From mercantile privateers to sanctioned seizures, how piracy has always been capitalism’s hidden engine—and why it is resurfacing in the age of U.S. imperial decline
Pirates of the Caribbean, 2025: The Seizure That Exposed an Empire’s Old Hunger
At dawn on December 11, 2025, the United States staged a spectacle it tried to pass off as law enforcement. A squad of armed commandos clattered down onto the deck of a Venezuelan-linked oil tanker, the Skipper, in the waters of the Caribbean—a theater of empire so old it carries the memory of wooden masts and stolen gold. Washington insists this was a clean and clinical operation: a sanctioned ship, illicit oil, a routine enforcement action. But anyone who has lived under the shadow of U.S. power knows better. Caracas called it piracy. Tehran called it piracy. Havana called it piracy. And when three nations colonized and punished by the American century tell you the same thing in the same breath, it is worth listening.
Because beneath the polished press releases and the Hollywood-ready raid footage lies a truth the empire hopes you won’t notice: this is not a new story. This is an old appetite wearing a new uniform. The United States did not invent this kind of violence; it inherited it—straight from the mercantile-age playbook of Europe’s great capitalist powers. Back when capital was young and hungry, pirates and privateers were its frontline workers, hoisting the skull-and-crossbones on behalf of kings, merchants, and bankers. They plundered ships, seized cargoes, smashed rival economies, and delivered their spoils into the blood-soaked cradle of primitive accumulation. Capital was born with a cutlass in its teeth.
The raid on the Skipper belongs to that lineage. It is not a rogue act but a reminder: even in the age of satellites and sanctions, empire still prefers to take what it cannot earn. The uniforms change; the logic does not. The American elites tell their people this is about “national security” and “illicit trade,” but strip away the patriotic varnish and you’re left with the same old impulse—punish the defiant, plunder the vulnerable, and remind the hemisphere that the Caribbean is still treated as an imperial lake. The ship may be a modern VLCC instead of a Spanish galleon, but the choreography is unchanged. A powerful nation sees something it wants; a weaker nation asserts its sovereignty; the stronger one sends men with guns.
And yet, what is most revealing about this incident is not simply the theft itself but what it exposes about the stage of crisis we are now living through. In the mercantile era, piracy built capitalism. In the era of imperial decline, piracy sustains it. Washington is no longer strong enough to command obedience through consent, nor confident enough to maintain hegemony through soft power alone. So it returns to the old tools—coercion, seizure, blockade—hoping that the scent of gun oil will substitute for the fading myth of American inevitability. The seizure of the Skipper is not just a crime; it is a confession. It tells us that empire is running out of options and has begun emptying the attic for strategies it hasn’t used since the “rosy dawn” Marx described—the dawn lit by the fires of conquest and cooled by the blood of the colonized.
This essay begins here, with this stolen tanker, because it is more than a headline. It is a point of entry into a much longer and darker history—one in which the United States, like the empires before it, has repeatedly used the cloak of legality to carry out acts of open theft. From the privateers of the Atlantic world to the sanctions regimes of the 21st century, the story is the same: empire calls it order; the oppressed call it piracy; history calls it capitalism. And if we follow the current backward—from the Skipper to the slave ships, from Operation Southern Spear to the letters of marque, from modern forfeiture courts to colonial admiralty tribunals—we will see how this latest act of aggression is part of a continuity, not an aberration. The old pirate economy never died; it simply switched flags.
The Rosy Dawn Revisited: How Mercantile Piracy Became Capital’s First Industry
To understand why a U.S. president in 2025 is still sending armed men to seize oil tankers in the Caribbean, we have to return to the beginning—to the age when capitalism first learned to walk, and the footprints it left behind were soaked through with plunder. Marx called it the “rosy dawn” of capitalist production, though there was nothing rosy about it unless you were the banker receiving the stolen cargo. In those early centuries of the world market, piracy was not a side hustle of empire—it was the business model. The great European powers did not accumulate their initial fortunes through thrift, ingenuity, or hard work. They accumulated them by robbing whoever they could reach by sea. Ships full of silver from Potosí, sugar from the Caribbean, human beings from West Africa—everything that could be captured, was captured. Everything that could be stolen, was stolen. Everything that could be turned into capital, was turned into capital.
And the pirates were not outlaws in the romantic sense that Hollywood loves to paint. They were subcontractors of the emerging capitalist world system, armed extensions of merchants and monarchs. The letters of marque handed out by European crowns were essentially corporate contracts: raid this vessel, seize its goods, disrupt that rival empire’s supply chain. In return, the privateer kept a portion of the loot while the rest flowed upward—into royal treasuries, merchant banks, and the early stock companies that would one day dominate global trade. Primitive accumulation—the violent birth of capitalism—was not an economic theory but a maritime strategy. It was the offshore account of European development before offshore accounts existed.
