Introduction

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction

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Unlearning Capitalism

A curated directory of educational resources for radical political education focused on building a better world beyond capitalism.

About this Collection

About this Collection

If you've spent any time listening to leftist discourse you have probably heard somebody mention the phrase "the principal (or primary) contradiction". But what is meant by this phrase?

Most famously introduced by Mao Zedong in his essay 'On Contradiction', the concept of contradictions within systems is a foundational concept in the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism: it is the tension and eventual resolution within things that drives forward and evolves human history. In this framework, the principal contradiction is the dominant conflict which influences all others.

In the 21st century, an anti-imperialist analysis reveals the hegemony of US empire - through its hybrid warfare and interventionism - supersedes internal class dynamics as the principal contradiction globally for the majority of the world's population. The US uses its military and economic might against any socialist project that attempts to engage in true sovereign development for its people.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/us-imperialism-is-the-principal-contradiction

10 articles · 2 books · 1 documentary · 2 podcasts · 5 videos

This ebook is about 269 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Imperialism — Then and Now

13 pages

https://progressive.international/blueprint/a82e56c6-5ba0-4ff7-84aa-85bb80053c86-gill-imperialism--then-and-now/en/

Progressive International

By Bikrum Gill

Publication Date: September 2, 2026

A lecture tracing imperialism from Lenin's theory of finance monopoly capitalism to Samir Amin's world-scale class struggle, arguing that anti-imperialism must contest both the military and economic legs of imperial power.

2. Imperialism: Unpacking The Primary Contradiction

4 pages

https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/12/16/imperialism-unpacking-the-primary-contradiction/

Hood Communist

By Erica Caines

Publication Date: December 16, 2021

Examines how imperialism connects global exploitation with domestic oppression of African communities in the U.S., emphasizing connections between capitalist imperialism and settler-colonialism.

3. Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage

113 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/

The Tricontinental

Publication Date: January 23, 2024

US-led imperialism has entered a new, more aggressive stage, which we call hyper-imperialism: marked by US dominance, the use of US-NATO military strikes, hybrid forms of power projection, including unilateral coercive measures, information warfare, new forms of surveillance and delegitimization of dissent.

4. Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist 'Rules-Based Order'

9 pages

https://orinocotribune.com/eight-contradictions-of-the-imperialist-rules-based-order/

Orinoco Tribune

By Vijay Prashad

Publication Date: March 17, 2023

Analyzes eight contradictions in the imperialist 'rules-based order' and how the world is entering a new phase with declining Western influence and rising Global South resistance.

5. NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth

26 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-nato-the-most-dangerous-organisation/

The Tricontinental

Publication Date: June 10, 2025

NATO serves as the military enforcement arm of Trans-Atlantic capital, enforcing the ability of the western nations to unimpeded resource and financial flows. From its founding origins by former Nazis post-WW2 to its present day regime change operations, NATO is the most dangerous organization on Earth.

6. Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

5 pages

https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/imperialism-and-anti-imperialism/

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

Publication Date: September 26, 2025

Understanding imperialism remains a crucial concept for understanding world capitalism today, and anti-imperialist struggles against US hegemony form the most essential part of any socialist strategy with any chance of success.

7. The Architecture of Power: The Dollar, Financialisation, and the Struggle for Sovereignty

32 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-de-dollarisation/

The Tricontinental

Publication Date: July 7, 2026

Analyzes US dollar hegemony as a tool of imperial power, detailing how financialization disciplines the Global South while exploring de-dollarization efforts by BRICS.

8. Contradictions (& exploiting them)

4 pages

https://socialistachampagne.substack.com/p/contradictions-and-exploiting-them

Socialista Champagne

By Isabella Aidar

Publication Date: May 9, 2026

Analyzes how Russia, China, and the Sahel exploit geopolitical contradictions to challenge US hegemony while critiquing Western leftists for compromising with imperialism.

9. Primary contradiction in our time and anti-imperialism

6 pages

https://amyyyang00.substack.com/p/primary-contradiction-in-our-time

Amy Yang

Publication Date: March 28, 2026

Argues that Western imperialism is the primary global contradiction, urging unconditional solidarity with Global South resistance movements to dismantle the current world order.

10. Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

57 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/five-characteristics-of-neoimperialism/

Monthly Review

By Cheng Enfu; Lu Baolin

Publication Date: May 1, 2021

Analyzes five characteristics of neoimperialism as the current phase of monopoly capitalism, building on Lenin's theory of imperialism.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Books

On Contradiction

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

Marxists Internet Archive

By Mao Tse-tung

In 'On Contradiction,' Mao Tse-tung establishes the law of the unity of opposites as the basic law of materialist dialectics. He contrasts it with the metaphysical world outlook that sees things as isolated and static, arguing internal contradiction is the fundamental cause of development; external causes are secondary, as illustrated by Russia's and Japan's transformations.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

Marxists Internet Archive

By V. I. Lenin

Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism, dominated by monopolies and finance capital, noting its historical place and inevitable decay. Written in Zurich between January and June 1916, it stemmed from extensive research documented in Notebooks on Imperialism, containing extracts from 148 books and 232 articles.

Documentary

Earth's Greatest Enemy

https://earthsgreatestenemy.com/

Resource Not Added

This documentary exposes the Pentagon as the world's largest institutional polluter, linking environmental destruction to the global military empire and urging unity between environmental and anti-militarist movements.

Podcasts

Mao's "On Contradiction": The Dialectic of Revolution

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/best-of-maos-on-contradiction-the-dialectic-of-revolution

Rev Left Radio

Episode explores Mao Zedong's philosophical text on dialectical materialism and its application to revolutionary strategy.

How the North Plunders the South

https://bb336368-b933-4b06-88b6-e51256ac6d81.libsyn.com/unlocked-how-the-north-plunders-the-south-w-jason-hickel

Upstream Podcast

By Jason Hickel

Jason Hickel explains how the imperial core continues extracting resources and labor from the Global South through unequal exchange.

Videos

America's Economic War on The Entire Planet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7lYCn4LJI0

Hakim

Hakim examines how US economic sanctions function as siege warfare against non-compliant nations, using Cuba, Iraq, and Vietnam as case studies to expose their devastating human costs and imperial logic.

A Summary of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQrXV92V31s

Red Pen

Summarizes Lenin's analysis of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, detailing how monopolies and finance capital drive global conflict.

The dollar is a weapon: How the US controls countries with financial colonialism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkza5cRBuG4

Geopolitical Economy Report

By Ben Norton

US financial colonialism uses the dollar, sanctions and control over oil revenue to dominate countries like Iraq and Venezuela, while BRICS and yuan oil sales push back against the petrodollar system.

Washington's Dirty War on China: From Pakistan & Iran to Afghanistan & Myanmar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_Fe6w71ltU

The New Atlas

By Brian Berletic

Argues the US uses armed proxies in Asia to sabotage Chinese infrastructure and energy projects while enforcing a maritime blockade.

The Anti-Imperialism of Iran in West Asia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-QydfeQ4_g

Journal of International Solidarity

By Max Ajl

Max Ajl analyzes Iran's anti-imperialist role in West Asia, discussing military technology, energy sovereignty, and the dynamics of US-Israeli hegemony.

Imperialism — Then and Now

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Imperialism — Then and Now

Imperialism — Then and Now

Article 1 of 10

Progressive International

By Bikrum Gill

Originally published at https://progressive.international/blueprint/a82e56c6-5ba0-4ff7-84aa-85bb80053c86-gill-imperialism--then-and-now/en/

Publication Date: September 2, 2026

Imperialism, the denial of sovereignty that underwrites global capitalism, is the primary contradiction.

This essay is based on the lecture delivered by Bikrum Gill for the second Unit of the People’s Academy curriculum. You can receive the full program — including the recorded lecture — by signing up for The People’s Academy.

Click here to sign up for the People’s Academy →

Introduction

What is imperialism? What does it mean to think about it as the primary contradiction? These questions have great significance for understanding our present conjuncture — the genocide in Palestine, the expansion of imperialist war against Iran — and for situating these conflicts in a broader historical struggle.

It is important that we think about imperialism specifically in its capitalist form, as theorised by Vladimir Lenin. But we must also understand it within the framework that Samir Amin called class struggle on a world scale. Why is this important? Because we cannot understand imperialism only as a self-propelling system. This may be one place where we hit a limit in Lenin, or where we need to broaden his approach.

Reading Lenin, it might appear that imperialism emerges out of an internal propulsion of capital in the core, transforms into imperialism, and then moves further afield. But what would it mean to think about imperialism as located within a class struggle on a world scale — as responding to anti-imperialism, caught up in a contest over ownership of the means of production globally, a conflict between the oppressing or core nations and the dependent nations?

Colonialism, Imperialism, and the Denial of Sovereignty

How do we understand the concept of imperialism, and how do we distinguish it from colonialism? Both are based on the denial of sovereignty to subjugated peoples. This is a key premise: core nations, imperialist nations, colonial nations are all premised upon a denial of sovereignty. Through this denial, they reorient subjugated peoples and their lands and territories — what Lenin calls economic territory — towards servicing the interests of the usurping entity.

Colonialism can be conceived as a one-to-one relationship between coloniser and colonised: French colonialism in Algeria, for example, or British colonialism in India. Imperialism, by contrast, operates on a world-systemic scale, or at least a broader regional and multi-unit scale beyond a one-to-one relation. Imperialism does not even need to involve direct territorial control. As Kwame Nkrumah argues, regions can have formal sovereignty — they are not directly under territorial rule — yet remain ensnared within a broader world system of imperialism through which they are effectively denied sovereignty and their resources are oriented towards the core.

This distinction matters because one can decolonise while remaining within an imperialist system that constrains sovereignty. A country may win independence and yet possess uranium in its territory with no means of processing it — no means of transforming its resources into finished or industrial goods through which it could build the hard power necessary to maintain sovereignty. The great war of the twentieth century was not necessarily the war between European powers in the two world wars, but the longer struggle for national liberation in the colonies. Victory may have been achieved by colonised peoples against the one-to-one relationship of colonialism, but the broader world-systemic structure remains in place.

Lenin on Monopoly Capitalism

For Lenin, imperialism is capitalism in its monopoly stage. He examines the way in which capitalism develops contradictorily: at one stage in the early nineteenth century it is a system of free-market competition, with capitalist firms competing with one another, developing the productive forces, and exploiting labour. But through this inter-firm competition, free-market competition eventually turns into its opposite: monopoly. The destiny of capitalism is monopoly capitalism. It is not free-market competition constantly leading to innovation and a progressive movement of society, however exploitative. Over the course of the nineteenth century, production comes to be controlled by cartels and trusts.

One can take as an example a market in which ten firms compete in the production of a particular good: after successive rounds of competition, two remain. More production is now concentrated in a single firm than before, and the surviving firms absorb into themselves ever more branches of production — a textile concern, for instance, may come to produce not only clothing but some of the inputs that go into the making of clothing.

Lenin’s point is not simply that capitalism transforms into a monopoly system of industrialists who concentrate production in larger firms. It specifically becomes what he calls finance monopoly capitalism. The monopoly ownership is held not by the industrial capitalists but by bank capital, by finance capital — those issuing capital and loans to the industrial capitalists. The financial capitalists do not seek to generate profits out of real production; they seek to generate profits from the loans they issue, from interest payments — what Lenin calls “clipping the coupons.”

There is something simultaneously parasitic about this process but also something potentially progressive, in the sense that it further socialises production. By concentrating greater amounts of labour into single firms, production is socialised. The conditions are there for a transition to socialism: one need only take these large firms and transform their concentrated ownership from private to socialist. But this does not happen — because of imperialism.

At the stage of financial monopoly capitalism, capital experiences a crisis of profitability or overaccumulation. Because of monopoly ownership, profits are concentrated in fewer hands. Surplus capital accumulates, but the monopoly firm cannot find new areas for profitable reinvestment, because other sectors are controlled by monopolies that cannot be competed with. If there is an excess of surplus capital, it could in principle be put to social purposes: building infrastructure, investing in education, healthcare, transport, raising wages, uplifting living standards. But capital’s objective is not only profits but the maintenance of power over the working class, and such measures would diminish that power.

This is where Lenin argues that monopoly finance capital leads to the search for new fields of profitable reinvestment, which leads to the export of capital to the colonies. What might otherwise have led to socialism — workers in concentrated monopoly firms fighting for a greater share of accumulated surplus — is deferred, because that surplus is directed outward towards what Lenin calls “backward nations.” That surplus builds railroads in the colonies that drain out resources, gains access to cheaper labour, and, by imposing conditions of dependency, forces the dependent countries to offer cheap labour and cheap resources to the core. This export of capital and finance from core to periphery heightens relations of dependency, forcing those countries that receive exported capital to reorient their economies to service the core. This generates super-profits for overaccumulated capital, underdevelops the periphery, and buys off sections of the working class in the core through modest improvements in living standards.

Nkrumah extends Lenin’s argument. When Lenin was writing, the export of capital occurred through the establishment of direct territorial control — the scramble for Africa, formalised at the Berlin conference, where the European powers assumed sovereign control over the African continent, and the colonisation of Asia in the nineteenth century, above all the colonisation of India. Nkrumah argues that even when countries reclaim formal sovereignty, the necessity of capitalism to maintain its imperialist outlet reproduces itself without direct territorial control. Countries may be formally sovereign, but their access to credit and capital remains under the control of the imperialist powers, and if they wish to develop, they must agree to terms of trade that continue to enable the drain of super-profits from periphery to core. This is where we see Nkrumah talk about neo-colonialism as a form of economic dependency.

Imperialism as the Primary Contradiction

What does this mean for our understanding of imperialism as the primary contradiction? Both Lenin and Nkrumah seem to suggest that the contradictions in the capital-labour relation in the core — in inter-firm competition — generate imperialism. This would appear to make imperialism a secondary contradiction. (The concept of primary and secondary contradictions comes from Mao, who in On Contradiction argues that at a given moment in China, imperialism is the primary contradiction — meaning it is the contradiction that bears upon all other contradictions.) The question is whether imperialism is the contradiction that directs the capital-labour contradiction, or whether it is the other way around.

If Lenin is arguing that imperialism arises out of contradictions in the core, it is not necessarily primary; what needs to be addressed is ownership relations in the core. If workers were the owning class in the stage of monopoly finance capitalism, there would be no recycling of overaccumulated capital into the colonies, no export of capital. Workers would take that surplus and recycle it into their own societies. But at the same time, Lenin argues that revolution in the core will not happen while imperialism persists. Only when dependent nations overcome imperialism — overcome the drain of wealth imposed by the export of capital — will the class contradictions in the core be sharpened and revolution become possible.

This poses a strategic question for organisers in the core. Does the struggle there need to target, through class struggle, the monopoly firms of the United States — the weapons companies, the pharmaceutical companies? Would the weakening of that power create space for peripheral nations to contest imperialism more effectively? And does resistance from the periphery — Iran's capacity to withstand imperialist war, the capacity of other nations to refuse US demands — in turn sharpen the contradictions in the core? These are the questions the framework of primary and secondary contradiction forces upon any strategy that claims to act in solidarity with the periphery.

Here we must turn to Samir Amin, the Patnaiks, and the world-systems tradition, which add something crucial. Amin argues that imperialism has always been a component of capitalism — there has never been a capitalism without imperialism. This helps us think about the primary contradiction in different terms. If we read Amin and the body of world-systems scholarship carefully, capitalism could never have emerged and stabilised without an imperialist base. From the long sixteenth century through to the nineteenth century, its very emergence was always contingent on imperialism.

Why? The Patnaiks argue in Capital and Imperialism that capitalism cannot exist at any point without imperialism, because without it the system can only engage in simple reproduction — it cannot engage in expanded accumulation, in endless accumulation. The capital-labour relation entirely dispossesses labour: the capitalist class generates surplus out of a dispossessed working class, but this working class can only reproduce itself through the market. Capital seeks to drive down wages, but workers must also be consumers. This is where Lenin picks up a component of what Marx called the law of value: competition drives down the wages of workers and the costs of goods, yet the workers must still be able to operate as consumers to reproduce their own lives. How can wages be suppressed and the market grow at once? There is a paralysing contradiction between profits, the suppression of wages, and the need for a consuming class. This is what generates, time and again, problems of overaccumulation, overproduction, and what the Patnaiks call a threat to the value of money.

This contradiction is historically resolved through imperialism — not as the highest stage, but as the very foundation of capitalism. The capital-labour relation would never have consolidated without an imperialist base. What enables workers to be both exploited and to function as consumers is the ability to draw in cheap inputs from the colonies and the imperialist peripheries. In addition to capital and labour, there are categories of labour and resources outside the core that can be appropriated without accounting for their reproductive conditions. Prices are imposed on peasants in the colonies because they have lost sovereignty — what the Patnaiks call a “price-taking” category of labour. This is not workers and trade unions bargaining for wages; it is the imposition of prices through the denial of sovereignty.

When Lenin speaks of “backward nations” that receive the export of capital, a question arises: why are these nations backward? How did they fall behind the European capitalist nations? The answer lies in the already existing relations of colonialist imperialism from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries — relations that rendered peripheral states dependent and subjected them to a drain of wealth since capitalism’s inception. So imperialism has always been the foundation of capitalism. You cannot have a capital-labour relation that exists at any point without an imperialist base. Therefore, imperialism is the primary contradiction. The denial of sovereignty to peoples, through which prices are imposed, price-setting power is exercised, and price-taking is forced upon the peripheries, enables the transfer of cheap inputs into the industry of the core and cheap goods for workers to consume. Under capitalism, imperialism is defined at its most primary level as sovereign power over the flow of economic capital across space.

The Two Legs of Imperialism

How is imperialism established? Amin provides a crucial framework. He says that imperialism walks on two legs — a military leg and an economic leg. From the sixteenth century onwards, the imperialist foundation of capitalism is established through the application of military force and violence against the peripheries. It is through force that sovereignty is denied, and it is through that denial that economic wealth is drained from the periphery to the core, generating the conditions for the second leg. Peripheral states come to depend on the core for access to capital, and dependency is maintained not only through military force but through economic force. This is why the Western imperialist order seeks to maintain monopoly control even over military violence — through NATO and other instruments — constraining the sovereignty of the peripheries.

The opium wars of the nineteenth century illustrate this concretely. China had been for millennia at the forefront of the world economy, and Europe often had a dependency on China. This relation was transformed through military force. An alliance of European powers went to war against China, subjugated it, and constrained its sovereignty. By seizing Hong Kong and other ports, they controlled the prices imposed on the movement of goods into and out of China. If Britain was being outcompeted by Germany and the United States, it could offset that deficit by forcing China to buy its declining industrial goods. Wealth was drained, and after a century China had a total deficit of economic capital. By imposing military force, imperialism created economic dependency.

