Recent reporting and commentary in major Western outlets have cast an unusually stark light on the intersection of US foreign policy, speculative finance, and outright predation. As deplored even in the Washington Post, Washington’s latest assault on Venezuela does not resemble a conventional regime-change operation alone. Rather, it appears to double as a mechanism for highly targeted financial profiteering, blurring the line between geopolitics and what, in any other context, would be called insider trading.

The episode that crystallized this suspicion involved Polymarket, a so-called “prediction” platform. There, a strikingly well-informed participant wagered more than $30,000 that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from office by the end of January. The bet paid off spectacularly, yielding profits exceeding $400,000. The timing was so precise, and the information advantage so obvious, that it drew immediate media scrutiny. The hallmarks of insider trading were difficult to ignore. That this occurred alongside an aggressive escalation of US pressure on Caracas invites an uncomfortable question: who, exactly, is permitted to know what-and when-in the corridors of American power?

To seasoned observers, the answer is hardly shocking. Real, historically existing capitalism-rather than the sanitized free-market mythology still propagated by Friedrich Hayek–Milton Friedman enthusiasts-has always been ruthless. Its roughly 500-year history is undeniably marked by astonishing scientific, technological, and cultural transformations. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves acknowledged this dynamism in The Communist Manifesto, at times sounding almost admiring of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary capacity to reshape the world.

Yet this same system was founded on extreme violence and dispossession. The early history of capitalism is inseparable from mass impoverishment, the plunder of entire continents, the annihilation of indigenous populations, and the transatlantic slave trade. Marx described this foundational brutality as “primitive accumulation,” or, more caustically, “original expropriation,” likening its role in classical political economy to the biblical myth of humanity’s fall from grace. Wealth did not emerge organically from peaceful exchange; it was seized.

For a time, however, the ruling elites of the capitalist core learned restraint. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution and, after the Second World War, the emergence of a global socialist “second world” centered in Eurasia, Western regimes faced a credible systemic alternative. Under that pressure, capitalism moderated its domestic excesses. Reformist rhetoric flourished, redistribution-though limited-became politically necessary, and public spending took on a more rational, socially stabilizing........

© Blitz