The workers who keep Venezuela’s economy breathing - the factory hands, the shopkeepers, the bus drivers, the street vendors, the nurses working double shifts in hospitals with no medicine - have a simple, urgent interest: to eat, to pay rent, to send their children to school without selling something they own. They have no interest in the dollar’s dominance, no stake in Wall Street’s balance sheets, but they feel the weight of its absence like a stone in their pockets. When the United States slaps sanctions on Venezuela, it does not target executives in Caracas - it targets them. It starves the household budget, not the boardroom. And now, as they turn to cryptocurrency as a lifeline, they are not embracing a technological revolution - they are clinging to survival, one transaction at a time, while Washington watches and wonders why their “market” isn’t cooperating.

Let us be clear: the dollar shortage is not an accident of nature. It is the deliberate consequence of economic warfare - sanctions designed not to change a government’s policies, but to break the people’s will. When capital flows are cut off, when oil exports are blocked, when the central bank is denied access to its own reserves, the pressure does not fall on the ruling clique - it falls on the baker who can no longer import flour, the mechanic who cannot buy spare parts, the teacher who sees her salary vanish in hyperinflation. The state may issue a new currency or embrace blockchain tokens, but if the people have nothing to trade, if their workplaces lie idle, if their savings are wiped out, no digital token will restore their dignity.

Who benefits here? Not the workers. Not even the small business owners who accept Bitcoin or Ethereum at their storefronts - those who do are not speculators; they are refugees of the fiat collapse, trading in digital ghosts because the real thing has been withheld. The beneficiaries are the financial intermediaries in the global North - the exchanges, the wallet providers, the venture capitalists betting on “decentralized” markets while the real economy crumbles beneath them. Crypto does not liberate the worker; it absolves the West of responsibility. We can say, “They’re using Bitcoin now - problem solved,” while ignoring that the worker still cannot buy medicine, that the farmer still cannot sell his coffee, that the student still cannot afford textbooks. The blockchain does not pay the wage the sanctions stole.

And what divides them? Oh, many things. The urban tech-savvy youth who see crypto as liberation, the rural communities who see it as magic or fraud, the unionised public sector workers who distrust anything outside the official system, the informal workers who just want to feed their children - each group sees the crisis through its own lens. Capital, ever the opportunist, will exploit these fractures. It will offer crypto “education” to the privileged few, while leaving the rest to scavenge for bolivars. It will make blockchain look like a progressive tool - decentralised, democratic, free - while ignoring that without real economic power, digital money is just another form of debt, another way to extract value from those who have nothing left to give.

Solidarity does not mean cheering every new crypto project that emerges from Caracas. Solidarity means asking: Who is still excluded? Who is left out of this digital lifeline? The old woman who cannot afford a smartphone? The miner who powers the network with stolen electricity and breathes toxic fumes while the rest of the city rolls blackouts? The woman who trades her gold for Bitcoin only to see its value swing wildly before she can buy rice? If the solution does not lift all of them - not just the connected, not just the English-speaking, not just those with access to electricity and Wi-Fi - then it is not solidarity. It is charity with a blockchain interface.

The real alternative is not better wallets or faster ledgers. It is unity across borders. It is the American railworker who understands that when sanctions starve Venezuelan families, they also drive down wages at home - because a desperate, dispossessed global workforce is a weaker workforce everywhere. It is the union in Detroit that says: We do not accept your exploitation of our brothers and sisters abroad, because it is the same exploitation, dressed in a different flag. It is the solidarity that refuses to let capital pit worker against worker, nation against nation, currency against currency.

The workers of Venezuela are not failing. They are adapting. They are improvising. They are surviving. And in their struggle, they show us something fundamental: no amount of digital trickery can substitute for real economic power - the power of workers who know their own worth, who organise, who strike, who build institutions that answer to them, not to foreign ministers or venture capitalists. The dollar may be scarce, but the solidarity that can replace it is not. It is waiting - not in code, but in collective action. And when it rises, it will not be measured in tokens, but in bread, in schools, in dignity.

The question is not whether Venezuela uses crypto. The question is: who decides what Venezuela uses it for?