Amin makes a crucial point: if imperialism walks on two legs of military and economic power, anti-imperialism must also walk on two legs. This is key to understanding our current moment. Different anti-imperialist forces in the latter part of the twentieth century and into today have walked on one leg or the other. But how might we conceive of these legs walking together?

When we think about imperialism on a world scale in terms of class struggle, we are thinking about how peoples in the periphery seek to reclaim sovereignty by challenging the military and economic bases of imperial power. When one leg is challenged, imperialism employs the other to contain the challenge. The Haitian Revolution is a clear example from the nineteenth century: Haiti defeated the military basis of imperialism, but could not resist the economic assault. A blockade was imposed, a capital strike was imposed. There can be an export of capital, but there can also be a threat of a strike of capital — denial of access to capital markets — which forces the subjugated country either into a condition of constant siege or into relenting and accepting the conditions imposed by the imperialist power.

This pattern plays out across the twentieth century. Peoples on the periphery struggle to reclaim sovereignty, to reorient their resources and labour towards national development, to build the infrastructure and industrial programmes through which they can become masters of their own destiny. But each time there is an attempt to reclaim sovereignty — whether through force or through an economic programme of nationalisation and development — there is always a counterrevolutionary move by imperialism to contain it. Iran is a concrete example: in 1953, Iran tried to nationalise its oil to create the conditions for overcoming dependency. A coup was imposed. The 1979 revolution was an attempt to reclaim control over the country’s national resources. When the military option — the proxy war that Iraq waged against Iran — did not succeed in reimposing military force, the US turned to sanctions, seeking to control the periphery through economic means.

The point is that imperialism is not only self-propelling; it is also responding to class struggle on a world scale. Sanctions are introduced not for their own sake, but to contain liberation struggles and the attempt to reclaim substantive sovereignty over resources. If states like Iran or Cuba accept a neocolonial status, they will not be subjected to constant war and sanctions — but they will not be sovereign either.

The Class Basis of Sovereignty

There is a second component to the question of imperialism and class struggle. As states on the periphery attempt to reclaim sovereignty, class struggles also occur within those states. The colonised territory is not composed of a single class: there are comprador elites, incipient bourgeoisies, trading classes, workers, and peasants. What is the relationship between these internal class contradictions and the attempt to reclaim sovereignty?

Lenin, in his thesis on the national and colonial questions, argued that it might be necessary to ally with the bourgeoisie in the peripheries, because the overcoming of the colonial and imperial relation must come first, and the proletarian revolution can follow. This makes sense as a way of thinking about imperialism as the primary contradiction, with other contradictions remaining secondary until they become primary later. But as Fanon and Amin argued, to actually achieve sovereignty one needs a peasant-centred anti-imperial, anti-colonial revolution — one in which class power is located in the peasantry and working classes, even if the bourgeoisie is not immediately done away with. The resources of national development must be recycled back into the country, producing a more universal form of development — not one that develops the bourgeoisie through neocolonial relations, but one that develops the entire country. There is a relationship between the class basis of decolonisation and anti-imperialism and the actual achievement of real sovereignty: the construction of a strong state necessary to fight imperialism, in motion with popular movements and struggles on the ground.

US Imperialism Today

After the Second World War, imperialism transformed into what Amin calls collective imperialism. The United States established itself as the primary imperialist power, with Europe and Japan — what Amin calls the "triad" — existing as subordinate powers. Europe and Japan acquiesced because they needed US leadership to manage and control the rise of the South during the era of decolonisation. US imperialism thus operates on two fronts: establishing neocolonialism over the peripheries while maintaining control over Europe and Japan. One key mechanism is controlling the flow of energy into and out of Europe, maintaining Europe’s dependence on the United States and keeping it in line.

US imperialism also emerges during the era of decolonisation and consolidates facing a particular set of challenges. The United States does not have access to colonies in the way the British did; it must reconstruct the system of imperialism on the neocolonial terms that Nkrumah describes. A key component is the relationship established between oil and the dollar — linking the purchase of oil on the international market to the US dollar. If we think about Lenin’s analysis of the relationship between bank capital and industrial capital, we can extend it to the power of the US dollar, premised upon its tie-up with oil, the US-Saudi relationship, and US control over West Asia. This generates a financial power through which the United States reimposed relations of dependency on the South after the 1970s.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States was able to impose even greater dependency. But two challenges to US imperialism, often underobserved, were launched in the 1980s and 1990s. China posed a challenge to the economic leg of US imperialism; the Islamic Republic of Iran, and later Russia, posed a challenge to its military leg. Today, what is at stake in West Asia and beyond is the US attempt to reimpose the military and economic basis of its imperialist order.

The United States is targeting China because China has contested the financial power of US monopoly finance capitalism by offering Global South states access to capital and surplus in ways that break them out of dependent development. In West Asia, the military force through which the United States established the oil-dollar relationship — through its Zionist and Saudi proxies — has been fundamentally challenged by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, by Hezbollah, by Ansar Allah in Yemen. Something existential is at stake for the United States in re-establishing overwhelming military supremacy, which is what it attempted to demonstrate against Iran — but has been unable to do so.

What we are seeing in the anti-imperialist struggle is a convergence between these military and economic challenges. Iran’s ability to withstand sanctions is related to China’s ability to offer Iran economic depth and an economic architecture through which it can overcome sanctions. China’s ability to continue with its economic programme is not unrelated to Iran’s ability to resist US imperialism militarily in West Asia from the 1980s to today, or to Russia’s ability to obstruct the projection of US military power on its borders. As the Chinese foreign minister recently said: the defeat of Russia is something China cannot allow — it would be a disaster even for the Chinese development project.

The Palestinian struggle, including al-Aqsa Flood, is not only a question of decolonisation. There is an anti-imperialist component, a geopolitical edge to the Palestinian struggle to overcome the way in which Zionism has held a monopoly on military force in the region. It is a challenge to the US imperialist system more broadly. The United States is trying to counter the Chinese project of integrating Iran into the region, of pushing what the Chinese call a “development peace” across the Global South. It is trying to build an India-Middle East corridor to cut China out. And the concern of states like China and Iran is to establish as much sovereign power as possible — to overcome dependency without seeking to replicate the system of domination. Their main concern is sovereign development, but the challenge they face is that sovereign development can no longer be secured without interventions on the international scale: building out an alternative economic and military architecture to defend those gains. This is why China speaks of holding the commanding heights of the economy, of AI and technological development: not from a wish to dominate in the manner of the West, but to overcome dependency. People may have relevant and rightful critiques of China; its own stated concern, however, is sovereign development — and the same logic applies to Iran and to Yemen.

Imperialism: Unpacking The Primary Contradiction

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Imperialism: Unpacking The Primary Contradiction

Imperialism: Unpacking The Primary Contradiction

Article 2 of 10

Hood Communist

By Erica Caines

Originally published at https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/12/16/imperialism-unpacking-the-primary-contradiction/

Publication Date: December 16, 2021

Global and domestic repression under imperialism are counterparts. However, this truth gets distorted in the Global North, even by so-called leftists. Living in imperialist nations, we are constantly propagandized and thus forced to internalize and repeat anti-communist rhetoric. Unless we are vigilant about studying theory and history, this will continue. The best way to attack this is by getting back to the basics.

Many who align themselves with socialism have begun to read at such high levels individually (apart from a communal/ group process) they are unable to effectively reach the masses. They also lack an ability to explain the complexities of theories in simple terms because they do not have a concrete understanding of the terms and theories they prescribe to. As such, anti-imperialism, revolutionary internationalism and revolutionary pan-Africanism are depicted as the latest buzzwords detached from the decades of historical materialism (scholarship, organizing, etc) of revolutions in the Global South that have had clarity on revolutionary ideologies the practiced and the terminologies they used and taught the masses. Most importantly, there was clarity on the primary contradiction.

The U.S. is a settler colony built on the genocide of indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and the enslavement of Africans brought to the land through the Transatlantic slave trade. Yet broadly on the left, settler-colonialism is deemed insignificant. Settler colonialism is a project intended to completely replace indigenous population with the settler one, by any means necessary, as to legitimize and continue in perpetuity the theft of land and resources. This is clear when we examine the movement to Free Palestine. Settler colonialism perpetuates itself through the educational systems instituted post-conquest in settler-colonial projects and through the systematic criminalization of indigenous languages, religions, and cultural practices. Imperialist powers are able to produce a segment of the colonized population that has been indoctrinated into the practices and values of the colonizer bourgeoisie.

The conditions that exist within African poor working-class communities here in the U.S. are the result of intentional systematic neglect under a white supremacist capitalist-imperialist system. African people in the U.S. have a colonial relationship with the larger society characterized by institutional racism that operates in three areas: politically, economically, and socially. Africans in the U.S. are politically stunted with our political decisions made for us due to a lack of power. Africans in the U.S. are economically disenfranchised and dependent on the larger society and this is maintained by a social order that designates police in our communities as occupying forces. 

If settler-colonialism drives imperialist powers, globally and domestically, then it is of importance to break down what imperialism is. Imperialism is defined as “the highest stage of development of capitalism.” Capitalism is an economic system that allows private individuals to own and control the means of production (i.e. mines, mills, banks, factories, forests) and accumulate wealth from the labor of workers who receive less than the value of their labor. Understanding capitalism on its most basic level helps one to understand Imperialism as a worldwide exploitation and oppression of the non-imperialist countries, like the Global South aka the Third World. Under imperialism, each major power has carved out a niche of the world to exploit and still maintains an irrepressible need to expand.

And as we are witnessing, the most effective push for imperialism has been neocolonialism where a segment of the colonized population ultimately becomes the new managers under the system of a national pseudo-bourgeois and petit-bourgeois (the willing Black and brown figureheads for the capitalist-imperialist system). It is the lack of understanding of these systems (capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism and neocolonialism) that contributes to not only what we are facing as Africans in the U.S., but the inability for us to connect these struggles globally.

As the highest peak of counterinsurgency, the 8-year neocolonial reign of former U.S. president Barack Obama, has set the stage for a bold backing of U.S imperialism by way of patriotism from a colonized ‘Black America’ who historically have been the least favorable to war and furthermore created a massive confusion about the primary contradictions we are up against as organizers, revolutionaries and Africans seeking liberation.

The Obama presidency is most likely the most efficient way to better explain and understand the working system of imperialism as a broader material reality faced by Africans in the U.S. and abroad. The normalization of wars and militarization of our communities in those 8 years cemented domestic and foriegn policy as one accord. Africans on the continent needed to “get over colonialism”, the same way Africans in the U.S. were advised to “take responsibility” for the colonial situation we find ourselves in.

The remnants of imperial settler-colonialism are made prevalent each and everyday. This relationship is a mirror image of the imperial relationship between the U.S and the Global South. “Imperialism is a domestic issue” manifested through the occupation of our communities by militarized police forces. These similarities are most evident when we examine the use of the U.S Department of Defense’s 1033 program and U.S military programs (like AFRICOM, CENTCOM, INDO-PACIFIC COMMAND and SOUTHCOM, etc) used in so-called wars against “terrorism” and drugs.

The U.S military and its hundreds of bases worldwide serve as occupiers in the same way the (overt) police state does in our neighborhoods. What is the difference between the U.S African Command (AFRICOM), which is said to “combat the War on Terror,” and militarized policing units like Operation Relentless Pursuit and Operation LeGend , both used in multiple cities across the country to “combat crime and domestic terrorism”? What is the difference between the murderous Israeli occupation of Palestine (funded by the US) and the occupation of African neighborhoods in the US using IDF trained police units?

The recently passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2022 included billions for AFRICOM and the continuation of the Department of Defense 1033 program that transfers millions of dollars worth of military equipment to police forces across the country as all progressive measures of Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ plan has been shredded, proves the money for wars comes directly from money not allotted to the poor. The excess military equipment ends up in the local police departments of African communities here in the U.S. When you hear rhetoric like “Sanctions are an act of war” we can recognize this act of war with welfare reforms. While financial sanctioning may have always been used to enforce compliance, welfare reforms of the 1990s heightened it by terminating a family’s entire aid, placing African families in even worse conditions and ultimately ushered many into the confines of a police state.

It must be continuously reiterated that domestic and global imperialism are counterparts. It is what connects Africans in the U.S. directly to the struggles against imperialism worldwide— From Haiti and the Americas to Palestine to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the Horn of Africa. This understanding pushes forward the organizing necessary to defeat imperialism and all of its manifestations. Once Africans in the U.S. understand themselves as colonized people on stolen land, there will be a more precise analysis of how liberation is sought and gained through revolutionary internationalism like the Black Radical Traditions of the past.

Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage

Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage

Article 3 of 10

The Tricontinental

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/

Publication Date: January 23, 2024

Research for this document has been conducted collectively for over a year and has received contributions from many scholars and socialist practitioners. This document was compiled with data and charts provided by Global South Insights (GSI), with editing and coordination by Gisela Cernadas, Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, Tica Moreno, and Deborah Veneziale. The data and charts for Part IV of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.

Introduction

It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfilment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism.¹ For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight.

In the face of violent repression, such as Brazil’s Carajás Massacre in 1996, the Landless Workers’ Movement led the reclamation of land for popular agrarian reform through occupation and production, challenging agribusiness behemoths, such as the US multinational Monsanto.² A ‘soldier who shook the continent’, Hugo Chávez won the popular vote in 1999, a sharp left turn that was followed by others in Latin America. This included a wave of mass mobilisation of millions of workers, peasants, Indigenous, women, and students that defeated the proposed US Free Trade Areas of the Americas in 2005, a direct challenge to nearly 200 years of the US Monroe Doctrine.³

In 2002, Nigerian women gathered at the gates of Shell and Chevron to protest environmental destruction and exploitation in the Niger Delta. Haitians refused the centuries of humiliation in mass demonstrations following the US ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and US occupation in 2004. Millions of Nepalese celebrated the toppling of the monarchy through armed resistance under the leadership of the communists in 2006. When fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in 2010, the Tunisian people revolted against the neo-liberal system that had caused him to take such extreme measures.

In subsequent years, changes – sometimes small and imperceptible, at other times volatile and explosive – unfolded. These involved both popular movements and state actors, in some cases extremely powerful ones. The US was confronted by a rising economic powerhouse in China, growing economies in the Global South (which overtook the Global North’s GDP in PPP terms in 2007), years of domestic capital investment neglect, the financialisation of the economy, and the loss of manufacturing superiority.

The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 signalled internal fracturing of US domestic politics. Internationally, the US failed to achieve soft regime disruption in China and de-nuclearisation or regime change in Russia. After a temporary reduction in military spending with the end of the disastrous war on Iraq (2003–2011), the US shifted to the use and threat of military power as a central pillar of its response to these changes.

Hegemony is historically lost in three stages: production, finance, and military.⁴ The United States has lost hegemony in production, though it still has some remaining areas of technological hegemony, including those related to the military. It is seeing its financial hegemony challenged, though still in the very early stages and revolving around the status of the US dollar. Even though the economic and political aspects of its decline might be accelerating, it still retains military power – creating a temptation for the US to attempt to overcome the consequences of its economic decline by military or military related means.

The US has defined China as its strategic competitor. The minimum programme of the US is the containment and economic diminishment of China, sufficient to guarantee the US’s own perpetual future economic hegemony.

From its own point of view, US capitalism is rational in its attempts to limit China’s rise. Failure to do so would erode the relative advantage the US has in controlling higher levels of productive forces and the resulting monopoly privileges that control entails. There is almost complete alignment amongst the US state actors to continue to manage decoupling from China (despite the near impossibility of fully re-modernising US productive forces domestically) and to advance military preparations against China.

The February 2022 movement of Russian troops into Ukraine – a result of the continued violations of US assurances on the non-expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the continuing civil war between Kyiv and Donbas – marked an explicit new phase in world military alignment for the US. In a series of rapid-fire moves, the US openly subordinated all the Global North countries and, in so doing, further subordinated the military apparatus of those states. It established itself as the open military hegemon of what is euphemistically called NATO+, which includes all but three members of the former Eastern Bloc. Those who attended the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a member or observer – including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea – are de facto members of NATO+. Only Israel (excused from attendance for political expediency) and a few smaller countries of the Global North did not attend.

Beginning in October 2023, Israel began a campaign of displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and genocide of Palestinians with the full and shameless support of the United States government. The developments in Ukraine followed by the recent escalations in Gaza are significant markers reflecting that there has been a qualitative change within the imperialist system. The US has now completed its economic, political, and military subordination of all the other imperialist countries. This has consolidated an integrated, militarily focused imperialist bloc. It aims to maintain a grip on the Global South as a whole and has turned its attention to dominating Eurasia, the last area of the world that has escaped its control.

It is not a matter of exaggeration to say that the Global North has declared a state of open hostility and war on any section of the Global South that does not comply with the policies of the Global North. This is seen in the joint declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation published on 9 January 2023:

We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.⁵

The Palestinian people in Gaza are certainly feeling the palpable barbarity of NATO+ and the forced ‘mass consensus’ of which the Global North is capable. As Palestinian liberation leader Leila Khaled put it recently:

We know that they speak about terrorism, but they are the heroes of terrorism. The imperialist force everywhere in the world, in Iraq, in Syria, in different countries… are preparing to attack China. All of what they say about terrorism turns to be about them. People have the right to resist with all means to it, including the armed struggle. This is in the Charter of the United Nations. So, they are violating the rights of people for resistance because it’s their right to restore their freedom. And this is, and I say it always, a fundamental law: where there is repression, there is resistance. People will not live under occupation and repression. History taught us that when people resist, they can keep their dignity and their land.⁶

***

Imperialism has begun its transformation to a new stage: Hyper-Imperialism.⁷ This is imperialism conducted in an exaggerated and kinetic way, whilst also subject to the constraints that the declining empire has foisted on itself. The spasmodic quality of its exertion is felt by the millions of Congolese, Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemeni living under US militarism, whose heads instinctively jerk for cover at sudden sounds.

Yet, this is not the full-blooded march across the globe that the Cold War initiated, fought in proxy battles that were followed by economic imperialism through the World Bank and other development institutions. It is the imperialism of a drowning billionaire who firmly believes he ought to be back on his yacht. It flexes the muscles of power that are still strong – the military. However, absent productive power and knowing that financial power is at a tipping point, the full suite of imperial technologies of control that the US once had is no longer at its disposal. It, therefore, channels its efforts through the mechanisms it has most at hand: culture (the control of truth) and war.

