Across a world hemmed in by Washington’s escalating drive for domination, people are still prising open space to breathe — and to decide.

Sovereignty is not an abstract notion, reduced just to fluttering flag over a parliament. It is the food on your plate. It is your ability to pursue a better life without the fear that foreign bombs might lay waste to your cities — or sanctions deprive you of the capacities to build or heal. It is the stubborn insistence — in countries, families, factories, and fields — that life must not be organised for someone else’s profit.

This urgency is thrown into stark relief by the United States’ spectacular and deadly violence in Venezuela — and the threat of more in Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Greenland, Iran and beyond. The kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro is about more than the take over of Venezuela’s oil and the attempted destruction of the Bolivarian project. It is also about projecting raw US power to the whole world. The aim is explicitly to frighten: to warn states and movements everywhere that do not wish to follow Washington’s dictates. For US strategists, the success of the Caracas operation rests on its ability to break the confidence off all those struggling for dignity.

It takes aim at the efforts to make a more humane world that progressive movements spend their lives fighting for. Its true target is not only a government in Caracas, but every worker, peasant, community and movement that dares to believe another order is possible — and to act on that belief.

From app drivers in India to shack-dwellers in Durban, from miners in La Paz to hunger-strikers in Britain, these struggles unfold in the shadow of that threat. To persist anyway is already an act of defiance that opens a vista of hope.

In India, gig workers, led by PI member organisation Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU) alongside the International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers (IAATW), have delivered a sharp reminder that even the most algorithmic of workplaces can be organised from below. After flash strikes in December 2025 that mobilised more than 40,000 delivery workers, organisers forced a public confrontation with the lethal pressures of “10-minute delivery” mandates — and won an intervention directing platforms to drop the promise from their apps.

The lesson is straightforward: when workers move strategically, the inevitability of the platform economy cracks, and the people who actually make the system run can impose limits, win protections, and build power for the next round. (You can read more about this victory [in an interview](https://progressive.international/wire/2026-01-14-our-fight-is-for-the-workers/en/) with Shaik Salauddin, the founder-President of Telangana Gig And Platform Workers Union (TGPWU).)

In Bolivia, workers and peasants mobilised to fight a new neoliberal reform. Via a December 2025 executive decree, President Rodrigo Paz ended long-standing fuel subsidies that serve as a lifeline to the country’s majority. The move triggered strikes led by the Bolivian Workers’ Union, rolling protests and blockades in La Paz, as working peopled refuse to accept balancing the books on their backs.

In South Africa, PI member Abahlali baseMjondolo celebrated twenty years since they began organising in shack-dwelling communities. In eKhenana, a land occupation that was developed into a commune in Durban, it built the Frantz Fanon School — a place to learn “the knowledge of resistance” and to deepen the shared intellectual life of a movement that can think, organise, and defend itself in a world structured against it. (You can [read more about](https://progressive.international/wire/2026-01-06-building-the-frantz-fanon-school-an-interview-with-mqapheli-bonono/en/) Abahlali’s urban commune and political education project [in an interview](https://progressive.international/wire/2026-01-06-building-the-frantz-fanon-school-an-interview-with-mqapheli-bonono/en/) with Deputy President Mqapheli Bonono.)

In Venezuela, communes continue to insist that democracy must be material — rooted in production and collective decision-making, not reduced to spectatorship every few years. Their communal assemblies are the basic cells of a socialist national project, aiming to bring production under democratic control and turn surplus toward social need — from education to clinics to housing. The commune movement poses a direct challenge to the imperial story that only markets and violence can coordinate life — and that any alternative can be crushed by sanctions, coercion, and siege. (You can [read more about](https://progressive.international/wire/2026-01-12-the-people-of-venezuela-are-with-their-government-/en/) Venezuela’s commune movement and its role in the Bolivarian Revolution and its relationship to the state resisting US aggression [in this interview](https://progressive.international/wire/2026-01-12-the-people-of-venezuela-are-with-their-government-/en/) with popular educator Cira Pascual Marquina.)

And in Britain, political prisoners have put their bodies on the line for Palestine — with some refusing food for more than seventy days, risking irreversible harm to challenge their detention and Britain’s complicity in Israel’s war. Their hunger strike helped force a key concession: the denial of a £2 billion government contract to Israeli arms giant Elbit Systems. But the significance runs deeper than a single win. The hunger strike exposed both a system in which solidarity is criminalised — and the power of ordinary people to challenge it.

These struggles are varied and distinct. Each has its own proximate enemy: a corporation, a decree, a police unit, a landlord, a ministry, an occupying power. To win, each must defeat that enemy on its own terrain. But none can do so in isolation — because each runs into the same global architecture that constrains what is allowed: imperial violence and financial coercion; sanctions and asset theft; military threats and investment rules; the disciplining of governments and the degradation of labour; the enclosure of land and the erasure of futures.

What they need is not only courage at the point of conflict, but connection beyond it: a shared horizon that strengthens every local fight by situating it within a common struggle against the system that produces them all.

That is why this moment of escalating imperial aggression demands a renewed commitment to internationalism.

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