This is the part of history that the textbooks soften, that the think tanks sanitize, that the liberal newspapers prefer not to mention when they describe today’s global order as if it emerged from a polite diplomatic conference. What actually built this order were men like Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and the multinational fleets of buccaneers who cleared the way for plantations, slavery, and colonial rule. They were the original logisticians of capitalist expansion, the rough hands that carved open the trade routes that would later be paved over with the “free market.” When Rediker and Linebaugh describe the Atlantic world as stitched together by a “many-headed hydra” of revolt, terror, and forced labor, they are speaking of this era—a world in which piracy was not a breakdown of law but the law’s violent enforcement mechanism.
If this feels distant from the present, remember that the mechanisms of accumulation pioneered in those centuries never really disappeared. They were simply domesticated, bureaucratized, and dressed up in the language of economics. The pirate ship became the naval frigate; the frigate became the gunboat; the gunboat became the sanctions office and the special operations unit. But the underlying impulse—take, punish, plunder, extract—remains intact. The empire’s moral vocabulary changed; its appetite did not. And when crisis strikes, as it has in the twilight of U.S. hegemony, the old methods slither back to the surface because they are the only ones the system truly trusts. You can get a sense of this continuity by watching the footage of U.S. commandos seizing the Skipper: strip away the night-vision goggles and the Navy logos, and what you have is a privateer raid in high-definition.
This moment stands here as the hinge between the world that was and the world that is. If the first act of the story is the seizure of a modern oil tanker, then this act is the revelation that such seizures are not deviations but echoes. Empires do not innovate as much as they recycle. They reach into their history, pull out the tools that built their power, and wield them again whenever decline becomes too obvious to ignore. The Caribbean once fed the mercantile machine with sugar, silver, and enslaved labor. Today, it feeds the American machine with oil seizures, naval blockades, and “legal” theft routed through forfeiture courts. The architecture has changed, but the logic remains untouched. And understanding that logic is what allows us to trace the line from the pirates of the 17th century to the commandos of the 21st—one continuous arc of accumulation by force.
The Empire’s Paper Shield: How Law Was Built to Bless the Thief
By the time the European empires perfected their Atlantic machine, piracy had already split into two distinct species: the kind punished with a rope, and the kind rewarded with a pension. The difference, as always, was authorization. A poor sailor who seized a merchantman without permission was a criminal; a nobleman or privateer who did the same with a royal signature was a statesman. This was the secret ingredient of mercantile accumulation: the violence was not only permitted—it was legalized. The law did not restrain piracy; it managed it, licensed it, and ensured that its spoils flowed upward. And once the plunder reached the counting houses of Antwerp and London, admiralty courts would launder the loot into legitimate capital. Thus was born one of capitalism’s oldest miracles: the ability to transform theft into property with a single document and a straight face.
This was not accidental. Empire understood early on that brute force alone could not organize a world system. It needed ideology, procedure, paperwork, seals, tribunals—an entire architecture capable of disguising coercion as order. The letters of marque the monarchs issued were infinite in their creativity: disrupt Spain’s silver flow, cripple Dutch commerce, capture as many “enemy Negroes” as possible. In every case, the directive was clear: weaken a rival economy and enrich our own. These documents were the ancestors of today’s sanctions regimes, asset seizures, and extraterritorial courts. They transformed geopolitical ambition into legal mandate. They gave the thief a judge, the plunderer a certificate, and the empire an alibi.
And if you listen closely to the bureaucratic cadence of modern U.S. power—the Treasury designations, the OFAC rulings, the forfeiture filings—you can hear the echo. Washington never abandoned the legal machinery of conquest; it updated it. Today, instead of a letter of marque, the empire issues a sanctions directive. Instead of an admiralty court, a federal judge in Delaware or New York certifies the taking. Instead of the king’s cut of captured treasure, U.S. agencies move seized oil, gold, or state assets into accounts they administer for “the Venezuelan people,” a phrase now stretched so thin it has been used to justify everything from freezing a nation’s gold to auctioning off its most important company. The old pirate economy has gone digital, but its operating system is unchanged.