The tactics of Hyper-Imperialism are shaped partly by the modernisation of hybrid warfare, which includes lawfare, hyper-sanctions, seizure of national reserves and assets, and other manners of non-military warfare. New technological tools of surveillance and targeted communication characterising the digital age are deployed to wage imperialist control of the battle of ideas. This has involved implementing more perverse and covert methods against the truth, such as the political imprisonment of WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange, who exposed numerous crimes against the Global South.⁸

The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc composed of 49 countries. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. In the military arena, Turkey (as a NATO member), the Republic of Korea and the Philippines (de facto militarised colonies of the US) are included in our definition of the ‘US-led Military Bloc’, even though they are part of the Global South.

Over the last twenty years, the Global North has endured a significant relative economic decline, along with a political, social, and moral decline. Its false ‘moral’ claims of civil rights and ‘press freedom’ are now complete mockeries as they seek to make illegal the public (including online) support for Palestinian rights. This full-on support for the humiliation and destruction of the darker peoples of the world is reminiscent of past centuries, exposing what can be described as collective ‘white fragility’.

The Global South countries comprise former colonies and semi-colonies, a few non-European independent states, and current and former socialist projects. The struggles for national liberation, independence, development, and total economic and political sovereignty still need to be completed for most of the Global South.

Despite the limitations of the terminology, we will use the term ‘Global North’ and occasionally ‘the West’ (an often-used hollow phrase) interchangeably with the more accurate term of the ‘US-Led Imperialist Camp’. We will analyse the Global North in four ‘Rings’. The rest of the world is currently known as the ‘Global South’, much of it was previously called the ‘Third World’. We will analyse the Global South in six ‘Groupings’ that are determined by the relative degree to which a country is a target of regime change and the role its government plays in publicly advancing international, anti-imperialist stances (both in Figure 1). The Global North is engaged in much higher levels of generalised conflict with the rest of the world, the Global South.

PART I: The Rise of a Complete US-Led Global North Military Bloc

Shifts and Consolidation

The US-Led Military Bloc has had two internal changes in the last three decades:

The further expansion of the bloc to include all Eastern Europe countries (only missing Belarus).

The challenge to retain the full subordination of the Western European capitalist states, which abandoned any fundamental, and in many cases even the pretence of, independence.

The latter became evident in 2018 by the Western European states’ genuflection to Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal – a significant blow to their economic interests. Further down, we will discuss the history of this process.⁹

The centre of the ‘US-Led Military Bloc’, as we call it, is NATO. It also includes Japan, Australia, Israel, New Zealand, three Global South countries, and the few other European countries who are not NATO members.

The US-Led Military Bloc is the world’s only bloc, a de facto and de jure military alliance with a central command. There is no other bloc of its kind. Its clarity and unity of purpose are sharply evident. The US has abandoned many important anti-nuclear proliferation treaties over the last ten years (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and Open Skies Treaty in 2020).¹⁰ This has allowed military planners to potentially prepare for the placement of intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of obliterating Moscow in minutes.

Military Spending

In the November 2023 issue of Monthly Review, a well-researched paper by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, using only US official economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Office of Management and Budget (OMB), revealed that the actual US economic military spending is over twice that acknowledged by the US government or even the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).¹¹

The actual 2022 US military expenditure was US$ 1,537 billion.¹²

To calculate the world total military expenditure, we have selected SIPRI’s published numbers as our primary source for all countries, except for the US.¹³ For the US alone, we use the figures from Monthly Review. In 2022, SIPRI adjusted the Chinese government reported national defence budget number of $229 billion to $292 billion, a 27.5% increase.¹⁴ Starting in 2021, SIPRI began a new methodology for revising China’s military spending.¹⁵ SIPRI changed their calculations for China’s military spending both for previous years and current years.¹⁶

SIPRI adjusted the US annual military budget reported by the OMB for the year 2022 by 14.5% up from US$ 765.8 to 876.9 billion.¹⁷ This was about half of the percentage increase added to China.

SIPRI’s treatment of China’s military spending is quite different from how it deals with the US, as it adopts a much more circumspect approach to US calculations.

Even if SIPRI doubled the military spending reported by China itself to US$ 458 billion, it would represent 2.6% of its GDP. This is significantly below the actual 6% spent by the US and, even then, China’s military spending would be only 29.8% of that of the US, with a population over four times greater than the US .¹⁸

Additionally, unlike the US, China does not have 902 overseas foreign bases.¹⁹ US bases and interventions create a drain not only on the annual budget but also on long-term economic debt. Additional details can be found in the endnote.²⁰

What emerged from our analysis was a series of clear findings. The first is that the US controls, through NATO and other means, an astounding 74.3% of all military spending worldwide (Figure 2). This amounts to over US$ 2 trillion.²¹

Figure 3 shows that imperialist countries account for 12 of the top 16 military budgets in the world.

Figure 4 shows the 16 highest military per capita spending by Global North countries versus the three largest Global South military spenders. The United States spends 21 times more on its military per person than China does on its military.²² There can be no doubt as to the significance of these findings.

Figure 5 lists all countries that have military budgets exceeding US$ 20 billion, 11 of which are in the Global North compared to six (out of 145) countries in the Global South. For this chart, Republic of Korea is listed under the US-Led Military Bloc.

It is clear that the Global South, in contrast to the Global North, is not a bloc and certainly not a military bloc. The Global South thus faces the extreme monopoly of military spending by the US-Led Military Bloc. This represents a clear and present danger to all countries of the Global South; it presents an imminent danger to the continued existence of humankind and the planet.

In turn, the single most important aspect of state power – that is, military power – the absolute central danger to the working classes of all countries, especially to the darker nations of the world, lies in the US-Led Imperialist Camp. Objectively, there is no such thing as sub-imperialism or non-Western imperialist powers (such concepts are subjective deceptions that cloud over the factual realities).

US and UK Military Bases

In March 2002, Monthly Review published an article with a list and map of countries with known US military bases, arguing that the extent of the US empire could be depicted by its bases.²³ This created a storm in some US military circles. Others have expanded on this work in subsequent years, including David Vine and World Beyond War (which has made an interactive map publicly available). ²⁴

The information about the location of these bases opened a window onto the absolutely pervasive nature of US military hegemony. The location and number of bases is valuable for understanding the shape and trajectory of imperialism by illuminating its frontiers and showing its role in policing them.

There are 902 known US military bases and 145 known UK military bases described below.²⁵

Due to the secrecy of the US military and government, there is a lack of data on US military functions that occur inside these bases and the actions launched from US military forces located there. This makes a full qualitative analysis of US foreign military activities incomplete. Some of the analytical deficiencies include that:

Listed bases exclude the facilities and locations of the many privatised military functions that the US has created over the last 40 years. Companies such as DynCorp International, Fluor Corporation, AECOM, and KBR, Inc. run operations worldwide, including in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.²⁶

They do not include ‘unofficial’ projects by the US military like the commandeering of Terminal 1 in Kotoka International Airport in Ghana’s capital city, in which US soldiers do not need passports or visas to enter (only their US military ID) and US military aircrafts are ‘free from boarding and inspection’.²⁷ Terminal 1 is thus a de facto US military base. Ghana has ceded national sovereignty to the US.²⁸

They exclude essential projects for the US military-industrial-digital communications complex. Many undersea cable terminus locations are controlled by US intelligence-cleared officials only. Control of the undersea cable communications of the world is one of the key US intelligence priorities.²⁹ This is part of the NSA ‘Collect It All’ program to gather all communications of the world and store them in places like the Bluffdale Utah Data Centre (code-named ‘Bumblehive’), the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative data centre.³⁰

They exclude secret military projects and locations (including host-nation facilities known as ‘lily pads’), although some have been exposed and included.³¹

There is little information regarding US military movements between locations, the nature of the activities carried out (such as troop movements or targeted assassinations), and the volume of goods, planes, and vessels.

Not all bases are equal in scale or function, assessing relative importance is near impossible. Sometimes a single building is classified as a base because it is discontiguous from other buildings a kilometre away. Some bases are massive and destructive to everything in their path – like the military facilities in Guam, destroying the natural environment and the lives of people living there. Others are known as small spy network installations.

The result of these limitations is a tendency to report on what is measurable, not what is unknown but strategic.

First, we provide a map using World Beyond War data that shows which countries have bases without showing the exact number in each country. This helps to reduce possible incorrect comparisons. The existence of even one US base within a country means that the country has already ceded some national sovereignty to the US. Second, for completeness, we include below two charts (one for the Global North and one for the Global South) that list countries with known bases as per World Beyond War.

Figure 6 shows the US has at least 902 foreign military bases. They are heavily concentrated in bordering regions or buffer zones around China and seriously undermine the sovereignty of Global South countries.³²

US foreign military bases not only exist in the Global South, but also have a significant presence in the Global North (Figure 7). More than two-thirds of known bases are concentrated in the two countries defeated in World War II: Germany and Japan.

Figure 8 lists the locations of US foreign military bases in Global South countries and territories. The Republic of Korea hosts 62 permanent US military bases.

Figure 9 shows the scale of the US military footprint: 36 million square metres in 49,000 buildings covering 245,000 hectares. Ranked by number of buildings, the three Axis powers are in the top four.

Whilst the sun now happily sets without concern for the British Empire, Figure 10 shows how large the UK network of bases remains, with its focus on West Asia and Africa.

US and UK Military Invasions, Interventions, and ‘Deployments’

NATO countries conduct extensive military deployments and interventions worldwide, supported by their vast network of bases.

Figures 11 and 12 are for the year 2022 only. Imperialist forces deployed 317 military operations in Global South countries and 137 in Global North ally nations, totalling 454 (45 of which are not UN member states). The imperialist nations who carried out the highest number of military deployments include the US (56), the UK (32), France (31), Italy (20), Germany (17), Spain (15), Canada (13), and the Netherlands (13) (Figure 11).³³

Figure 12 shows how Africa and West Asia remain the focal points of Western schemes, with the following five nations suffering the most military deployments in 2022 alone: Mali (31), Iraq (30), Lebanon (18), the Central African Republic (13), and South Sudan (13).³⁴

Looking at the geography of US and UK bases and Global North deployments, it is clear where the frontiers of US policing lie and how Eurasia and regions that buffer it are the battlegrounds of our time.

The US and its Global North allies, especially the UK, have had centuries of interventions as indicated in Figures 13 and 14. Since Congressional Research Services (CRS) is an official US government publication, it serves as a primary source of data on US military intervention. It is used to demonstrate the scale and historical longue durée of US military intervention. However, it must be noted that CRS does not include secret missions and does not aggregate its data to differentiate between various types of US Armed Forces’ overseas interventions. The data is not organised based on the qualitative and quantitative nature or scale of the instances. The listed instances (over 480) vary greatly in size, duration, legal authorisation, and significance.³⁵

The Military Intervention Project (MIP) uses a more comprehensive definition of military intervention that encompasses ‘united instances of international conflict or potential conflict outside of normal peacetime activities in which the purposeful threat, display, or use of military force by official US government channels is explicitly directed toward the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state actor’.³⁶ MIP has not published their database, so exact instances of all the military interventions they identify are not yet publicly available. As such, this report has only accessed summary data from the publication ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’ (2023) and could not produce a map based on MIP.

As seen in Figure 13, as of June 2023, the acknowledged data from the US Congressional Research Service shows that the US Armed Forces have been deployed to 101 countries between 1798 and 2023.³⁷ Figure 14 exposes the UK who has militarily invaded 170 countries and territories between 1169 and 2012.

According to MIP, between 1776 and 2019, the US carried out over 392 military interventions worldwide.³⁸ Half of these operations were undertaken between 1950 and 2019, and 25% of them occurred in the post-Cold War period.³⁹ The pace of US military interventions has clearly accelerated since 1991.

On International Working Women’s Day in 1950, Claudia Jones, a black communist and immigrant woman, addressed a rally of activists in the US. In different circumstances but with the same spirit, we share this report with the aim, to quote Jones, of ‘heightening [our] consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day, against monopoly oppression, against war and fascism’.⁴⁰

PART II: Evolution of Imperialism

The US dollar monopoly and the switch from creditor to debtor nation that began in the 1970s, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, ushered in a period where the United States attempted to create a self-crafted unipolar world order. Unipolarity could not be fully established because states – which the US called ‘rogue states’ – refused to submit to this new system.⁴¹

Over the past fifteen years, the project of US unipolarity has been greatly weakened. The period between the ‘great financial recession’ of 2008 and the February 2022 conflict between NATO and Russia has consolidated a quantitative and qualitative change in global imperialism.

A key historical question flowing from this has been the depth and consequences of inter-imperialist rivalries. This has deep strategic and political implications: will other imperialist powers break with the US on fundamental issues or subordinate their own interests to those of the US?

Today, the facts show these differences are no longer strategic. Imperialism has consolidated a new stage of existence best described as Hyper-Imperialism. Later, we explain why we chose this term.

Some of the features of this new stage include the following:

China has emerged as the largest and most dynamic economy in the world. The growth of the Global South exceeds that of the Global North. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in Asia is significantly higher than in the G7 countries.

Despite its remaining economic strengths, the US is facing meagre growth and is declining relative to the rise of the Global South (with China’s growth being a major locomotive). This is evidenced by total GDP, industry, trade, infrastructure, and 5G communications. The US is making aggressive attempts to curtail China’s economic growth and its role in global initiatives such as BRICS10. The US is leading the world into increased protectionism.

The US has rapidly advanced hybrid warfare, including US sanctions (inflicted on more than one in four countries around the world).⁴² The US seizure of national reserves (from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Afghanistan) has been a rude awakening to many in the Global South.

The US has now set its sights on the domination of Eurasia, where the West faces Russia and China, two powerful countries with a combined strong economic, technological, military, energy, and food capacity. The complete demilitarisation of the long border between China and Russia and their announced ‘no limits’ partnership is a testament to both countries’ common interests in peace and security.

There is a clear and present danger that imperialism will continue its militarist path and rely on its military dominance to offset its growing relative economic and political decline. The political and military interests of the imperialists have now become paramount. Short-term economic losses are being taken. ⁴³ The interests of individual capitalists or groups are secondary.

US dollar hegemony, financialisation, and technological ability allow finance to move trillions of dollars in trades in milliseconds, which has changed the mechanics of capitalist accumulation and its ownership. European and Japanese capitalists invest their capital in the same structures as those of their US class brethren, albeit under the control of the latter.

The US enhanced its already vast ‘soft power’ infrastructure based on the rise of a new generation of advanced social media and video streaming, under the full control of US monopolies, all of whom are explicitly integrated into the US military industrial digital complex.

The contradictions between the imperialist countries are now non-antagonistic and secondary. Germany, Japan, France, and all other imperialist powers must subordinate their short-term and medium-term interests to the fundamental interests of the United States. Their work is coordinated in NATO+. Official policy documents state that their strategy on China is to de-risk. Yet, Germany’s Bundestag officials, for example, are leading the calls for the isolation of China, even though that entails a considerable loss of markets for ‘German’ manufacturers.⁴⁴ There is also a simultaneous internal drive to re-militarise Germany.

New multilateral institutions and alternative development financing models emerging from the Global South are gaining momentum. This is evident by the breadth of support for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the growing interest in joining BRICS, now BRICS10. Nearly 80% of UN member states participate in the BRI, comprising around 64% of the global population with their combined economies representing 52% of the world’s GDP (Purchasing Power Parity) in 2022.⁴⁵ BRICS10 countries now encompass 45.5% of the world population, with 35.6% of the share of the world GDP (PPP). In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10% of the world population, their share of the global GDP (PPP) is 30.4%.⁴⁶

The Global South is losing confidence in the US and Europe’s economic, political, and moral leadership. China, not the US, facilitated Saudi Arabia and Iran’s breakthrough diplomatic agreement. Russia and China now conduct most of the trade between the two countries in their own currencies. BRICS10 is setting up a working group to explore alternatives to the use of the US dollar, including international payment systems and a possible new reserve currency. On the vote for the UN resolution on a ceasefire in Gaza (A/ES-10/L.25), the Global North was outnumbered, with 14 votes against and 120 in favour.

For the first time in over 600 years, there is now a credible economic and political alternative to the domination of world affairs by the Europeans and their descendant white-settler colonial states. First, is the socialist grouping led by China. Second, are the growing aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernisation, and multilateralism, emerging from the Global South.

Given these shifts, leaders of the US political ruling class at the Centre for New American Security (CNAS) – the Washington-based think tank and the US government’s intellectual core – have defined US geo-strategy as the dual defeat of Russia and China, which would mean that the Global North would gain control of Eurasia. The size, share of natural resources, military power, geographic proximity, and independence from imperialist domination of China and Russia are the key factors in their respective global outlook and strategic partnership.

These objective factors are much more dominant than the ideological ones. The US wants to accomplish their unfinished mission of de-nuclearising Russia. There are maps hanging in Washington that have been drawn to show both countries broken up into small chunks, vassal states of the West, without independence and certainly without nuclear weapons.

As pictured in Figure 15, China, Russia, the DPR Korea, and Iran are the four nuclear (or potentially nuclear) powers that are the centre of the frontline attack from imperialism. China and Russia are the top two targets, the former due to its economic strength and the latter due to its nuclear arsenal. Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Belarus are also immediate targets for regime change.

The world faces a very difficult and dangerous moment. Countries in the Global South are highly diverse and heterogeneous, do not form a bloc, and are not ideologically aligned. They certainly have no military alliances. Some – the Republic of Korea and the Philippines – have become enmeshed in the US military sphere.

What they do have is a shared history. They have suffered hundreds of years of colonial and semi-colonial abuse by the Global North. The whiter nations have spent the last fifty years trying to airbrush from history the terror they unleashed on the world’s darker peoples, including those who live within their own borders.

Western media revels in the vast differences within the Global South. The Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement, despite being weaker, continue to exist. The developments stronger sense of shared identity amongst Global South countries cannot be easily dismissed. The demand for national sovereignty is deeply democratic. It remains a crux matter for improving the lives of the popular classes in the Global South and is also a necessary step towards socialism.

The First World War (WWI) ushered in the Russian Revolution (1917), followed by the creation of the Soviet Union, the world’s first fully functioning workers’ state and a wave of revolutionary national liberation struggles. The Second World War (WWII) ended with the creation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (1948) and the People’s Republic of China (1949), which were followed by another wave of national liberation struggles that included important socialist victories, such as in Viet Nam (1954 and 1975) and Cuba (1959).

We are not living in a comparable period of revolutions today. Yet, there is a clear new mood and an awakening of the spirit to advance the incomplete national liberation projects that began in the two previous periods. The domination of the Western neo-colonial system is being questioned. We are witnessing ‘changes not seen in 100 years’ and entering a new period of history.

