation movements that still rely in their organisation on traditional meetings, and on distributing paper leaflets in the streets, and on using unencrypted phones to coordinate their activities, and use the Internet in a traditional primitive way, and on limited discussion circles that are easy to monitor, face a digital capitalist system with this amazing level of development and complexity? The answer is clear and painful at the same time: it cannot to a large extent, unless it decides to enter seriously, deeply, and strategically into the technological field, not as passive consumers of capitalist technology as is the case now, but as developers, innovators, and producers of independent digital alternatives that develop the struggle and protect it from penetration and repression, and enhance it with effective tools that suit the spirit of the age and its requirements.

Artificial Intelligence: The New Weapon of Capitalist Hegemony

It has become clear today beyond any doubt that Artificial Intelligence, despite its vast and promising potential in serving all of humanity, is no longer just a neutral scientific advancement waiting for someone to direct it towards good or evil. It is, in fact, a highly advanced and complex weapon in the hands of global capitalism, used systematically and deliberately to deepen its control over human labor, collective awareness, and the big data that has become the new oil in the digital age, and over society as a whole in all its economic, political, cultural, and intellectual aspects.

The major monopoly capitalist companies today monopolise the development and operation of the most powerful Artificial Intelligence systems in the world. These companies are not neutral technical entities operating in a political and economic vacuum as they try to portray themselves; they are in truth direct tools in the hand of global capital, and are linked by close and intertwined relations with the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies and the institutions of the capitalist deep state.

Reproduction of Class Exploitation by Digital Means

What we are witnessing today everywhere around us is the reproduction of the same historical class exploitation, but by more scientific, advanced, complex, and hidden means. This exploitation is no longer confined within the walls of factories where workers work on production lines, or in farms where peasants toil under the sun; this exploitation has extended to include the digital space itself, which many imagine as a free and open space. And we see today how algorithms in digital companies are used to exploit manual and intellectual workers in ways more accurate and cruel than any human manager in history. These algorithms determine wages based on supply and demand at every moment, impose exhausting working hours without any regard for the worker’s health or family status, and issue automatic penalties for any delay or error without any possibility of appeal or negotiation. The manual and intellectual workers here do not face an employer they can negotiate with or protest before, but rather face an algorithm that knows no mercy and does not understand human circumstances.

In the field of awareness and ideology: The algorithms of giant platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (X), YouTube, and TikTok are used to shape the awareness of billions of people around the world. These algorithms do not work neutrally as companies claim, but rather systematically promote the ideology of capitalist consumption and the culture of individualism, competition, and the eternity of the capitalist system, while fighting leftist and progressive content through “reach reduction” and “shadow banning” techniques that make the content almost invisible without officially deleting it. Millions of young generations have their awareness shaped today not through reading and critical thinking, but through algorithms that decide what they see and what they do not see, what they know and what they are ignorant of.

In the field of surveillance and security control and contemporary wars: Artificial Intelligence techniques are used today as a central tool to deepen political and social control in ways that were not possible at any previous stage. Recognition systems and algorithmic analysis allow for tracking political activists, monitoring their behaviour, their networks, and their movements with high accuracy, and these techniques do not remain confined to the countries that developed them, but are marketed and exported on a large scale to authoritarian and repressive regimes, transforming digital and public space alike into a field of permanent surveillance. In the same context, Artificial Intelligence is being employed in the management of violence and wars systematically, as fateful decisions related to life and death are assigned to mathematical systems that perform classification, estimation, and decision-making according to a cold technical logic, detached from any human or ethical consideration. Thus, technology, which is supposed to be a product of human progress, turns into a tool for reproducing killing and repression with higher efficiency, in the service of the logic of capitalist hegemony and militarism, and not in the service of humans and their right to life and freedom.

3. The Historical Wager of the Left

The technological factor is no longer just a secondary or luxury addition in the Left’s battle against capitalism locally and globally. It has become a basic and vital condition for survival, effectiveness, and influence. Facing this reality cannot be limited to criticism and diagnosis, but rather requires specific and tangible positions and policies, going beyond merely exposing capitalist hegemony to working on dismantling it and re-directing technology in general and Artificial Intelligence in particular towards serving the general masses instead of enslaving them.