What matters here is not the vocabulary the empire uses, but the sequence of actions it repeats. First comes designation, then isolation, then seizure, and finally redistribution—always carried out at a distance from the people whose resources are being taken. This is how mercantile piracy functioned, and this is how sanctions piracy functions now. The CITGO auction, the frozen gold, the boarded tanker are not separate policies; they are iterations of the same procedure applied through updated institutions. When Washington seizes assets today, it is not governing a stable order but intervening directly in circulation itself—deciding which commodities may move, which states may trade, and which revenues may exist at all. That is not management; it is extraction under crisis conditions. The return to seizure signals not confidence but necessity: a system that can no longer rely on compliance alone and therefore reaches back to the methods that once built it, even at the cost of revealing how much power now depends on taking rather than leading.
This is why the seizure of the Skipper matters beyond the news cycle. It is not an exception that needs explanation; it is a repetition that demands recognition. When the United States boards a tanker in the Caribbean and claims the right to seize its cargo, it is not improvising—it is remembering. It is drawing from a deep imperial archive in which force at sea has always been treated as a legitimate means of economic management. To grasp what happened on that deck in December 2025, we have to stop treating it as a contemporary scandal and start treating it as a historical method. The raid only makes sense once we place it back where it belongs: in the long, violent lineage of mercantile plunder that gave birth to capitalism itself, and that still resurfaces whenever empire feels its grip slipping.
From Gunboats to Sanctions: The Return of Piracy in an Age of Imperial Decline
By the early twenty-first century, the silhouette of the pirate ship had vanished from the horizon, but the structure of piracy had not. It had merely been absorbed into the operating protocols of U.S. foreign policy. The empire no longer needed weather-beaten captains with earrings and cutlasses; it had Treasury officials with spreadsheets, naval task forces with public-relations teams, and sanctions regimes broad enough to suffocate entire economies. Yet the goal remained unchanged: to seize resources, fracture sovereignty, and punish those nations stubborn enough to insist on governing themselves. If the mercantile powers once used cannon fire and boarding hooks to redirect the world’s wealth, the United States now uses unilateral sanctions, asset freezes, maritime seizures, and lawfare—the administrative technologies of a hyper-imperial state that prefers its piracy dressed in legal robes.
Consider the recent record. In 2020, the U.S. seized Iranian fuel shipments headed for Venezuela, triumphantly announced the confiscation as the “largest in history,” and then quietly sold the oil for profit in American courts. The United Kingdom, playing the role of Washington’s loyal privateer, intercepted an Iranian supertanker off Gibraltar, provoking a retaliatory seizure and weeks of escalating brinkmanship. Venezuelan gold—31 tonnes of it—was frozen in the vaults of the Bank of England under the pretense of “protecting democracy,” a phrase that apparently grants Western powers the right to hold another nation’s wealth hostage. And when the U.S. finally succeeded in pushing through the forced sale of CITGO, Venezuela’s most valuable foreign asset, it did so through courts that conducted themselves not as neutral arbiters but as instruments of geopolitical pressure—civilian admiralty courts for the neoliberal era.
These are not isolated events; they are the architecture of a new mode of piracy: sanctions piracy, judicial piracy, financial piracy. They do not require a single cannon to be fired. They rely instead on the overwhelming asymmetry of the global financial system, where the dollar still functions as both currency and cudgel. A nation targeted by Washington does not face a fleet—it faces a bureaucracy. Its ships are refused insurance; its payments are blocked; its officials are restricted; its cargo is declared contraband by a foreign power that has appointed itself the regulator of the world’s arteries of trade. The empire no longer needs to sink your vessel; it only needs to make it illegal for the rest of the world to approach it.
But an empire in crisis cannot rely on spreadsheets alone. And so the United States has begun reactivating the older tools as well—the gunboats, the special operations units, the maritime “interdictions” staged like reality TV episodes. Which is how, in 2025, the Skipper found itself seized under the banner of Operation Southern Spear, a campaign that blends counter-narcotics rhetoric, anti-Iran hysteria, and old-fashioned regime-change policy into one combustible package. The Caribbean is once again being militarized, not unlike the early twentieth century when U.S. Marines hopscotched from island to island to secure plantations, ports, and puppet governments. The difference today is that the empire insists on calling this process “law enforcement,” as if legality is a spell strong enough to disguise the outline of a blockade.
What emerges instead is a pattern that repeats across institutions rather than a new doctrine announced from above. Economic pressure gives way to legal designation; designation authorizes seizure; seizure is then normalized through courts, compliance regimes, and administrative routine. The violence is no longer episodic—it is procedural. This is why the CITGO auction and the seizure of the Skipper belong to the same register: both remove control over circulation itself, deciding who may sell, who may earn, and who may exist as an economic actor at all. In this sense, the United States is no longer arbitrating a world order it can stabilize; it is intervening directly in the flows that keep other societies alive. That shift does not reflect renewed strength. It reflects a narrowing margin for maneuver, where extraction replaces leadership and enforcement replaces consent. The turn back toward seizure is not a strategic flourish—it is the behavior of a system that has run out of ways to rule without taking.