Summarily, we can say there are eight main contradictions evident in the world:⁴⁷

Moribund US-led imperialism vs. emergent China-led socialism.

Parasitic rent-seeking capital vs. societies’ requirements for environmentally sustainable development, industry, agriculture, and employment.

US-led imperialism vs. the urgent necessity for national sovereignty of the socialist and capitalist countries within the Global South.

The ruling classes of the Global North vs. the bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries in the Global South.

The white supremacist ruling class of the G7 (and the rest of the Global North) vs. the popular classes (workers, peasants, and lower petty bourgeoise) in the darker nations of the Global South.

The bourgeoisie and upper strata of the Global South capitalist countries vs. the popular classes of the Global South.

Western imperialism vs. the future of the planet and human life.

The internal contradiction between the Global North bourgeoisie vs. millions of the working class (poor and increasingly growing sections of the skilled and semi-skilled) in the Global North.

As we have already begun to do with the military, we attempt here to analyse this new stage of imperialism, the internal functioning of the imperialist camp, and to examine the Global South’s composition and connotations to understand the world’s primary contradictions today.

Conquest, Racism, and Genocide: The Common History of the Imperialist Camp

The wealth of the Global North originated from historical theft through violent dispossession over centuries (Figure 16).⁴⁸ Economic stagnation and demands for growth spurred the looting of resources from other regions. This began as early as the military invasions of the Crusades against Arab and Muslim areas of West Asia (1050–1291).

The end of the European Medieval Warm Period (which lasted from about 950AD to 1250AD), and the catastrophe of the Black Death (1346–1353) tilted things in favour of peasants, away from the aristocracy. The peasant rebellions and charters of the forest throughout Europe were a sign that capitalism’s future was far from sealed.

Europe then commenced its trajectory as a world hegemon through its militarised maritime powers, beginning as early as 1415 with Portugal’s invasion and capture of Ceuta, a fortified Moroccan port – a date we use to mark the now over 600 years of Western domination. The first European colonial power, Portugal, used Genovese capital to fund its expeditions, and the rest of Europe followed suit in the 1400s.

The conquests of the darker nations of the world, the subsequent dispossession of peoples from their lands, and the subordination of their labour saw racial ideologies emerge. This ideological layer infiltrated the base and superstructure of both European societies and the peoples they conquered. It is most pronounced in the white settler colonial states, which were racial projects from the very beginning of their existence. Within these white settler colonial states, the US and Israel now represent the most acute, permanent, and deeply ingrained history of racial-religious projects.

Economic analysis shows that the real rise in capitalist investment in the UK began when slavery’s profits and plunder of countries such as India enabled the historic rise in fixed capital investment and was decisive in so-called capitalist primitive accumulation and the financing of the ‘industrial revolution’. In a 2022 study, Utsa Patnaik indicated that the UK extracted US$ 45 trillion (using a compound interest rate formula since it remains unrepaid) from India between 1765 to 1936.⁴⁹ The overwhelming bulk of leading UK institutions profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racial ideological underpinning, in turn, has shaped the later development of both capitalism and imperialism.

Over the centuries, Europe created several further white-settler colonial projects outside its historic core in the Americas and Australasia, including in Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The ‘successful’ ones did not do so by settling on uninhabited land, the myth of terra nullius, but rather through genocide and military conquest in creating majority white populations and states. Germany perpetrated the first twentieth century genocide, murdering approximately 80,000 Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia between 1904 to 1908. Five of these remain today: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel, all projects of Britain – the latter having begun its colonial conquests in the mid-1500s in Ireland. . Britain’s role in the Americas resulted in the creation of the United States of America. The infamous British Balfour Declaration (1917) was central to the formation of Israel at the expense of the then-UK colony Palestine. The Zionist mission needed to create in Israel a barrier to the ‘barbaric hordes’ of Asia. No other nation is as influential in the US as Israel. The US, due to its size and role, remains the dominant force of world terrorism, but Israel has an outsized role in violence and military spending. It has nuclear weapons that the Western media conveniently downplays.

From creation to modern times, the US has been defined as a racial project. In American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1992), David E. Stannard estimated that within the first 150 years of the European conquest of the Americas, as many as 100 million Indigenous people may have died because of the conquest and its aftermath, including disease, warfare, and enslavement.

By 1860, nearly four million black people were slaves in the US alone.⁵⁰ In 2022, over 720,000 black people were incarcerated in US prisons and jails. Black people represented 38% of the prison population despite being only 12% of the US population. The US has nearly 20% of all prisoners in the world despite having only 5% of the world’s population.⁵¹ Over 500 years after slavery began (with the earliest recorded arrival of a slave ship in 1519), the US still puts tens of thousands of black people in solitary confinement, despite this being considered a form of torture by the United Nations.⁵² It was only in 2013 that the state of Mississippi officially ratified the 13th amendment which abolished slavery – first officially noted in the constitution on 6 December 1865.⁵³ We can only understand the ideology of the US ruling class by recognising the racialised character of its class structure.

The 2023 NATO declaration and the unified support for Israeli genocide against the Palestinians is ample proof that imperialism cannot be divorced from historic racial aspects. For over 600 years, European and white-settler states have sought to and succeeded in dominating the whole world.

Since WWII, the US has sought to extend this rule for at least a millennium. Initially, all the states within the imperialist camp were white. With the absolute defeat of Japan in WWII, including using atomic bombs, Japan was assimilated into the imperialist camp, eventually achieving what the South Africans coined ‘honorary white’ status. This was particularly possible because Japan was a previously fascist power that also tied its imperialist expansion to racialised practices.

Imperialism also has racialised patriarchal foundations, which trace back to how the sexual division of labour, the control of women’s reproductive capacities, and the exploitation of women’s unpaid work were reshaped within Western colonisation, as preconditions for the international expansion of capital accumulation.⁵⁴ From then to now, gender-based subordination and violence have been used extensively in warfare and conquest, from the sexual slavery of tens of thousands of ‘comfort women’ during Japan’s military occupation in China and Indonesia, to the current sexual exploitation that unfolds inside the US military bases in the Philippines.⁵⁵

It is not an accident that the United States shows up in seven of the eight categories of historical violence in Figure 16. This process did not begin in the 1890s with the development of modern imperialism. It can be traced back to 1492 with the first European invasion of the Americas.

In October 2023, out of 193 members of the UN, only the United States and Israel voted against ending the illegal embargo and blockade against heroic Cuba. When an initial draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza was drafted on 16 October 2023, not one single white member of the US House of Representatives initially signed it.⁵⁶ There is a throughline from the Portuguese slave traders in West Africa to the Israeli and US genocidaires in Palestine.

History and Definition of ‘Hyper-Imperialism’

Pre-History

The pre-history of modern imperialism began in 1415 with the advent of European maritime expansion. Africa was the first victim, followed by the colonisation of the Americas and the genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples, and then the rapid dependence by Europe (and its settler states) on blood-soaked capital from human slavery, which lasted 400 years.

Britain’s existence as a modern power started with the vampiric dependency on the blood of slaves and colonial labourers. The British were responsible for millions of deaths in the Atlantic slave trade and its colonial conquests. Slave labour in the Americas – as well as the British capture of a good part of Spanish and Portuguese colonies’ surplus – provided the ‘special’ ingredient to so-called primitive or originary accumulation (‘ursprüngliche Akkumulation’, the term used by Marx in Capital).⁵⁷

US imperialism, in addition to starting as a racial project, has a unique path of capitalist development, including the following:

A highly profitable capitalist form of slavery.

A state unbridled in its expansion in a large territory, without any holdovers from feudalism.

The only major imperialist country whose territory was not militarily attacked by other imperialists.

An imperial power beginning after Europe had already divided the world.

A self-defined unlimited power through the Monroe Doctrine (1823), as well as concepts such as Manifest Destiny and US exceptionalism.

Since the advent of modern industry, the capitalist world system has consisted of two successive periods of dominance by a single capitalist power – first the UK and then the US. From the late eighteenth century to WWII, Britain was considered the dominant force in international finance. However, this openly collapsed when Britain abandoned the pound’s convertibility to gold and ended the gold/pound standard in 1931. In reality, US dominance was clear from WWI and acknowledged US hegemony began in 1945, with Europe in tatters. At the core of the imperialist system, therefore, is what can be called the Anglo-American Project.

The size of the US economy overtook Britain’s in the 1870s, but US per capita GDP (PPP) did not equal Britain’s until the twentieth century. By 1913, the US economy was twice the size of Britain’s in GDP (PPP).⁵⁸ However, it was not until 1945 (with the US being five times greater than the UK) that US hegemony was fully and formally established. At that point, the US was manufacturing more than half of the products in the world.

History

Vladimir Lenin’s work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), drawing heavily on the work of Rudolf Hilferding’s 1910 book Finance Capital, explained the rise of finance capital during the last period of the nineteenth century – marking the shift from classical liberal capitalism to finance-driven imperialism.⁵⁹ The increase in the organic composition of capital meant that greater and greater outlays of capital were needed to expand production. This went beyond the ability of most individual capitalists engaging in classical competition, leading to domination by oligopolies and monopolies with the reorganisation of the financial system to meet their requirements.

In parallel with this were technological changes. The switch from steam power to electric power in the 1890s saw a leap in the productive forces and of factory production: higher energy efficiency, lower maintenance, decentralisation, a reconfigured factory floor layout, mass production, and a massive increase in the division and socialisation of labour. This type of rapid change in the productive forces happened again later with the invention of the transistor and the rise of computers.

Lenin noted five characteristics of this new stage: the rise of finance capital and the financial oligarchy; the concentration of production and monopolies; the export of capital; the rise of monopolist cartels, which ‘shared’ the world among themselves; and the completion of the territorial division of the whole world amongst the largest capitalist powers, along with the increasing conflict between the imperialist states.

These developments meant that a new, highest, and last stage of capitalism had begun, i.e., the stage of modern imperialism. There cannot be another new stage of capitalism (as a system with no competition would not be capitalism).

Lenin’s book was written on the eve of the Soviet Revolution. Once the Soviet Union was formed, the conflict between labour and capital changed qualitatively and was no longer solely a domestic contradiction within countries but included contradictions between states with a different class basis.

Modern imperialism fully inherits the history of the European project’s domination and exploitation of the world. Lenin defines super-profits, a result of modern imperialism, as ‘a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world’.⁶⁰

Post-WWI, international capitalist divisions again intensified during the Great Depression (1929–1939), as various imperialist powers locked their economies behind tariffs and other barriers. Before the end of WWII, the US-led reorganisation of the global financial system was agreed to in Bretton Woods in July 1944. The convertibility of the main currencies into the US dollar and the US dollar into gold established the supremacy of the new ‘green gold’. To make sure its regulations were implemented and followed, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), later, the World Bank, were established. These two institutions have been key pillars of US domination over the Global South since then.

Post-World War Two

1945 saw the decisive victory by the United States among the capitalist powers, and the US dollar began its domination. The period from 1945 to 1971 was an expansionary phase of US imperialism. The US did suffer significant political losses during this period, including a number of newly formed socialist projects. However, confident of its own productive supremacy, the US began a radical reorganisation of the global capitalist system after WWII. It dismantled tariffs and other protectionist measures that it deemed unnecessary to its own advancement (but retained subsidy measures that advantaged its own capitalist firms). The post-WWII new ‘globalised’ organisation of world capitalism differed significantly in its international structure from the pre-1945 capitalist system. It achieved a more rapid development of the productive forces than the era of the previous colonial empires. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, behind the veneer of free trade, there were always monopolies, as Karl Marx said with respect to Britain. The US further developed this domination through imperialist monopolies guarded by an international military apparatus.

Formed in 1949, NATO initially had three objectives: first, to stop the spread of the communist spectre into Western Europe; second, to guarantee the military subordination of all other imperialists to the US; and third to create a military bloc to contain and eventually overthrow the socialist bloc countries. The US also began the domestication of the European elite and elicited their support for the North Atlantic project through economic integration and dependency (symbolised by the Marshall Plan beginning in 1948) and political subordination (such as through institutions like the Bilderberg Meeting, beginning in 1954).⁶¹

The US had three objectives in the colonial world. First, finalise the defeat of European control and remove barriers to US economic interests. Second, prohibit their alignment with the socialist bloc. Third, defeat any communist-inspired or -led revolutionary projects.

Outside a few exceptions, such as Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, the US never had the full aim or desire to rule or manage the full scope of political, economic, and social relations at the local level in what was then called the Third World. Using military power, covert operations, economic inducements, and American ‘soft power’, the US developed a strategy of neo-colonialism: nominal political independence and near-total economic subordination. The first institution responsible for the conscription of Europeans into the US hegemonic project post-WWII, the IBRD, pivoted to its work in the Global South once the Marshall Plan kicked in.

Neo-liberalism

The next phase of imperialism is generally called neo-liberalism. It emerged as a response to the economic stagnation that began in the 1960s (which became acute by the crisis of 1974) and the political threat of left-led Third World Projects.⁶² Neo-liberalism was first experimented with in Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976) by the ‘Chicago Boys’ under Milton Friedman. Both were implemented through bloody coup d’états that killed tens of thousands of people to eradicate support for left projects, with support from the US. The elections of Margaret Thatcher (1979) in UK and Ronald Reagan (1980) in the US paved the way for its global ascendancy.

The US had become, in current terms, a debtor nation by 1981. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 enabled the US to engage in a more naked imperialist projection, especially in the military realm. Salient features of neo-liberalism included the following:

The world experienced economic globalisation and the financialisation of monopoly capitalism, with ‘Super-Imperialist’ financial monopoly privileges created by the US sustaining the removal of the US dollar from the gold standard.

The US aggressively extended its intellectual property rights over the whole world and achieved near-perpetual global monopolies. The tangible goods economy was subordinated to the virtualised economy. Large areas of petty production were ruthlessly destroyed.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank consistently pursued austerity policies that impoverished and saddled the Global South with large levels of debt. That debt could only be repaid through exporting things that the Global North would pay for in US dollars. Unlike any other bank, the World Bank got to author its creditors economic policy, shrinking the state, and deflating local currency to secure the primacy of the US dollar. Privatisation, enclosures of the public sector, the withdrawal of the state role in the economy and society (especially in the Global South), and increased casualisation of labour were core demands of their policies. This resulted in increased poverty and inequality, such as the intensification of women’s unpaid reproductive work.⁶³

The disarticulation of factory production and supply chains (helped by huge technology changes and US subsidised oil prices) created not only massive increases in productivity but huge advantages to global capital and its multinational corporations at the expense of the working class. Capital was easily able to move parts of production between various small, weak Global South countries, and late-entrant industrial Global South countries like Brazil and South Africa suffered de-industrialisation. Socialism and China’s large size protected it from this fate.

There was a shift from production to speculative finance and monopoly-rent seeking capital. A strong deregulation of financial markets all over the world – and a revolution in communication technologies – made possible huge flows of financial speculative capital in real time.

A new advanced form of monopoly production and circulation became evident in multiple sectors of the economy. Notably, within the rise of digital monopoly capital, a few monopolies and oligopolies, such as Google, dominate the whole world (except for China, Russia, Iran, DPR Korea, Cuba and a few others).

There was a growth in the coercive state, growing high levels of inequality, and a rise in neo-fascist populism.

The rise of Western cultural, political, and foreign policy hegemony was possible due to the pervasiveness and economic monopoly status of US technologies, including Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter.⁶⁴

Michael Hudson’s work on Super Imperialism (1972) describes the great defeat of the rest of the world when the US abandoned the gold standard.⁶⁵ Rather than buy gold to maintain their currencies, the US forced other central banks to recycle their dollar surpluses into buying US Treasury bonds. This enabled it to force the rest of the world to pay its debts, including the debts incurred from the war against the people of Viet Nam. The US became a debtor nation but was able to outsource its debt through the instrument of the Dollar-Wall Street complex.

Technology and Soft Power

Accompanying this process were tremendous changes in technology and the development of the productive forces. Semi-conductors, for example, saw a 100-billion-fold increase in transistor density between 1954, when the first single working silicon transistor was created, and in June 2023, with the release of the Apple M2 Ultra chip with 134 billion transistors.⁶⁶

The US tech sector power came into existence, first, due to the importance of technological advancement to the military-industrial complex and, second, to the US dominance in world trade that allowed them to flex their commercial muscles to reinforce the centrality of Silicon Valley. Thus, Silicon Valley is both an enabler of core state military intelligence functions and one of the beneficiaries of it.

The underlying nature of what is called the ‘network effect’ allowed for rapidly established ‘natural’ monopolies and oligopolies in many technology areas. Like phone exchanges of a hundred years ago, once a company like Google passed a threshold of market share in search functions and monetised it, they became an oligopoly. Technologies like cloud computing enabled Amazon to move from being solely a retail industry monopoly to challenging Google and Microsoft in new markets.

The term ‘soft power’ was developed by Joseph Nye in the late 1980s, but it is just a label for the extension of the aspect of Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony to US imperialism. The following ‘industries’ are part of US global hegemony: culture, information, entertainment, non-profits (NGO’s), academia, and think tanks. All of these rely on a common centralised communications industry, which covers undersea optical cables, satellites, telecommunications networks, massive data centres, digital communications firms like Twitter (X), Facebook, and Google.

There have been approximately five stages of communications technologies in the last century:

Mass medium radio, the telephone, and ‘talkies’ (1920–1950).

Television and the rise of Madison Avenue advertising (1950–1970).

Digital revolution, the widescale growth of the Internet (which actually began as a US military project in 1969) (1980–2000).

Mobile and first-generation social media (2000–2005).

Pervasive mobile, smart devices, and OTT streaming video monopolies, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, CGI, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and soon, AI influenced media (2005–present).

Each of these five generations of technologies were commercialised and then ‘weaponised’ under the watchful eye of US military and intelligence agencies. Hollywood is infamous for these ties. The fifth generation of technologies represent a quantitative and qualitative leap in capacity. US tech and media companies, proxies for US hegemony, now effectively control the bulk of voices that the youth of the Global South hear. While X may be declining and was mainly a space for the chattering classes, Facebook and Instagram and streaming services like Netflix penetrate the lives of billions of the working class.