The Need for Progressive Alternatives

Instead of leaving technology in the hands of a handful of capitalist companies and states, the development of progressive leftist Artificial Intelligence systems must be pushed. But the transformation cannot happen without a fundamental change in the political, intellectual, and organisational structure of the leftist forces themselves, and in their view and approach to technology. It is not enough to deal passively with technology on the pretext that it is a specialised capitalist tool, or to use it in a limited and superficial way, but it must be mastered and understood deeply, its fortresses penetrated, and re-directed to serve the interests of manual and intellectual workers and the general masses.

Developing leftist capabilities in the technical field is a vital necessity no less important than developing capabilities in political, intellectual, organisational, media, and mass work fields. Just as the leftist forces cannot rely on capitalist media and seek to build their independent media, and just as they developed their thought, policy, and organisational tools independently away from the moulds of capitalist hegemony, they must also work on building their independent technological alternatives, whether in social networks or Artificial Intelligence and others, to serve their comprehensive liberation project.

Possible and Radical Solutions

The possible solution now is the development of open-source, transparent, neutrally-oriented systems, managed democratically with societal controls, in addition to pushing towards enacting international laws that regulate the work of Artificial Intelligence and ensure its service to society as a whole, and not the interests of major states and capitalist companies.

But this is not enough. The required and radical solution is building real leftist technological alternatives with progressive orientations and societal ownership, through which this technology is wrested from the grip of the market, and employed in dismantling exploitation relations, and contributing to building a new, more just and humane society, based on equality, cooperation, and fair satisfaction of needs.

Cautious and Conscious Use of Artificial Intelligence

The Left’s use of current Artificial Intelligence must be accurate, deliberate, and cautious. Applications developed within a capitalist environment and by monopolies and companies cannot be trusted without deep critical awareness of their working mechanism. While many of these tools allow for accurate data analysis, planning, monitoring public opinion trends, and improving organisation, mobilisation, and communication policies and methods, they may carry in their structure hidden biases that reproduce capitalist hegemony within the work of leftist organisations themselves. Extreme caution must be taken when dealing with sensitive data and information, as the unstudied exploitation of these tools may lead to a security breach or information leak that exposes leftist organisations to danger, especially in authoritarian states. Therefore, it is necessary to develop advanced digital security protocols, adopt more independent open-source applications, and train members on digital security practices, to ensure that the use of Artificial Intelligence is in the service of the struggle, and not a repressive and intelligence tool used against it.

Towards a Liberationist Digital Revolution

What the current digital revolution reveals, and the development of Artificial Intelligence in particular, is that we are living in a historical moment in which the contradictions between the massive development of productive forces and capitalist social relations—which are no longer capable of containing this development or directing it for the benefit of the masses—become clear. Although the vast potentials offered by this digital revolution to liberate humans from gruelling work and the necessities of living, they are restricted and re-engineered within the logic of capitalist hegemony and profit.

The struggle in this digital space must turn into an organic extension of the socialist struggle on the ground, and not just a field of work and discussion separate from the political, social, and economic reality. This struggle against digital hegemony cannot be limited to the virtual space only, but must be an extension of the movement and struggle of manual and intellectual workers and the field mass movement. Linking the technological struggle and the class struggle on the ground is essential, because digital hegemony is just an extension of the hegemony of capital over production and control over labor power.

4. The Decisive Historical Moment for the Left

What happened with the Venezuelan President Maduro is not an isolated incident nor a passing exception in the global power struggle, but rather it is a sharp and loud warning to all progressive regimes and leftist movements in the world. It is a practical announcement that the digital battle has turned into a central and important arena of class struggle, taking place here and now, and threatening the political and organisational existence of every liberationist project outside capitalist obedience, and especially American in the era of Trump. What happened in Venezuela reveals that digital capitalism has come to rely on technical gaps that give it the possibility of influencing the stability of progressive regimes, and trying to paralyse their leaderships or confuse their movements, and wagering on engineering the awareness of their societies digitally; which gives it offensive options that sometimes exceed in their effectiveness the methods of traditional military intervention or direct occupation.