Operation Southern Spear: When the Caribbean Became an Imperial Checkpoint Again
Operation Southern Spear is the name Washington gives to what older empires would have recognized immediately: the reassertion of naval dominance over a contested sea. Dressed up in the language of counter-narcotics and sanctions enforcement, it is in practice a rolling assertion of jurisdiction over the Caribbean basin—a declaration that ships may pass only with imperial permission. This is how blockades are reborn in the twenty-first century, not announced with cannon fire but smuggled into existence through press briefings, executive orders, and carefully staged “interdictions.” The seizure of the Skipper was not an anomaly within this campaign; it was its logical climax, the moment when paperwork gave way to rifles and the empire reminded everyone watching that law ultimately rests on force.
The Caribbean has always been the proving ground for these doctrines. From the age of sugar and slavery to the age of oil and sanctions, it has functioned as a corridor of extraction and control, patrolled by whichever empire claimed hemispheric authority at the time. What has changed is not the objective but the justification. Where earlier interventions were justified by “civilization” or “order,” today’s are justified by “compliance” and “security.” The effect is the same. A region that supplies labor, resources, and transit routes is disciplined through surveillance, interdiction, and exemplary punishment. The message sent by Southern Spear is unmistakable: sovereignty in this sea is conditional.
This is why the raid on the Skipper carried such symbolic weight. It was not merely about oil or sanctions or alleged shadow fleets. It was a demonstration, carefully choreographed for both domestic and international audiences, that the United States still claims the right to stop, search, and seize at will. In an era when multipolar currents are eroding U.S. dominance, these displays serve a psychological function. They reassure allies, intimidate adversaries, and discipline neutrals. They also reveal anxiety. Empires confident in their legitimacy do not need to rappel onto tankers to prove a point. Empires in decline do.
Southern Spear thus operates on two levels at once. On the surface, it is a technical mission, complete with acronyms, dashboards, and legal justifications. Beneath that surface, it is an imperial ritual, reenacting the old choreography of control: the patrol, the stop, the seizure, the public declaration of authority. The Caribbean is transformed into a checkpoint where capital aligned with Washington flows freely and capital aligned against it is intercepted, confiscated, or destroyed. This is not free trade; it is selective circulation enforced by force. The sea lanes are open only to those who accept the empire’s terms.
Operation Southern Spear is better understood not as a return of history in the abstract, but as a practical response to a specific problem: the loss of uncontested control over maritime circulation. When rivals find ways to move oil, capital, and goods outside U.S.-managed channels, the response is not negotiation but interception. Control of chokepoints once achieved through royal navies and privateers is now enforced through sanctions lists, interdiction authorities, and armed boarding teams. The seizure of the Skipper follows this logic precisely. It is not symbolic; it is operational. It restores leverage by physically interrupting exchange, reminding shipowners, insurers, and states alike that access to the sea still runs through imperial approval. In this sense, the turn back toward maritime enforcement does not reveal hidden barbarism—it reveals priority. When dominance over circulation is threatened, the empire returns to the sea because that is where economic power can still be stopped by force.
Loot or Lesson: Piracy as Profit and Punishment in the Age of Sanctions
The question that hangs over the seizure of the Skipper—and over every similar act of imperial confiscation in the past two decades—is deceptively simple: is this about money, or is it about discipline? Is the empire seizing oil tankers, gold reserves, and national assets because it needs the material value, or because it needs the spectacle of punishment? The honest answer, which imperial rhetoric works hard to obscure, is that it is always both. Capitalism in crisis does not separate accumulation from coercion; it fuses them. The seizure becomes profitable not only in dollars but in fear, deterrence, and political leverage.
In the mercantile era, the profit motive was naked. A captured galleon meant silver in the hold and dividends in the port cities. Today the accounting is more complex but no less real. When the United States seizes oil cargoes and authorizes their sale through its courts, the proceeds are quietly redistributed—sometimes to claimants, sometimes to state agencies, sometimes to fund further enforcement. When Venezuelan gold is frozen in London or a strategic company like CITGO is auctioned under foreign supervision, the empire is not simply making a point; it is reallocating wealth. Primitive accumulation has not ended; it has migrated into the legal infrastructure of sanctions, forfeiture, and asset management. The vampire phase of capitalism does not merely feed on blood; it feeds on balance sheets.