Let’s take the case of India. During the first ten months of 2023, there were 510 million unique internet viewers in India, who spent a total of 371 billion (B) hours with 2.9 trillion views. 105B of these hours were spent on social media, 74B on entertainment, 10.5B on news, 10B on retail, and 12.8B on other (mainly finance). During the month of October 2023, those ages 18–24 years old spent on average 940 minutes on Instagram, 708 on YouTube, 387 on Facebook, and 117 on X. For all ages the time spent on Facebook, Instagram, and X has more than doubled since January 2020. During October 2023, the following OTT video streaming led in millions(M) of viewers: 170M – Disney, 99M – MX Player (Indian firm reportedly under talks with Amazon), 92M – JioCinema (Reliance, Paramount, and James Murdoch), and others like ZEE5, Netflix, and Sony. Despite the rise of Bollywood, Hollywood is still present in India.⁶⁷

Globally, Western media has used four types of censorship with social media: Shadow banning or ghosting (secret suppression of viewers), white and blacklists (prioritising desirable content; deprecating or eliminating unwanted content), private non-visible algorithmic manipulation, and now even direct removal and suppression of content and/or users.

An estimated 73% of internet traffic is conducted by so-called ‘bad bots’, including state-controlled fake user accounts by the United States and Israel in particular.⁶⁸ More than half of this traffic uses evasion techniques to mimic human behaviour. These techniques are systematically deployed for a range of US soft-power campaigns, including for elections and popular sentiment.

The Financial Times, noting ‘America’s cultural supremacy’, worries on behalf of the empire thus: ‘To retain immense cultural reach is a wonderful cushion for a post-peak superpower. The trick is to not fall asleep on it’.⁶⁹

However, the level of detailed control of every single phone call, message, and key stroke by US intelligence results in very high stakes for the Global South. Digital sovereignty requires serious attention and cannot be dismissed.

Fictitious Capital

Karl Marx critically analysed the rise of fictitious capital in Volume III of Capital.⁷⁰ The latest report from the Bank for International Settlements reports that the total notional value of outstanding derivatives (the three types of which are interest rate, foreign exchange, and equity) reached US$ 715 trillion at the end of June 2023, up 16% in six months, over four times the world GDP (PPP), and over seven times the world GDP in current exchange rate (CER) terms.⁷¹ The gross market value of these derivatives was nearly US$ 20 trillion.

Hedge funds such as Bridgewater Associates and private equity firms such as BlackRock engage in this hyper-speculation. One analogy used to help explain derivatives is that if you stand between two mirrors at a slight angle to each other, you can see a long series of images of yourself. You remain real, but the images are ephemeral.

Whilst the capital is fictitious, the results are not. The expropriation of the natural goods and companies of the Global South now happens at a scale of trillions of US dollars at a speed of milliseconds.⁷²

2008–2022: A Transition

The defeat of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a new feeling of eternal confidence in imperialism from US capital. Now they could expropriate the markets of the former Soviet Union and have the sense of accomplishing Manifest Destiny. The idea of the ‘end of history’ and the emergence of the sentiment of unilateralism dominated the thinking of the Council of Foreign Relations and other strategic US institutions.

Confronted with a decline in the rate of capital creation in their economies, and as financialisation and intellectual property rights enhanced the prevalence of monopolies, a larger proportion of capital avoided productive investments and increasingly sought short-term gains, becoming even more speculative.

The 2007–2008 financial crisis – what we call the start of the Third Great Depression – meant that previous tools to fight stagnation proved increasingly ineffective. China’s imperviousness to this crisis added to the alarm of the Global North. The following 14 years saw a transition period marking the end of the neo-liberalism phase. From the early 2000s until 2022, major shifts began to take place. Some accelerated the consolidation of capital – others signalled the beginning of an existential crisis of capital:

The most important single change was the rise of China as the largest economy in the world when measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

The Global South moved from 40% of world GDP to 60% when measured in PPP.

The Third Great Depression led to a further drop in GDP growth rates. By 2022, 10-year average per capita growth rates in Europe were less than 1% and in the US 1.5%.

European and Japanese capital were ‘de-nationalised’, accelerated by the rapid changes to the capital markets. They are now fully integrated, dependent on, and subordinate to the US on fundamental issues.

China consolidated itself as a socialist project and the Western hope for a new ‘Chinese Gorbachev’ completely failed.

NATO countries increased the number of their global military interventions but were confronted by a series of defeats such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even, to an extent, Syria.

The US decision to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and use Ukraine as a proxy at the centre of the move to control Russia resulted in an important military conflict between nuclear powers.

The US, facing relative economic and political hegemony, began to massively expand the use of sanctions, lawfare, tariffs, and seizure of foreign currency reserves.

To attempt to stop China’s technological advance, the US began using tariffs and protectionism. It began a full-fledged soft power attack on China and started a New Cold War.

Major voices in the US ruling class openly talk of the possibility of using its military hegemony to block China. Since they have also ‘lost’ Russia, at least with Vladimir Putin in power, the US is focused on planning how to complete their historic mission to subordinate Eurasia once and for all. This would ultimately entail the de-nuclearisation and potential dismemberment of both Russia and China.

Periodisation of Imperialism

Imperialism has changed over the last 100 years. We can roughly describe a few key periods as follows:

1890–1916: The rise of modern imperialism.

1917–1939: The birth of the Soviet Union, the decline of British hegemony, continued extreme inter-imperialist rivalry, the rise of fascism, the spread of socialist ideas across the world, and the Great Depression.

1940–1945: The worldwide battle against fascism, and German and Japanese Aggression.

1945–2008: The establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the era of US hegemony within the imperialist camp, the advance of national liberation struggles in the Global South and end of direct colonialism, the rising importance of socialist projects like Cuba and Viet Nam, dramatic changes in the productive forces, and numerous wars in which the US murdered tens of millions. This period could be subdivided into two parts: the so-called golden era of US imperialism during the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1970s and the turn to stagnation and neo-liberalism.

2008–2023: The false hope of US unilateralism was replaced with an awareness that a powerful non-white socialist project would, within a lifetime, overcome the US economically. In 1918, on the 73rd day of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Vladimir Lenin left his office at the Smolny Institute (Petrograd) and danced in the snow. He celebrated the fact that the Soviet experiment had outlasted the Paris Commune. On 18 November 2023, the People’s Republic of China marked 27,077 days of existence, exceeding the duration of the Soviet socialist project. As noted by President Xi Jinping, we are entering a period not seen in 100 years.

In summary, these changes show a transition to what is best described as a new stage of imperialism: Hyper-Imperialism.

PART III: The World Defined

The Global North Defined

The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc at present composed of 49 countries, as pictured in Figure 17. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. This US-led bloc is the imperialist camp in today’s world.

As pictured in Figure 18, the Global North is fundamentally a North Atlantic project, with two outlying countries – Australia and Japan.

Inspired by Samir Amin’s concept of the Triad but expanding and modifying it to suit the realities of the present, the organisation of the Global North bloc can be best understood as layers of four concentric rings.⁷³ The position of each country within each ring depends on its rapport with the United States and how close its intelligence services are to those of the US, which is explained below.

GN Ring 1: Six Core US-Led Anglo-American Imperialist Countries

Ring 1 (listed in Figure 19) represents the inner core of imperialism. The white English-speaking victors of  WWII, the Five Eyes (US, UK in 1946, Canada in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956) established themselves as the Praetorian Guard of what can be called the Anglo-American Project. It is composed of the UK and the white settler states it spawned. Israel, treated by the US as the sixth eye, is unofficially part of the inner core. The cohesion of countries in this ring remains; an example is the trilateral security alliance AUKUS, created in September 2021.

A fundamental key to understanding the Global North is the special relationship between the United States and Israel. They are white settler states, founded on and justified by white supremacy and religious zealotry, and are the core of Ring 1 of the Global North. The US was established by white, religious extremists who, in 1690, conceived and established their colonial settlements as ‘plantations of religion’.⁷⁴ They believed that only they, the white Puritans, could realise God’s plan in the ‘American wilderness’. Their genocide against the native Americans and enslavement of Africans were viewed as the inevitable and obvious outcome of their racial and religious superiority.

Israel was the creation of British and US imperialism and was organised by the leaders of the Zionist movement. It was described by the military expert for The Guardian, Herbert Sidebotham, during WWI as follows: ‘The only possible colonists of Palestine are the Jews… at once a protection against the alien East and a mediator between it and us, a civilisation distinct from ours yet imbued with our political ideas’.⁷⁵ For the imperialists, ‘freedom from discrimination’ was only the pretext for the formation of the Judaic and white supremacist state of Israel.

As indicated earlier, between 1776, the year of independence from the British, and 2019, the US has spent 228 of 245 years in war/conflict, and only 17 years in ‘peace’.

During its history, the United Kingdom’s forces (or forces with a British mandate) have invaded, had some control over, or fought conflicts in 171 of the world’s 193 countries that are currently UN member states, or nine out of ten of all countries. ⁷⁶

In its 72 years of existence, Israel has ‘officially’ started 16 military conflicts with the Palestinians and other Arab nations. One-fourth of them were under the rule of Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999; 2009–2023). Of course, not included in these ‘official’ statistics are the multiple incursions by Zionist settlers and their army brethren against Palestinians.

Israeli white racialism and religious demagogy have morphed from ideological justifications into material forces that have contributed to the qualitative change in imperialism today. This is exemplified by, among other things, the per capita military spend of the US, which is 12.6 times that of the world’s average, with Israel’s 7.2 times, the two largest in the Global North. In the first month following 7 October 2023, Israel killed more civilians than all the civilian deaths in the Ukraine since 2022 and detonated more tons of explosives than the combined weight of the two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁷⁷

The US Congressional Research Service reported that: ‘Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II… Israel is the first international operator of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Department of Defence’s fifth-generation stealth aircraft, considered to be the most technologically advanced fighter jet ever made’.⁷⁸ Adjusting for inflation, US aid to Israel from 1951 to 2022 totalled US$ 317.9 billion.⁷⁹

Nonetheless, it is the US — not Israel — who is driving the agenda in the region following 7 October 2023. Blinken’s ‘shuttle diplomacy’ sets the rules and tones for Israel’s military operations and the ‘proportionate’ actions against the Palestinian resistance and regional powers. The US provides the necessary political and military support for Israel to eliminate the Palestinian resistance ‘permanently’, deter Iran and its allies, and push forward normalisation with Arab neighbouring countries. All these US interventions seek to lay the ground for building the planned India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which is not only an economic corridor but essentially an ideological and political plan to block China’s increasing integration and influence in the region. Therefore, Israel constitutes a ‘central junction’ for the US-programmed IMEC, which is outlined within the framework of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment (PGI), a Global North world plan, aiming essentially at countering China’s BRI and any form of Global South long-lasting cooperation.

GN Ring 2: Nine Core European Imperialist Powers

As listed in Figure 20, the countries in Ring 2 are the closest to the US-led inner core, namely Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Ring 2 is defined by each country’s proximity and affinity, and the trustworthiness of their intelligence functions to those of the United States.

‘Politics is a concentrated expression of economics’, Lenin explained.⁸⁰ The military function is the essential expression of this political concentration. Post-WWII, and with the advent of the Internet and social media, the control of communications and all its related functions has become a qualitatively new strategic intelligence asset of the state and has further advanced the US’s dominant hegemonic control of vast portions of the world.

Thanks to the work of Wikileaks and the bravery of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, the world was given its first public view into the secret world of intelligence relations among the imperialist forces.⁸¹

Instructively, the US prioritised its level of trust beyond the Five Eyes and the hidden special relationship with Israel. Subsequently, secretly but formally, the US created the Nine Eyes, which added Denmark, Norway, France, and the Netherlands. The Europeans were unwilling to have it be known, even privately, that Israel was a formal member. In addition, Israel did not fully trust many European powers with intelligence, so all parties allowed the US to continue having its special relationship with Israel.

Fifty years after WWII, the United States continued to exclude the former fascist powers of Germany, Italy, and Spain from the Five and Nine Eyes. Following the end of WWII, the US built an international system that was premised on the subordination and integration of the former fascist powers and the rest of Europe. This process of subordination and integration was evident in the military apparatus constructed by the United States, with NATO as one of the lynchpins. Establishing a system of US military bases in the defeated powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – allowed Washington to set aside any talk of a sovereign military or diplomatic project for the defeated.

In 2001, five other countries (Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden) were added to the Nine Eyes to become the Fourteen Eyes.⁸² Between 2005–2009, the US became increasingly alarmed about Russia and China. The unofficial ‘Pivot to Asia’ had begun; the official launch was delayed until Barak Obama took office in 2012.⁸³

GN Ring 3: Japan and Fourteen Lesser European Imperialist Powers

Ring 3 (listed in Figure 21), though made up of 15 countries, has a special focus on Japan, which has become a decisive front-line asset in the effort to curtail and suppress China and Russia. However, we have added here other secondary Western European powers, who, although loyal to the United States, are less strategic than others. A few of them, like Portugal, Finland, and Iceland, are part of NATO. Portugal is the only former fascist colonial power not in Ring 2 due to its small importance to US military intelligence (they are not in the Fourteen Eyes) and its smaller GDP.

Therefore, the third ring of the imperialist camp includes Japan and another 14 European countries (Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta, Iceland, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Monaco).

In the past several centuries, countries in the first three rings of the imperialist camp, other than Ireland, have caused massive human disasters. The United Kingdom, the US, and the Netherlands appropriated wealth through the African slave trade. Europeans implemented colonialism worldwide; the entirety of the Americas, nearly all of Africa, and more than half of Asia were dominated by colonisers. Anglo-Saxon white immigrants forcibly expelled or murdered Indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. There were several imperialist attempts to break up China, including the First Opium War, when Hong Kong was ceded in 1842, and then Taiwan at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. In 1884–1885, European colonisers arbitrarily partitioned Africa at the Berlin Conference. This violent methodology of the partitioning has continued unabated until today, as evidenced by the 2011 partition of Sudan and by the ongoing destruction of the country and its people. In 1919, they dismantled the Austro-Hungarian and German empires through the Treaty of Versailles, transferred rights of some areas of China (Shandong) to Japan, handed German colonies in Africa to victorious European powers, and re-established a world order led by Anglo-American forces. As a result of internal crises and imperialist rivalries, fascist states arose within this camp, triggering WWII and leading to the death of at least 50 million Soviet and Chinese people. In the final stages of WWII, the US used atomic bombs on civilians. To this day, the US still refuses to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons and has unilaterally withdrawn from key nuclear and missile treaties.

Since the end of WWII, Japan has become a strategic US ally. With the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida accepted the dominance of the US military over his country. During the Cold War, Japan played a significant role in containing the Soviet Union and China on the Eastern front, and this role continues today. Japan is the second country with the most US military bases as of July 2023 (98), only after Germany (171). To date, none of the German bases are in the former German Democratic Republic.

Although not officially a NATO member, since 2014, Japan has cooperated with NATO on an individual basis – most recently agreeing to the Individually Tailored Partnership Program in July 2023 – and has participated in the past two NATO summits. Japan also regularly participates in meetings held at NATO Headquarters in Brussels between NATO Allies and the four partners in the Indo-Pacific region at the level of ambassadors. This practical incorporation can be explained by the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, which states that ‘cooperation with partners in this region is key to addressing the increasingly complex global security environment, including Russia’s war on Ukraine, the shift in the global balance of power and the rise of China, and the security situation on the Korean Peninsula’.

In addition, Japan is the only G7 member not part of NATO. In 2022, China was labelled by the Japanese government as ‘the greatest strategic challenge ever to securing the peace and stability of Japan’ and announced plans to double official military spending to 2% of the GDP (on par with NATO countries) by 2027, overturning Japan’s post-WWII cap, which had official limited military spending to 1% of GDP.⁸⁴

GN Ring 4: Nineteen European Former Eastern Bloc Integrated into NATO

Ring 4 is composed of the European members of the former Eastern Bloc and the Eastern European members of the former Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon, which lasted from 1949 to 1991). They are a new category within imperialist camp and thus not included by Samir Amin in his seminal work on the Triad.

Ring 4 (listed in Figure 22) of the imperialist camp includes Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Albania, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Montenegro (except Belarus). Five countries were formal republics of the Soviet Union.

These countries were not previously part of the imperialist camp. To expand its hegemony, the US has targeted this region militarily, politically, and culturally. Serbia, part of the former Yugoslavia, was subjected to a 78-day NATO bombing in 1999. Despite not being a NATO member to this day, Serbia was compelled to participate in joint military exercises with NATO countries in June 2023.

Romania’s entrance to NATO did not involve a referendum. Instead, the ruling government modified the constitution, allowing senators to make the decision without consultation from the Romanian people.

US and western European expansion were done mainly through economic subordination and NATO’s eastern expansion. Fourteen are NATO members, whilst four (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) attended the NATO Vilnius meeting in June 2023. Some of these countries are governed by pro-NATO right-wing regimes (examples include Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia), and actively playing the role of frontline troops against Russia.

The Global South Defined

Outside the 49 countries of the Global North imperialist camp, making up the vast majority of the world’s population, are 145 countries that constitute the Global South (Figure 23).

The use of the term ‘Global South’ has primarily been a loose, imprecise reference. The actions over the last four years of the now fully aligned and integrated US-led Military Bloc have, however, created a large group of countries that are the ‘Rest of the World’. The ‘Rest of the World’ are thus aligned initially by ‘negative unity’, i.e., all its members are excluded. Consequently, they have become a negation of the imperialist camp. These countries include Russia and Belarus, which are not developing countries but are heavily targeted for regime change and subjugation.

The Global South includes mainly so-called ‘less developed’ or ‘developing’ countries, geographically associated with countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. It implicitly refers to countries that have been historically marginalised in the global economic system and are all grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. These countries were often called the Third World.

The Global South lacks cohesion, an agreed on collective identity, and unified organisation and action. Unlike the integrated Global North bloc, the Global South is not a unified group or bloc. These 145 countries each have distinct ideologies and political agendas, with differences in proximity and orientation towards each other and Global North countries. Various disputes exist among some of them, ranging from territorial disputes (take the case of Eritrea and Ethiopia) to intra-regional political power struggles (take the historical case of Saudi Arabia and Iran).

Much of the Global South pursues sovereignty, peace, and development, yet these countries rarely reach a global consensus on any issue. Often, this points to differences in the degree of proximity of any given country to the inner core of the Global North. As such, we arrange these countries in ‘groupings’ based on some common attributes rather than in an integrated, layered ring, or distinct blocs.