The danger does not affect Venezuela alone, but it could extend to threaten every leftist and progressive experience, every government trying to exit the logic of the market and capitalist hegemony, and every labor or mass movement seeking a radical change. We are in a new stage of class struggle, in which technology and Artificial Intelligence are used as a strategic weapon to strike leftist and progressive movements in their cradle, and besiege any possibility of building independent progressive alternatives. The global socialist struggle today is directly targeted, not only by military and economic repression, but by digital penetration, total surveillance, and the prior drying up of any potential revolutionary action.

The basic question, which is existential and fateful: Are we, as leftist and progressive forces, truly ready to fight this complex, long, and multi-front digital war? After all the positions we have lost, and after all the regressions and divisions, do we have the audacity to rebuild the Left intellectually, organisationally, and technically, to face capitalism in its highest degrees of scientific and digital technological development? Are we ready to transcend local fragmentation and global division and conflicts between leftist forces, and understand that the fate of every progressive experience has become organically linked with the fate of others?

The historical moment is merciless, and digital capitalism armed with advanced technology and Artificial Intelligence does not wait for our hesitation or slowness. Either we engage with awareness, struggle, and organisation in this battle, and re-formulate an alternative socialist project capable of facing the digital age, or we are left on the margins of history, subject to new forms of exploitation and repression that are softer and more effective. Accepting this last fate is precisely the inevitable extinction. Accordingly, the true and only historical wager for the liberation project, despite all the complexity of the paths, is for it to transform into a digital project with awareness and organisation; it has no third option but to become digital so that it remains.

Digital technical knowledge and understanding the mechanisms of Artificial Intelligence work must become an integral part of contemporary leftist culture, and here the vital role of youth as a vanguard for this transformation emerges; they are the most capable of harnessing these tools and leading digital innovation within progressive movements. We must build leftist technical cadres, investing the energies of young generations in developing alternative digital tools, and service-oriented Artificial Intelligence systems, not exploitative ones, and communication networks that are not subject to the algorithms of capital. We must understand the programming code as we understand the political text, and master the algorithms as we master class analysis, and look at big data as a field of struggle, not as mere neutral numbers.

This effort requires coordination and joint work globally through building digital alliances and internationals whose goal is to develop the digital struggle of the Left in the whole world. And as the First, Second, and Third Internationals were historical responses to the stages of capitalist development, the Digital International today is a strategic necessity to face capitalism in its most ferocious digital phase. Yet, building these independent technological alternatives is fraught with serious dilemmas: the dilemma of relying on knowledge and tools developed in the bosom of the capitalist system itself, the dilemma of the massive resources required for competition, and the dilemma of coordination between feuding leftist forces.

Therefore, this project cannot be a separate utopian one; rather, it must be a strategic tactic that starts from the critical and cautious use of available tools, and building technical solidarity networks on the basis of shared practical issues, and seeking to develop an alternative core in the spaces provided by open-source technology and decentralised networks, with the recognition that it is a long-term cumulative project and not an immediate magical solution, which is the historical task that falls on the shoulders of our youth to merge the values of justice with the horizons of technology.

The left, which has played a recognised role in advancing freedoms, equality, and justice, can overcome the current situation. Just as capitalism has developed itself on a massive scale, let this digital struggle become a moment of qualitative development for the present left toward an electronic—digital left integrated with struggle on the ground, more courageous, more radical, more scientific, and more capable of renewal and of leading the struggle of its era, and of defending the future of the socialist alternative in the face of the most dangerous attack it has faced in its modern history. The struggle for control over digital technology is not merely a technical struggle, but a struggle over the future of humanity itself.

Digital socialism, in this sense, is not one option among others. It is the existential condition for the survival of the socialist project itself in the twenty first century.