But punishment is the multiplier. Every seizure sends a message far beyond the immediate target. It tells shipowners that defiance will be costly. It tells insurers and banks that neutrality is an illusion. It tells smaller states watching from the sidelines that sovereignty is tolerated only so long as it aligns with U.S. interests. The raid on the Skipper was designed to be seen, discussed, replayed—a pedagogical act in the curriculum of empire. It teaches by example, reminding the world that Washington reserves the right to reach into your economy and remove what it deems unacceptable. This is not market discipline; it is imperial discipline.
This dual function—loot and lesson—is what distinguishes modern imperial piracy from its earlier forms. The United States does not rely on plunder alone to sustain itself; it relies on maintaining a global hierarchy in which its rules are internalized by others. Sanctions piracy works best when it becomes self-enforcing, when companies refuse to trade, banks refuse to process payments, and governments hesitate to challenge U.S. decrees. Each spectacular seizure lowers the cost of future coercion by making resistance appear futile. Fear, in this sense, is as valuable as oil.
The seizure of the Skipper points less to a change in ideology than to a narrowing range of available options. As economic leverage weakens and compliance becomes harder to secure, enforcement moves closer to the point of circulation itself. Access to trade is no longer regulated primarily through agreements or institutions, but through interruption—through the ability to stop ships, freeze assets, and deny revenue in real time. This is not a politics of persuasion; it is a politics of conditional access. States are not asked to align; they are warned. The resort to seizure reflects a system that increasingly governs by removal rather than integration, by cutting actors out of circulation rather than incorporating them into a stable order. In that sense, piracy is no longer a founding moment recalled in history—it is an operational response to decline, used when other forms of control no longer reliably work.
Against the Empire’s Law of the Sea: Reclaiming Sovereignty from the Pirate Order
Every empire that has ruled the seas eventually insists that its dominance is natural, necessary, and eternal. And every empire is eventually proven wrong. What the seizure of the Skipper makes impossible to ignore is that the United States is no longer governing the world through consent, even among its allies. It is governing through exception—through seizures, sanctions, and exemplary acts of force that suspend any meaningful notion of international law the moment it becomes inconvenient. This is not the rule of law; it is the rule by law, wielded as a weapon against those who refuse to submit to a collapsing hierarchy.
History offers no comfort to such arrangements. The mercantile pirate empires believed their control of the seas guaranteed their future. It did not. Their violence produced resistance, revolts, counter-flows of power, and eventually new orders that emerged from the wreckage they left behind. The Atlantic world that fed early capitalism also gave birth to maroon communities, slave uprisings, anti-colonial revolutions, and movements that shattered the legitimacy of imperial rule. Piracy, when exposed, does not stabilize empire; it delegitimizes it. It teaches the oppressed to name what is being done to them and to recognize that legality and justice are not the same thing.
This is why the current moment matters. The Global South is no longer confronting imperial piracy in isolation. Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and others are not anomalies but advance signals of a broader fracture in the world system. Multipolar currents are challenging the empire’s claim to police trade routes, currencies, and resources. New mechanisms of exchange, finance, and cooperation are being tested precisely because the old system has revealed itself as a protection racket enforced at gunpoint. Each act of seizure accelerates this process by confirming what many already suspect: that compliance offers no security, only delayed vulnerability.
To name modern sanctions and asset seizures as piracy is not rhetorical excess; it is analytical clarity. It places today’s events within a long historical continuum and strips the empire of its moral camouflage. It reminds us that the law of the sea has always been contested terrain, shaped less by abstract principles than by power relations. And it opens space for a different vision—one rooted in genuine sovereignty, collective security, and the right of peoples to control their own resources without fear of confiscation by distant courts or foreign commandos.
The thread that runs from mercantile privateering to Operation Southern Spear is not one of analogy but of recurrence under pressure. When control over circulation becomes uncertain, force is reapplied at its narrowest points—ships, payments, assets, access itself. The seizure of the Skipper belongs to this pattern. It reflects an order that can no longer rely on integration to reproduce itself and therefore turns to interruption as a governing tool. What remains unresolved is not the logic of this turn, but its consequences. As seizure becomes routine and enforcement replaces consent, the costs of maintaining control rise, resistance adapts, and the very channels being policed begin to reorganize around avoidance rather than compliance. The outcome of that process is not foreordained. But history suggests that systems which govern by cutting others out of circulation eventually confront a world no longer willing—or able—to move through them.
Weaponized Information 
Leave a comment