However, this does not mean that the Global South is – as some Western perspectives would have it – a fabricated concept devoid of substance. The Global South (Figure24) is former colonies or semi-colonies of the Global North imperialist camp, having suffered centuries of oppression and humiliation under imperialism. A handful of these countries share, to varying degrees of commitment or realisation, a socialist political orientation. Objectively, China’s current 2022 per capita income (U$12,850) makes it a developing country.⁸⁵ It is also because of this common historical background that Xi Jinping in his BRICS Business Forum 2023 speech (read by Wang Wentao) stated: ‘As a developing country and a member of the Global South, China breathes the same breath with other developing countries and pursues a shared future with them’.⁸⁶

The genealogical roots of the Global South can be traced to the Third World Project that attempted to shift the international balance of forces in favour of the interests of the newly politically independent but economically indentured countries in the mid-20th century. This included efforts of the Bandung Conference (1955), Non-Alignment Movement (1961), Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (1966), and the pursuit of a New International Economic Order (1974) through the formation of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (1964) by developing countries.⁸⁷

These countries hold historical and contemporary marginalisation in the global economic and political order in common. One of the most poignant but devastating examples of this commonality is the environmental and ecological damage that the Global North has visited upon Global South countries. Resource extraction and financial speculation on land and crops has led to deforestation, habitat destruction, soil degradation, and water pollution. This has created significant loss of biodiversity and large swathes of uncultivatable agricultural land – destroying local ecosystems and species and resulting in widespread hunger.

In addition, Global North multinational corporations are responsible for air, water, and soil pollution through nefarious methods; neo-liberalism ensures that there are no regulations to prevent these practices. Prohibited in the Global North but widespread in the Global South, agrochemicals and the generation of hazardous and other waste materials have increased health risks, especially to Indigenous people, women, children, and elders.⁸⁸ Manufacturing, mining, energy, and transportation companies continuously emit greenhouse gases, the greatest contributor to climate change, putting the Global South in imminent danger of catastrophe. Direct Foreign Investment by Global North multinational corporations have decimated the environment, destroyed agricultural lands, and increased the precarity of all working peoples. At the same time, the Global North uses the climate crisis to push more land grabbing and privatisation of biodiverse resources through the financialisation of nature.⁸⁹

All these 145 countries are now enduring the immense pressure of imperialist over-expansion. Some of the common challenges these countries continue to face include but are not limited to historical underdevelopment, primary sector dependence, limited industrialisation, external debt, trade imbalances, technological gaps, infrastructural deficit, and disproportionate environmental crisis.

Disillusioned by the challenges mentioned above, growing sections of the new bourgeoisie in Global South countries – who emerged through rapid economic growth over the past two decades, particularly in Asia – are gradually losing confidence in the political, economic, and moral leadership of both the United States and Europe. New centres of economic power, such as China, offer alternative development and investment models (e.g., through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative) and have become more attractive to the Global South bourgeoisie.

Among the 145 countries of the Global South, six groupings of countries can be identified. While each grouping has some identifiable shared traits, importantly, the grouping number correlates to the descending order of countries considered to be a threat to the US-led Anglo-American imperialist bloc. Membership in the groupings is dynamic and can change according to the political and economic conjuncture.

GS Grouping 1: Six Independent Socialist Countries

All six countries in Grouping 1 (Figure 25) are advancing socialism to varying degrees, and often take progressive international positions. Five of the six are in the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter.

China is the critical member in this grouping. Its GDP, measured by purchasing power parity, ranks first globally, almost tripling India’s. China’s GDP (PPP) corresponds to 119% of the United States’.⁹⁰ It has made the most significant advancement in human development by lifting 850 million people out of extreme poverty in the last four decades.⁹¹ Though it does not seek hegemony over the world system, it is viewed by the US and its allies as the prime threat to their hegemony, labelled in recent years as a ‘near-peer’ competitor in US State and Defence Departments’ strategy documents. China not only represents an economic threat but, with the resurgence of a stronger communist party under President Xi Jinping, represents a major political threat with its overt revitalisation of socialist and communist traditions. China is thrust by its national and social interests and its historical support for the Global South into the role of supporting counter-hegemonic processes and projects. China continues to publicly state a commitment to ‘narrowing the North-South gap’.⁹²

While China represents the major economic and political challenge to Global North hegemony today, Cuba and Venezuela represent the frontline of historical, socialist resistance. Cuba continues to push back against the suffering caused by the over six decades of the US-led economic embargo and blockade. Cuba and heavily sanctioned Venezuela have made no attempt to hide their pursuit of a socialist agenda. DPR Korea remains the West’s ‘bogeyman’ in the east, while Laos and Viet Nam have long-standing communist parties at the helm of their governments and are undergoing rapid economic development.

Ever since the founding of the Soviet Union, the world’s left forces have faced a contradiction between the needs of the state and people of the socialist projects and the needs of the working class in specific countries or regions. Strategic thinking by the working-class leaders in all countries is required to keep ‘contradictions amongst the people’ non-antagonistic and ensure that the decisive blow is directed at the centre of imperialism. Pursuing the dictum that communists have ‘no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’, requires an investigation of the concrete.⁹³ For example, defeats such as the fall of the Soviet Union are catastrophic for all workers. Numerous tactical decisions must be made to take advantage of the cracks in the imperialist camp to protect socialist projects and movements, whether in power or not.

GS Grouping 2: Ten Strongly Sovereign Seeking Countries

Countries in this grouping (Figure 26) are not socialist states but are prime targets of US-led regime change. These countries are fiercely defending their sovereignty and that of others (as seen by seven out of the nine voting against the US-backed resolution for Russian withdrawal in February 2023 and their full support of a ceasefire in Gaza).

Although these nations have different reasons for doing so, they face some of the most acute situations of the struggle for national sovereignty. They are on the frontline of the Global South’s struggle against imperialism. Whilst they are all either fully or partially economically dependent on the West, they are actively pursuing political independence. They are, therefore, subjected to extreme hybrid warfare from imperialism; put simply, most of these countries are included in US intelligence’s critical targets for regime change.

Particularly since the US-backed, right-wing coup in Ukraine in February 2014, followed by Crimea’s annexation for unification, Russia has been a primary target for regime change by the imperialist camp. The US and its allies have dedicated considerable resources towards weakening, dismantling, and denuclearising Russia; the US has provided more than US$ 90 billion in military assistance to Ukraine for the campaign against Russia from February 2014 to February 2022.⁹⁴ Belarus is geopolitically and economically aligned with Russia (such as through the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, formed in 1992, as well as the Union State of Belarus and Russia, formed in 1996) and, therefore, remains within the crosshairs of US intelligence.

Since the 1978 and 1979 revolutions that ousted US-aligned leaders, Afghanistan and Iran have been targets of US military intervention and political interference. Iran has been an obstacle to Western advances in the region, with its nuclear energy programme, strong regional influence in proxy conflicts, and consistent anti-Western (and anti-Israeli) posture. Afghanistan was invaded by the US in 2001, with the US spending two decades and over US$ 2 trillion (US$ 300 million a day) to gain a foothold in central Asia – eventually withdrawing in 2021.⁹⁵ Since 2011, Syria has been a battleground for US attempts to secure control over the whole of West Asia, a war that proves journalist Patrick Seale’s 1965 definition of Syria – ‘the mirror of rival interests’.⁹⁶

This group is growing, with countries such as Eritrea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger taking bolder steps to protect their national sovereignty. Eritrea has had a long-term hostility towards the US and being a target of US intervention via Ethiopia. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have rejected the neo-colonial presence of France in the Sahel and removed their Western-aligned political leaders. They have established both the Sahel Economic Alliance and the Alliance of Sahel States, aiming for economic and military cooperation. However, their political situation is still unstable, and they are struggling to guarantee their actual independence from imperialist powers.

GS Grouping 3: Eleven Countries Current or Historic Progressive

The countries listed in Figure 27 are allocated to this grouping based on two essential concerns: the relative degree to which they are targets of regime change and their role in publicly advancing international anti-imperialist stances. Those in this grouping are either the next in line for regime change (following Grouping 2) or are playing a clear role in speaking out against the interests of the imperialist camp.

Regarding countries that pursue progressive agendas, examples include Brazil under the Workers’ Party (PT) and South Africa under the tripartite alliance (which includes the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions), with the former showing leadership in building alternative intergovernmental institutions such as the South American Nations Union (UNASUR) in 2008, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2011, and the IBSA Dialogue Forum, which was supplemented by BRICS by 2009, with the latter playing an important role in building the African Union. These countries sometimes defend progressive international positions such as standing with Cuba against US sanctions in international organisations. Nepal abolished the monarchy in 2008, established a republic led by the left and has made significant strides in legally and politically emancipating historically marginalised communities.

Palestine has been under occupation and siege for over seven decades. Algeria has staunchly supported Palestinian self-determination and independence and, within the African Union, has been influential in promoting progressive stances on African unity and economic development. Following the popular coup in Niger, Algeria was the only African state to promptly advocate for non-military solutions to political crises.

These countries attempt to find a path of sovereign development within a global capitalist system yet confront severe internal contradictions. For example, South Africa was forced into significant economic concessions in the 1990s, including deindustrialisation and privatisation, leading to catastrophic results. Today, 57% of South Africans live below the poverty line, 46% are unemployed, and the share of manufacturing to the GDP has decreased from 25% in 1981 – during apartheid rule – to 12% in 2022.⁹⁷

Unlike China, for example, these nations have seen their revolutionary potential curtailed – or their revolutions did not culminate in socialism – but have tried to pursue progressive agendas in domestic, regional, and/or international spheres. These countries are considered by the US to have political positions that are inimical to the hegemony of the Global North. Many of these countries have experienced US interventions, hybrid warfare, sanctions, and government overthrows. Recent instances of these interventions include the coups in Honduras (2009), Brazil (2016), and Bolivia (2019). Zimbabwe continues to face US sanctions.

GS Grouping 4: Five New Non-Aligned Countries

With sizable economies of scale, the non-alignment that characterises countries in this grouping is economic, not political (Figure 28). These non-socialist countries are not reviving the political project of the Non-Aligned Movement. Most of these countries have had 50 years or more of independence from former colonial rulers and today have very different relationships to them.

Economically, all five non-aligned countries have significant GDPs (all ranking in the top 20 largest economies in GDP (PPP) terms in 2022) and are taking increasingly independent economic measures.

These countries have recognised that the US hoarding of foreign exchange reserves and sanctions against countries with 30% of the world’s population poses severe threats. Today, more than one in four countries are subject to UN or Western government sanctions, while 29% of the global GDP is produced in sanctioned countries, up from 4% in 1960s.⁹⁸

Politically, they are ambivalent. Militarily, Indonesia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia maintain very close relations with the United States. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest purchasers of advanced US weapons. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a less reliable partner for the West, notwithstanding Turkey being a NATO member.

This grouping shows highly contradictory behaviours on the international stage. They show some degree of slowly decreasing economic dependence on and alignment with the West and/or are prepared to oppose it on some key issues.

Despite India’s alignment with the US in organisations such as the QUAD, or its reactionary positions on Israel in its war on Gaza, since the start of the war in Ukraine, India has refused to accede to some important US demands, such as refusing to implement US sanctions against Russia. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar vocally defended his government’s refusal to accede to Washington’s pressure, saying at a press conference in June 2023, ‘A lot of Americans still have that NATO treaty construct in their heads… It seems almost like that is the only template or viewpoint with which they look at the world… That is not a template that applies to India’.⁹⁹ The conflict with Canada, and now with the US, over alleged Indian intelligence operations in their countries, is complicating the plan of the US to gain the support of India against China. The big national bourgeoisie of India is beginning to assert their interests.

Saudi Arabia differs from the US when its economic self-interests dictate, e.g., increasing Saudi-China investments (including oil deals paid in Chinese yuan) and using its partnership with Russia at OPEC+ to define the global price of oil. However, simultaneously, at the run-up to the Arab League summit in November 2023, Saudi Arabia blocked Algerian efforts to close US bases, blocked Iranian proposed military aid to Palestine, stopped a proposed trade boycott, and refused to curtail oil shipments to Israel. The Pentagon, CIA, and Saudi Arabia were front-line allies in the recent war against Yemen that took tens of thousands of lives. The US Special Forces provided Saudi pilots with the bombing coordinates of their targets.¹⁰⁰

Indonesia, home to the largest Islamic population in the world, has had a compounded average growth rate of the GDP (PPP) of 4.2% between 2012 and 2022.¹⁰¹ According to IMF forecasts, by 2030, Indonesia could be the fifth largest economy in the world by GDP (PPP). Its state-owned enterprises’ assets as a share of GDP increased from 43% in 2014 to 54% in 2018.¹⁰² In 2020, Indonesia banned the exports of raw nickel, a key component of lithium batteries. Indonesia accounted for 39% of global nickel production in 2022. Its total exports in current terms surged from US$ 183 to US$ 323 billion between 2020 and 2022.¹⁰³ On 2 February 2023, during the Mandiri Investment Forum in Jakarta, President Joko Widodo warned, ‘We must remember the sanctions imposed by the US on Russia. Visa and Mastercard could be a problem’. He also stated that, ‘If we use our own platforms, and everybody is using them, from ministries and local administrations to municipal governments, then we can be more secure’. Yet, in November 2023, the US (an active participant in the torture and assassination of 500,000+ Indonesian communists) and Indonesia signed an agreement upgrading their relations to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.¹⁰⁴ Indonesia withdrew its application to join BRICS in 2023 and has expressed public interest in becoming an OECD member.

Confronted with a war of aggression under international law, 1846 was the de facto moment that consolidated the emerging US imperial project in Mexico. Forced to exchange land for peace and cede 50% of its territory, the new Mexico-US border became a historical line that internally constitutes an inexorable and preordained determination. On the other hand, Mexico has a history that relentlessly returns to its anti-colonial roots, Indigenous culture, and anti-imperialist modern history. Very little analysis is given to the complex interdependency of Mexico and the US, e.g., in population, culture, economics, but perhaps more significant in terms of geopolitical security for the viability of US hegemony.¹⁰⁵ The government of López Obrador is, at multiple levels, an attempt of the Mexican social movements to launch a low intensity counter-neo-liberal reform. The concentration is on recovering the public property of all strategic resources, launching a new agrarian reform, and reclaiming land as social property. The current agrarian reform in Mexico guaranties by law the registration of 50.6 % of the territory as social communal property in the hands of campesinos and Indigenous communities (29,803 agrarian communes on 99.7 million hectares). However, the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, formerly the North America Free Trade Agreement) represents a constant impediment to the uncoupling or disentanglement of Mexico’s political position vis-à-vis the emerging Global South. In June 2023, the US began preliminary proceedings (through USMCA arbitration) to block the presidential decree that would take various measures to ban genetically modified corn, which makes up 96% of US corn exports.¹⁰⁶ The US is exhibiting more aggressive and interventionist policies to undermine the long and hard-fought historical gains of Mexican sovereignty. In 2022, Mexican President López Obrador refused to attend the VIII Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles after news emerged that the United States would not invite Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan leaders to the meeting.

The five countries in this grouping have differing political, economic, or military perspectives and different nuanced levels of closeness to the Global North. However, their growing new national bourgeoisies are gradually seeking alternative economic relations and occasional political divergences with the US, albeit out of self-interest and self-preservation. The question of the new national bourgeoisie emerging in the Global South is outside the scope of this text; it will be addressed in our 2024 research on capital formation and ownership in the Global South.

GS Grouping 5: One Hundred and Eleven Diverse Global South Countries

There are 111 countries that are not included in the previous Global South four groupings above, due to multiple diversities. Figure 29 lists the twenty largest economies; the full list is in the appendix. They do not share the same political views nor governmental systems. Eswatini, Qatar, and Bhutan are still governed by monarchies, whilst Libya, Syria, and Somalia do not have a single governing authority. A handful of countries have abandoned socialist agendas after being hamstrung by Western development finance, such as in the case of Angola and Mozambique. Due to imperialist political and economic intervention, a series of countries in this grouping suffer severe governmental dysfunctionality (breakdown of governance, authority, and law), and are almost entirely unable to provide for their people.

The economic performance of these countries varies significantly. For example, despite Nigeria being the second largest economy in Africa and having a GDP (PPP) fourteen times that of Cambodia, the former has seen a 0.4% negative annual average growth rate between 2012 and 2022, while the latter grew by an annual 5.3%.

Among these countries, they have different levels of military allegiance to the Global North. Egypt has been a strategic partner of Israel and the United States since 1979, while Bangladesh, Comoros, and Djibouti participated in submitting a referral to the International Criminal Court regarding the situation in the State of Palestine on 17 November 2023.

They have a range of internal conflicts and territorial disputes, such as in the case of Morocco’s colonial occupation of Western Sahara, beginning in 1975.¹⁰⁶ Others, for example the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti, are subjected to UN military interventions, where other Global South countries take part.

Countries in Grouping 5 participate in diverse multilateral platforms with both Global South and Global North nations. Membership in this grouping can change should a country develop more distinctive characteristics. For example, whilst Argentina has played historically progressive roles in the region, the recent right-wing drift currently precludes membership in that grouping today. Therefore, this is not a static or permanent position.

GS Grouping 6: Two De Facto US Military Colonies

The peoples of these two nations (Figure 30) largely align with the Global South. Both countries have had pro-US leaders, as well as independent-leaning leaders. However, these countries are – militarily – entirely controlled by the US.

Historically, both nations have been subordinated to the US through military conquest. After WWII, when the US had militarily occupied the Korean peninsula, and, later, at the end of the Korean War, the Republic of Korea retained a large US military presence. Its economic reconstruction was almost entirely funded and directed by the US. Following the Spanish-American War, the Philippines was a US colony for nearly five decades (1898–1946).

This vassalage is evident today: after the elections of Yoon Suk-yeol in the Republic of Korea and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Philippines in 2022, both have served as frontline positions in containing China. In February 2023, the Philippines invited the US to expand its military presence in the country by adding four more bases to the existing five US-operated bases – 30 years after Philippine lawmakers ruled to end permanently the US military presence in the country. The Republic of Korea has also increased the military expansion of the US, participating alongside Japan ‘to inaugurate a new era of trilateral partnership’ with the US.¹⁰⁸ In addition, the General Security of Military Information Agreement between Japan and the Republic of Korea, facilitated by their closer alignment with the US, expands intelligence sharing between the two countries to include ‘threats from China and Russia’.¹⁰⁹ Their military expenditures should be attributed to the US-Led Military Bloc.

Figure 31 lists all Global South countries with military spending exceeding the world average (except Russia, which was shown earlier). Many of these countries have close military relations with the United States but are not listed in Grouping 6.

PART IV: The West in Decline

The Erosion of United States Economic and Political Hegemony

US slowing economic growth, measured by a decelerating GDP growth rate, fall of net investment as a share of GDP, higher levels of unutilised productive capacity, and unemployment/underemployment began in the mid-1960s and accelerated from the early-to-mid 1970s.¹¹⁰The transition to the US becoming a net importer of capital exacerbated the contradictions of monopoly capital.

The change in the US capital account to becoming dependent on continuous large-scale import of capital from the 1980s onwards is key to a financialised wealth generation process and a crucial economic mechanism of US imperialism. The world’s capital assets are preponderantly in US dollars and feed the overall position of US monopoly-finance capital.

By 2009, the US began to plan its pivot to Asia to curtail China’s economic growth. Under the Obama period, the US began to move against the World Trade Organisation. This period also marked the increased reliance on tariffs, sanctions, protectionism, and hybrid warfare.

Given that it is now dependent on large scale net capital imports, which by 2022 reached US$ 1 trillion a year, the US has little internal economic ability to provide economic advantages to its Global North or Global South allies.¹¹¹ Indeed, it needs to continue to attempt to hollow out even more surplus from them.

Under neo-liberalism, the relative autonomy of the US state eroded, and private capital exerted more direct control of much of the state. Today, however, faced with rising international economic threats to the US position, and the failure of neo-liberalism to maintain US economic dominance, the collective political interests of the ruling class are being asserted by an increasingly autonomous state (as opposed to representing the interests of individual capitalist groups). To borrow from Lenin, for the capitalists also, ‘politics must take precedence over economics’.¹¹²

Financialisation or accumulation under the phase of monopoly-finance capital is truly a parasitic development aimed at drawing blood from a sponge and marking the structural crisis of capital. US capital has an internal contradiction. As US capital seeks to increase surplus extraction from its own working class, it risks losing support for its external military wars, which are aimed at removing international obstacles to US capitalist economic interests. The US ruling class is therefore forced into simultaneous attacks on the Global South and its own working class – this necessitated the rise of increasingly right-wing currents in US capitalism. In the 1930s, the US had sufficient reserves to confront a deep crisis of capitalism with a reformist domestic programme, unlike the open attack on the working class in Germany or Japan. However, it took WWII for the US to escape the economic depression not, as is popularly purported, the Keynesian New Deal. Today, in this new situation, the US has no alternative but to rely on combining external aggression with an increasingly repressive domestic agenda.

The US utilises inflation to attempt to increase profits – a trend exacerbated by military spending and the debt it incurs. Interest on US military debt accounts for around 70% of US federal government net interest payments. In the 1970s, the US was able to manage the consequences of its Viet Nam Bonanza in military spending by removing itself from the gold standard to push the cost of this debt onto other countries. This successful attack on imperialist rivals strengthened US economic and financial power compared to them.

An accurate historical perspective, as well as short-term shifts, is required when analysing a potential decline of an empire. In Europe, the transition from slavery to feudalism took several centuries as did the transition from feudalism to capitalism. France was still fighting remnants of feudalism in the 19th century, hundreds of years after European capitalism had begun on a small scale in Italian city-states.

The relative economic decline of an imperialist state can be traced by its increasing need to extract capital from abroad – with the UK and US both following a similar historical trend. The UK stopped being an exporter capital beginning in the early 1930s (Figure 32).

A country’s balance of payments is equal to the difference between its domestic capital creation (savings/surplus) and its domestic capital investment. If a country’s ‘domestic’ capital creation is larger than its domestic investment, it is, therefore, exporting capital and runs a balance of payments surplus. If a country’s domestic capital creation is less than its ‘domestic’ capital investment, it runs a balance of payments deficit and is importing capital, that is, it has a surplus in its capital account.

From 1913 to the early 1980s, with rare exceptions, the US generated more surplus than it invested ‘domestically’. It had a surplus of capital that it could invest in other countries and extend its international hegemony not only through violence. Post-WWII, the particular beneficiaries of this were imperialist countries whom the US wished to enmesh, integrate, and dominate, as seen by the Marshall Plan in Europe. Other beneficiaries, such as the Republic of Korea, became military frontier states to constrain Russia and China and thus received US economic investment.

By the late 1960s, the US understood that the most urgent economic, as opposed to political, threat did not come from communism. The attention began to focus on curtailing the growth of other capitalist rivals. A few capitalist economies – first Germany in the immediate post-war period and then Japan until the late 1970s – achieved investment rates far higher than the US, reaching 30% of the GDP or above. This enabled these countries to achieve higher GDP growth rates than the US. This was a historical result of the immense defeats of the German and Japanese working classes by fascism – the consequences of which continued into the post-war period. German and Japanese capitalists were able to increase the rates of exploitation, which financed high rates of capital investment. Simultaneously, their ‘late industrialisation’ also allowed them access to better quality technology, which further increased productivity. While the US was prepared to accept the economic consequences of this in the immediate post-war period, the continuation of this process began to impact US economic growth.

To prevent effective economic competition from these countries, the United States used political and military pressure to force down their rates of investment and, therefore, growth rates. The decoupling of the US dollar from gold in 1971, and therefore the removal of restraints on the weaponisation of the US control of the international monetary system, played a key role in this process.

The numbers in Figure 33, positive or negative, show the balance between domestic savings/capital creation and domestic investment over the span of 120 years. A positive number, for example, 0.8% for 1929, means the US is saving/creating more capital than it is investing domestically, i.e., it is lending/exporting capital abroad. A negative number, for example -3.9% of GNP for 2022, means US domestic investment is higher than US domestic capital creation/saving. Thus, there is an inflow of capital of 3.9% of GNP from abroad. A positive number represents an outflow of capital from the US, and a negative number indicates an inflow of capital into the US.¹¹³

But despite this ability to slow down imperialist rivals, the US proved incapable of raising its own economic growth rate (to achieve a new higher rate of investment and exploitation), partly because of the withdrawal of US-based capitalists from long-term productive investments within the United States. Indeed, US economic growth decelerated further – the average annual economic growth of the US today is only 2.0%, less than half its growth rate in the 1960s and far behind the rate of growth of China or indeed of a series of Asian states. Figure 34 shows that the US has had a long-term overall decline in average growth rate since 1953.

Confronted with this situation the US has subsequently turned to tariffs, economic sanctions, and technology bans, leading to an increasingly protectionist environment. However, despite this economic decline, as already analysed, the US still maintains a military lead over all other states. US Imperialism, therefore, now turns to a growing reliance on force.

Tracing the processes underlying this and showing the inability of the US to raise its rate of growth without a complete restructuring of the US economy (which is not on the agenda), Line 1 in Figure 35 shows that from 1965 onwards, US net saving/capital creation progressively fell until by 2009 it was -2.7% of GNI. Line 2 shows that from the 1980s on, US borrowing from abroad, the use of capital imported from other countries, began to rise sharply. By 2002, for the first time, US borrowing from abroad was higher than its domestic net capital creation – i.e., for the first time, even the immediate increase in US capital stock was being financed more by capital from other countries than from the US itself. This slightly reversed and then fluctuated until 2020, when, once again, more of the addition to the US capital stock was financed from other countries.

To summarise this overall process, the US has structured the world economy to its advantage. Its corporations obtain gargantuan amounts of surplus value through the global arbitrage in the Global South and the entire imperial system forces US dollars on foreign countries – including via not only economic processes but through US military bases and other means. The aim is to create a system whereby countries have no choice but to put their US dollars into US securities, financing the US deficit and US domestic investment. This is how global monopoly-finance capital, which is an advanced form of financial imperialism backed by military and political power, works.

What is upsetting this system is that monopoly capital is relatively stagnant in terms of production (the real economy), which has allowed China and other countries in the Global South to leap forward in production. Hudson’s Super Imperialism provides useful insight on what the consequences would be if the US lost its dollar hegemony.¹¹⁴

Figure 36 shows that China has outpaced the US in net fixed capital formation, whilst the US has seen a gradual decline. Whilst this section does not cover the rise of China, it should be noted here that every year since 1992, for 30 years, China has been a net exporter of capital. It is this surplus of capital that makes economically possible the financing of international initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

This becomes a critical factor in understanding that two nuclei of international processes are developing:

The US has increasingly become a fetter on the development of the productive forces domestically and globally.

China is now focused on the development of its national productive forces and on working with the developing nations as a whole. This presents a new path to modernisation through the development of the world’s productive forces taken as a whole (through the BRI, the Global Development Initiative, and various continental-scale industrialisation projects).

The Sunsetting of Bourgeois Liberal Democracy

Some outside of the US have long held an illusion that democracy in the US has existed for centuries and has only recently been defaced. In 1776, both wings of US capital, those led by Alexander Hamilton and those led by Thomas Jefferson (a slave owner), ensured that only property-owning white males like themselves had the right to vote. From 1776 onwards, property rights were sacrosanct and subordinated all other rights.

‘Freedom of speech’ was effectively restricted to those who owned the means of material production. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The German Ideology (1846), these were generally those who owned the means of mental production, that is, the media, beginning with the printing press. In some cases, this right extended to those known to have fringe or no support, or others who were no threat to the system. Those opposing capitalist class interests who had the chance of any significant support were subjected to suppression, imprisonment, and sanctioning, as well as judicial murder or assassination. Bourgeois democracy was always a vehicle for protecting property rights. Only the pressure of the US to defend itself against socialist projects internationally in the twentieth century temporarily extended voting rights to black people and increased the appearance of free speech and other civil liberties.

There is a great misunderstanding internationally about the US electoral parties. From their inception, neither the Democratic nor Republican parties were formed as mass membership parties. They have been primarily top-down associations of propertied elites and professional class allies, closely aligned with the status quo. Third parties have practically no influence in the US system, a political party duopoly. The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee that run their respective parties are formally organised as not-for-profit, tax-exempt corporations. They are primarily money-based, vote-gathering machines that periodically attract voters in the context of electoral contests and thus are quite distinct from membership political parties like many European parties. Although there are registered Democrats and Republicans, this mainly affects the right to vote in their respective primaries. Party affiliation for the vast majority of the population, thus, does not go beyond votes cast in particular elections. Therefore, around half of US voters see themselves as politically independent, not attached to either of the major parties. Indeed, neither political party, when in office, reflects the interests of the majority of the US population.

One of the most poignant written words on the hypocrisy of America’s self-proclaimed greatness is found in a poem by Langston Hughes:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’.)

…

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay —
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.¹¹⁵

Large sections of the capitalist class in the Global North and their hangers-on indulged in a period of euphoria caused by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. They deluded themselves into believing in the ‘end of history’ with aspirations for a perpetual unipolar world. The War on Terror campaign espoused by the US was a brilliantly constructed methodology to gain support for militarism.

Between 2006 and 2009, new realities began to set in:

The demise of the Soviet Union did not result in Yeltsin’s promise of a de-nuclearised Russia nor the permanent establishment of a Russian government entirely following US directions. The usual cries of ‘who failed in Russia?’ followed.

US strategic circles began to announce the idea (both amoral and unscientific) that the US could achieve first-strike nuclear war capability.

In the face of NATO’s continuing eastward expansion and claims of the United States to be on the verge of nuclear primacy, Vladimir Putin delivered his Munich speech in February 2007, marking the end of any illusions about Russia being adopted into the Anglo-American club. In that speech, Putin criticised the ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations’ and suggested that the world must not be governed by ‘one master, one sovereign’.¹¹⁶

The creation of the Centre for New American Security in 2007 marked a historic marriage of two groups of foreign policy elites, the mainly Republican neo-conservatives and the largely Democratic liberal hawks. Their joint strategy was to move to target Russia via Ukraine immediately.

Led by populist neo-fascists, the Tea Party arose in 2009. It appealed to the petty bourgeoisie and a section of the upper strata (mainly but not exclusively white) of the working class who had made little to no economic progress and feared a loss of privilege. This signalled the ending of the so-called bipartisan consensus that had dominated the US system for decades.

The bubble caused by financialisation turned into the Third Great Depression starting in 2008, the most significant economic crisis since the 1930s.

There was growing evidence that there would be no Gorbachev in China to lead the surrender of the Chinese Revolution.

The ‘Pivot to Asia’, which is more precisely the pivot to China, and a strategy for the US control of Eurasia, was devised.

China’s economy continued to expand rapidly after the beginning of the Third Great Depression, while the Western economies were anaemic.¹¹⁷ In 2016, China exceeded the US in terms of GDP (PPP), and there was palpable fear that by 2030, China would surpass the US in GDP at current exchange rates (CER). The US ruling class needed a response.

Neo-fascism and extreme right-wing forces grew globally. Obama, the Democratic president, adopted regressive domestic measures that would have been the envy of previous Republican administrations. Trump’s election weakened the shared identity of the bourgeoisie’s interests and widened awareness of the limitations of the US political system.

Internationally, this situation also it marked a resumption of global awareness of imperialism as the greatest danger facing humanity. Faced with the evident failure of neo-liberalism, which had culminated in the Third Great Depression, a new movement to reverse some aspects of the hollowing out of the state that neo-liberalism had produced began.

To accurately understand the events following the start of the Third Great Depression, we must evaluate the preceding 60 years. In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater, an extreme right-wing capitalist, lost the general election but succeeded in bringing the far-right into the mainstream of the Republican Party and the country. The Democrats lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a Republican centrist, who seized the white Southern vote and introduced a new institutional racism-based incarceration system, which both parties have followed since. The Democratic Party began a period of internal fracturing and began abandoning any leftward positioning in the name of ‘electability’ and ‘triangulation’. Instead, it attempted to capitalise on the rightward momentum of the Republicans.

The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan marked the actual far-right takeover of the Republican Party. The 1985 formation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a private corporation, marked the beginning of a new phase of the Democratic Party: the rise of the New Democrats. A list of some former chairmen of the DLC included Dick Gephardt, Chuck Robb, Sam Nunn, and Joe Lieberman – all military hawks, who favoured shifting social spending to the military. The DLC successfully defeated the left, and its crowning victory was winning the Presidency by their chosen candidate, Bill Clinton, in 1992.

Clinton’s virtue from the standpoint of the DLC was that he could bring the white South back into the Democratic Party by talking left and walking right. For example, he adopted both anti-welfare and pro-incarceration policies (both racial code positions) while making pretensions of a progressive agenda. Less anti-labour than Reagan, he nonetheless represented the Democratic strategy of trying to remain the ‘centre’ in a political dynamic that had shifted far to the right, with the Democrats standing for a lighter, kinder version of neo-liberalism.

It is instructive to think of the Democratic and Republican Parties as operating like private corporations with revenue derived mainly from various capitalists to serve the interests of the shareholders and the corporation’s top officers. For the Democratic Party, this includes groups like the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Centre for American Progress (CAP).¹¹⁸ The product sold is elected officeholders who implement the interests of their financiers. Well-known officials include John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, once elected, became parasites of the state, earned tens of millions, and joined the higher echelons of the capitalist class. At least 85 of the 154 people from private interest groups who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Hillary Clinton, while she led the State Department under President Obama, donated a combined US$ 156 million to the Clinton Foundation.¹¹⁹

The DNC business model requires the assembly of a disparate array of electoral blocks and the necessity of manipulating numerous social strata, groups, and movements. There is now more than ever a sharp rift between the interests of the people who vote for the Democratic Party versus the vastly different interests of the Democratic Party paymasters.

A more comprehensive assessment is beyond the scope of this document. However, the idea of entrepreneurial democracy, in which the concepts of competition between individual capitalists and groups and the battle to acquire votes like a market, trace back to Joseph Schumpeter.¹²⁰

In the last twenty years, the Republican Party has been transformed ideologically. The emergence of the Tea Party in 2009 signalled both a growing neofascist ideology and the creation of a more engaged core and base. Although the Republican Party also has internal fractures, the weaponisation of large sections of the lower middle class has engendered a radical right that destabilises bourgeois liberal democracy.

All the previous contradictions of race, class, gender, and social identity became weaponised by both the far right and the DNC corporation for different purposes. The social rift between various strata of the US is acute. Hyperbolic claims that the US is heading towards a civil war are highly misleading, however. There is no economic basis for California seceding from the US. This is not the pre-civil war period in the US.

Starting in 1970, the US working class received very little of the vast increases in wealth created by the US’s world domination. Millions of children suffer food insecurity, and their parents have precarious employment and lives. The US is undergoing significant demographic changes, with some estimates showing that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority within the US by 2045, which suggests a trajectory of US racial capitalism toward enhanced segregation and even apartheid.

Narcissism, pessimism, nihilism, and fatalism are now fundamental features of an increasingly stagnant capitalism in the Global North. The traditional trappings of bourgeois liberal democracy are becoming fetters on the needs of capital, which is, ironically, caught up in a process of self-negation.

These fissures inside the US political system are significant to the US working class, which is in a very uneven development of its revolutionary capacity. It faces great danger and opportunities. There can be no illusion that ‘worse is better’.

Simultaneously with this erosion of liberal democracy, millions of young people from Jakarta to Istanbul to Johannesburg to Des Moines, Iowa, have now been brought into political life based on their moral, racial, religious, and political outrage. This has been met with severe repression by Washington in its global geopolitical, economic, and hegemonic military roles. The United States is a waning hegemonic power; it is a wounded one and, as a result, is more dangerous.

A Defeated and Submissive Europe and Japan

Since the end of WWII, the United States has been committed to the military, political, and economic integration of countries in Europe and Japan into a bloc that it controls. Through the NATO+ structure, the US ensured complete military dominance within the imperialist group, deploying many military bases in countries defeated in WWII, including in Japan (120), Germany (119), and Italy (45). The latter is home to over 12,000 US military personnel.¹²¹

Beginning in the 1950s, the US brought European political elites into their orbit. Through the Marshall Plan, European economic interests were subordinated to those of the US. Over the next fifty years, even imperialist leaders who dared to partially oppose US interests – such as Jacques Chirac (president of France between 1995 and 2007) or Gerhard Schroeder (Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005), both of whom opposed the US invasion of Iraq – were targeted by the US for replacement.

After WWII, Japan, as a frontline state against Soviet and Chinese communism, was allowed to rapidly develop its economy. However, in the 1980s, Japan’s economic rise began to pose a possible threat to the United States’ global economic hegemony, leading to increased bilateral trade frictions. The United States forced a rapid appreciation of the Japanese yen through the 1985 ‘Plaza Accord’, reducing exports and causing Japan to lose its economic momentum.¹²² Then, following the 1987 Wall Street crash, the US compelled Japan to adopt ultra-loose monetary and economic policies. This aimed to increase the flow of capital to the US to aid finance its international aggression against the USSR. In the process, it created the ‘bubble economy’ in Japan, the bursting of which plunged Japan into a decades-long economic stagnation.

In the fields of information technology and new energy, among other high-tech areas, Japan also faced suppression from the United States, hindering its industrial upgrading. Toshiba was the global leader in semiconductor manufacturing by 1987 until it was sanctioned by the US under the pretext of making deals with the USSR (very similar to what the United States has done with Huawei in China). Toshiba’s main competitors, IBM and Intel, benefited from this policy by the US state.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and Germany’s subsequent reunification, the German bourgeoisie coveted Russia’s markets and low-cost energy. They desired economic ties with Russia but only as long as they and their French compatriots could maintain their unfettered domination of the European project, which they had held since WWII. This meant building economic ties with Russia but excluding Russia’s political leadership from any equal participation in Europe’s political affairs, decisions, or structures. US strategy in turn had been to avoid any strategic relationship between Russia and Germany as their combined strength would create a formidable economic competitor in Europe.

Ownership of capital and the means of production are always fundamental. Over the last 30 years, the ability of capital to move quickly and seamlessly between the borders of imperialist countries has increased exponentially. Capital investments have a defined number of primary categories including stock, notes, bonds, private equity, real estate, and many forms of derivatives. The stock market is one of the fundamental vehicles for most capitalists to make long-term investments. A German firm that goes public may do so in either the US or German stock exchanges. Large funds like Vanguard purchase these funds, but they are not the beneficial owners. They are just effective trustees for the funds of major capital (some small percentage of this capital is owned by the petty bourgeoisie and privileged sectors of the working class through pension funds and other instruments).

The original shareholders of this firm eventually can and do sell their now public stock. They no longer remain dependent on managing their wealth via their investment inside one company. Rather they hire wealth managers, either through firms such as Goldman Sachs or their own advisors, who in turn, invest the cash proceeds from the sale of stock. For many capitalists, their advisors will have them invest well over 50% of their portfolio in the US stock markets. The German capitalist’s ‘family wealth’ therefore does not disappear when the German company they had originally owned declines in value.

The economic, political, and social consequences of this change in capital markets and ownership are vast. This newly minted global – formerly ‘German’ – capitalist behaves very much like their French, English, Swedish, or US peers. This level of integration and denationalisation of capital results in a much more robust economic and, eventually, reinforces political allegiance to the US.

Such a high level of stock market and capital integration rarely occurs in Global South countries for many historical reasons. A capitalist in Turkey has much greater difficulty having their company go public in the US. What the Turkish capitalist can do is to go public in Turkey, sell their stock, turn the proceeds into US dollars, and then invest those dollars in US stocks. This is the most common pathway for the Turkish capitalists to join the global elite. This process, however, is much more competitive, happens in smaller amounts, is less frequent, and is elongated.

Figure 37 shows research from the OECD that indicates the percentage of beneficial foreign ownership for each of the major stock markets in the world.¹²³ These show that Europe overall has a high percentage of foreign ownership, whereas the US, China, and Saudi Arabia all have less than 20% foreign ownership. Different national imperialisms, and their ruling classes, are not separate or economically divided from each other. They do not pursue substantially divergent strategic national goals on any scale comparable to that before World War II. Progressive and socialist forces, however, always utilise partial, economic, or tactical differences between imperialist powers where valuable.

The situation in Germany today, for example, clearly illustrates the effectiveness of this integration process and economic consolidation by the US as shown in Figure 38. According to 2020 IHS Markit data, only 13.3% of the German stock market’s value is owned by Germans, while investors from North America and the UK own 58.3%.¹²⁴ A 2023 study by Ernst & Young revealed that at least 52.1% of the market value of the 40 blue-chip stocks that make up Germany’s DAX index is owned by funds outside of Germany in 2022. Of the remaining shares, 16.5% ownership is unidentified (very likely also owned by foreign capital), with only 31.3% of the market value owned by Germans.¹²⁵ The major companies of the German economy are primarily not owned by Germans.

Germany’s industrial value added has declined from 9% of the world to just above 6% in the last 18 years.¹²⁶ The loss of cheap Russian energy and its adaption to risk-managed decoupling are likely to be disastrous for its international competitiveness. In addition, the advent of Electric Vehicles (EV) has led to a huge loss with the end of the importance of the combustion engine. This had been a core one-hundred-year technology superiority enjoyed by Germany.

In 2022, FDI in Germany decreased 50.4% year-on-year.¹²⁷ Over the course of 15 quarters, starting in Q3 2019, Germany’s GDP increased by a paltry 0.6% in total, in constant prices, whereas China increased 20.2% during the same period, and the US by 8.1%.¹²⁸

In media, the US dominates more than the Global South. The European television market is largely a US business: ‘Around one in five (18%) of all private TV channels (excluding local TV) are US-owned and over one third of all SVOD (39%) and TVOD (33%) services in Europe belong to a US company… Around half of all children’s TV channels in Europe are US-owned (48%) and so are 59% of entertainment subscription video-on-demand services’.¹²⁹

The collapse of ‘national will’, the willingness to pursue a path corresponding to its national capitalist interests, demonstrated by Germany in the context of the war in Ukraine, shows that Germany has been defeated for a third time since the beginning of the twentieth century (the first two being the world wars, as noted by Hudson).¹³⁰ Despite the cost to itself, Germany supported sanctions against Russia and military aid to Ukraine. When Israel’s war on Gaza entered its 100th day, having killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, Germany – with its historical violence in Namibia and domestic holocaust against Jewish people during WWII – supported Israel in the hearing at the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa.¹³¹

Over the last few months of 2023, political representatives of German capital in the Bundestag privately raised and then introduced measures to restrict trade with China under the guise of de-risking. This is clearly in contradiction to the short- and medium-term interests of German business. Marx described the relations between the capitalists as one between a band of warring brothers.¹³² In periods of crisis, the state, as an organ of the ruling class, exerts its political role despite the fissiparous nature of intra-capitalist relations. Today, the short-term interests of executives at nominally German companies are subordinated to the interests of Hyper-Imperialism.

With the formation of the German Empire (1871–1918), political and economic expansion into Eastern Europe, rather than solely territorial expansion, was a key strategy. After reunification in 1990, Germany pursued a dual strategy: first, it decisively supported the US strategy towards Russia of NATO expansion. Second, it led a simultaneous strategy of ‘capital penetration’ into Russia with the aim of securing political control in that state of groups most tied to Western and German interests and against those pursuing a more independent policy. German capital supported proxies like Russian billionaire (at the time) Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2001, Khodorkovsky established the Open Russia Foundation, with Henry Kissinger as one of its trustees.¹³³ By 2004, he was imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement after attempting to carry out policies against Putin.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel pursued dual strategies of supporting military preparations against Russia and organising the internal opposition to Putin. She also orchestrated the building of Nord Stream 2 despite huge US resistance. The latter however was for German self-interest, not for the appeasement of Russia, nor to hinder NATO expansion. In 2014, she arranged the release of Khodorkovsky and enabled a calculated breach of the Minsk agreements. But the dual strategy ended in February 2022, when Germany as a willing partner alongside the US, and with the help of Ukraine, decided to wrestle and topple Russia.

Germany’s reality, however, is that unless it were prepared to undertake a full break with US policy, which no significant section of the German bourgeoisie is prepared to consider, any strategy it has fails without US support – giving the US the whip hand in this relationship. A paradox arose in which the US wanted to maintain German-Russian enmity, but not support a full German victory against Russia. This explains in part why the US appears to be threatening to cut off Ukraine’s funding. The US goal of destroying German-Russian relations has already been achieved as well as the vassalage of Europe and Germany under penalty of the deindustrialisation of Germany.

The US will continue to deprive the German bourgeoisie of all major options for asserting independent political positions. With the help of the capital ownership links that we have described, the German bourgeoisie will be faced with absolute subsumption of the options for the action of German capital under the US aegis. The hostility towards Russia acts as a driver of Europe’s subordination to the US and as a loss of any possibility of independent development.

The situation of antagonistic contradictions between US and European capital on fundamental issues has ceased. Small differences exist, but they are not strategic. The depth of US subordination of Europe is seen by the fact that only 11 of the 49 countries in the Global North are not part of a known US spy network nor attended the Vilnius NATO+ meeting. They are Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, San Marino, Serbia, and Switzerland. Collectively they have 28.3 million people (nearly equivalent to Delhi’s population) and a combined GDP of .8 trillion (1% of world GDP), a small portion of the Global North.

While a member of the secret Fourteen Eyes, Germany’s impotence was on full display when it was revealed that the US spied on its leaders, and it was incapable of even a whimper. Today, Europe’s bourgeoisie has become a toady for US intelligence operations.

NATO has long pressured Germany to spend a minimum of 2% of GDP on the military, following what was called the Goldilocks principle (established in the 1950s), aimed at:

… encouraging defence contributions from medium-sized allies – for example, [the Republic of] Korea during the Cold War, or Poland today – while treading lightly when it comes to larger allies like Germany or Japan. In doing so, it seeks to maximise contributions from allies that are powerful enough to supply meaningful military power to the alliance but not so powerful that they can afford to spurn the alliance.¹³⁴

Japan’s governments have pursued policies of political provocation to China, at the behest of the US, despite the great advantages to Japan’s economy that would flow from closer ties with China. In the UK, US opposition to the ‘golden period’ of relations with China carried out under David Cameron’s premiership forced its reversal under his successors – with damaging consequences for British capital.

The creation of the Centre for New American Security in 2007 marked a historic marriage of two groups of foreign policy elites, the mainly Republican neo-conservatives and the largely Democratic liberal hawks. Their joint strategy was to move to target Russia via Ukraine immediately.

In 2022, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida set spending targets for the following five years of 43 trillion yen (US$316 billion).¹³⁵ It already has the second greatest number of F35 advanced aircraft in the world (after the US) and signed an agreement in 2020 to purchase 105 additional aircraft. These aircraft can be retrofitted with nuclear weapons. It has penned a revised national security strategy to allow the country to develop a pre-emptive strike capability and deploy long-range missiles.¹³⁶

The rearming of the two main fascist powers of WWII must be considered a crime. A dangerous revanchist movement is re-emerging in Germany. The difference is that this time they do so as part of the US-Led Military Bloc.

PART V: Changes in the World Order

A Southwards Shift of the Economic Base

As the countries of the Global North have faced prolonged declining economic growth, countries of the Global South, especially in Asia, have displayed a higher economic growth trajectory over the past thirty years. As can be seen in Figure 39, at the end of the Cold War in 1993, the Global North accounted for 57.2% of the global GDP (PPP), while the Global South accounted for just 42.8%. Thirty years later, these proportions have definitively inverted: the share of the Global South has reached 59.4%, with the Global North holding at 40.6%.

The G7 (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan) is the core economic countries of the Global North bloc, and in 1993, these seven countries accounted for 45.4% of the global economy. Meanwhile, the most significant economies of the Global South, later known as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), made up only 16.7% of the global economy in that year. Among them, Russia had just emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and China was deepening its economic reforms and establishing a socialist market economy. Neither Russia nor China were competitors to the G7 at the time. Thirty years later, the BRICS countries accounted for 31.5% of the global economy, having surpassed the G7 (30.3%) as shown in Figure 40.

In August 2023, BRICS expanded by inviting six countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina (although Argentina has now temporarily declined). BRICS10 (excluding Argentina) added 4% to BRICS’s share of the world GDP (PPP) as shown in Figure 41.

Over the past thirty years, the absolute leader of the Global North, the United States, has seen its share of the world economy slowly decline in PPP terms from 19.7% in 1993 to 15.5% in 2022. However, in the Global South, China’s rapid rise has been the most notable variable. In 1993, China only accounted for 5% of the world economy (Figure 42); by 2016, China’s economy had surpassed that of the United States in PPP terms; and by 2022, China’s share of the world economy had reached 18.4%. This marks the first time in over 600 years that a non-white dominated country has economically broken through the hegemony of the white imperialist countries. This economic reality led the US to urgently begin to try to suppress China’s rise.

However, it would be a mistake to view China as the sole source of growth for the Global South. Even without China, the economies of the Global South had surpassed the Global North by 2022 — with their respective shares of the global economy at 41% and 40.6% (Figure 43). The overall economic development of the Global South has enabled them to objectively have the capacity and to seek a more just international order, which is contrary to the wishes of the imperialist bloc of the Global North.

We have identified all 43 countries – whose share of the world GDP (PPP) amounts to 41.1% (Figure 44) – that are part of one or more of the three new non-imperialist controlled international organisations: BRICS10 (founded in 2009, expanded in 2010 and 2023), Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (founded as ‘Shanghai Five’ in 1996, expanded in 2001, 2017, and 2023), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations (founded in 2021). The full list is provided in a later section.

Figure 45 shows the past decade’s average annual growth rate of GDP (PPP) per capita of the 21 largest economies in the Global South and the G7 countries. China’s growth rate (5.8%) continues to lead among major countries. Asia’s growth rate is generally higher than other countries in the Global South. The next five countries with the highest growth rates are Bangladesh (5.3%), Viet Nam (4.9%), India (4.6%), the Philippines (3.3%), and Indonesia (3.1%). Aside from the United States, the rest of the G7 countries have an average per capita growth rate of less than 1%. Regrettably, the largest economies in Africa and Latin America have experienced negative per capita growth: Nigeria and South Africa at -0.4%, and Brazil and Argentina at 0% and -0.7%, respectively.

Of course, we acknowledge that growth rates themselves can mask the intense class struggles within these countries, where the share of the growth is not nearly equitably distributed between capital and labour. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the growth rates and what their trend lines describe.

One of the most significant changes in the world economy of the last 20 years has been a dramatic shift in the geography of world industrial production.

The World Bank publishes the industry percentage of GDP using the current prices and current exchange rates, which this study refers to as the Current Exchange Rate (CER) method. Currently, we are unaware of any published industry percentages for GDP (PPP) calculations.

Figures 46 and 47 show changes in the percentage of industry value added in GDP for both CER and PPP terms over the last 18 years. It is likely that the figures of the industry value added world share are somewhere in between the CER and PPP. Subsequent charts in this series are shown only for the PPP method and have the same qualifications as made for the first series.¹³⁷

What we see is that there is indeed a change in the base of the economy, with the Global South home to the majority share. Despite many predictions of a new post-industrial society, no major country has achieved modernisation without industrialisation.

The world share of industry value added of BRICS10 is now double that of the G7 (Figure 48).

The results show the following for industry valued added as a percentage of the world using GDP (PPP):

China is the world’s leading industrial country with a 25.7% share value added, while the US holds only a 9.7% share.

The Global South has a 69.4% share, while the Global North has a 30.6% share.

BRICS10 has a 44% share and exceeds the G7.

The share of Japan, Germany, France, and the UK are also declining, whilst India is increasing (Figure 49).

We used the World Bank industry percentage multiplied by the annual GDP (PPP) for each country for each year to derive a country-based industrial value added. We then used these to calculate the percentage of total world industry value added by each country and country grouping category. There are some limitations and complex issues regarding this methodology.

Some economists have tried to minimise this change. Some argue that US dollar monopolies and ownership of large multinational corporations mean GDP figures overstate the change. China, at a minimum, cannot be said to have all its production under the lock and key of the US. Even in India, it is a mistake to understate the significance of a growing big national bourgeoise (albeit large sections of it politically reactionary). Moving industrial production to the Global South could only have occurred with massive improvements in their infrastructure.

In his parting words to Russian President Vladimir Putin during his state visit in March 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, ‘Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together’.¹³⁸ Eurasia is now centre stage for determining the future of the next period of human existence.

US Strategy to Curtail China’s Economic Growth and Influence

In 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered his famous Munich speech criticising US monopolistic dominance, ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts’.¹³⁹ In the same year, the Centre for New American Security (CNAS) was formed. By 2009, secret US cables to Washington revealed by Wikileaks stated:

Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialisation of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution… When Xi takes the helm of the party, he might aggressively attempt to address those evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.¹⁴⁰

The alarm bells in Langley and Foggy Bottom were ringing. The West’s dream for the rise of a ‘Chinese Gorbachev’ was eviscerated in 2012. It became clear that an economically ascendant China would not be imminently defeated. Thus, the Pivot to Asia strategy began integrating its allies to contain China. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly declared that ‘the twenty-first century will be America’s Pacific Century’.¹⁴¹ In contrast, Xi Jinping said to US President Barack Obama, ‘The Pacific Ocean is broad enough to accommodate the development of both China and the United States’.¹⁴²

By 2016, China’s GDP, calculated by purchasing power parity, had surpassed that of the United States. In 2020, the Centre for Economics and Business Research predicted that by 2028, China’s GDP, measured in US dollars, would overtake that of the US, a forecast that became a ‘demon barrier’.¹⁴³ US officials repeatedly defined China as the most significant strategic threat facing the US and the Global North.

The relative decline of US power, the rise of socialist China, and the economic growth of the Global South are key reasons behind US active subordination and subsequent integration of the rest of the imperialist countries. This has led to a full military, political, and economic bloc under US control. In 1998, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, ‘The most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran… not out of a sudden love for one another but out of a shared opposition to the predominant power (the US)’.¹⁴⁴

CNAS, formed by a combination of neo-cons and liberal hawks, spawned a core cadre of US policy elites – from both parties – who focused on developing a new geopolitical strategy for the US. By 2021, ignoring Brzezinski’s warning, they began publicly promoting the preparation for simultaneous wars. Significant figures from CNAS include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, and former Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Michele Flournoy. Former CNAS staff and consultants have permeated strategic organs of the state, including the National Security Council.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, whilst not a member of CNAS, now plays a dominant role in the Presidency and pursues the same international strategy. In April 2023, Sullivan gave a speech titled ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institute.¹⁴⁵ This speech was significant for three distinct reasons. First, it is very unusual for such an important speech on the US economy to be given by a National Security Advisor. Historically, National Security Advisors, like Henry Kissinger, stayed in the realms of national security, geopolitics, and military affairs. Second, Sullivan’s speech sought to create a ‘new Washington Consensus’ to re-establish US economic hegemony. Third, Sullivan acknowledged the depth of the US structural crisis, including its economic stagnation.

This economic plan is required to support military expansion. In July 2023, the US proposed a bill to add US$ 345 million in military aid to Taiwan.¹⁴⁶ From Tel Aviv to Kiev to Taipei, the US is escalating its military operations to the doorsteps of Eurasia.

Cold Wars, necessarily associated with conflicts between nuclear powers, are always dangerous. In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, in which they decried the ‘propaganda model’ utilised by the US corporate media, often in partnership with the state. They wrote it long before that system was able to avail itself of the new technological tools of surveillance and targeted communication characterising the digital age. Thanks to whistle-blower Edward Snowden the world was able to get a glimpse of the vast expansion of US control over all communications and how it has integrated all the US IT tech monopoly platforms into adjuncts of US national security infrastructure.

‘Collect it all’ was how a former senior intelligence officer described the National Security Agency’s former director Keith Alexander’s approach to data collection. All the emails, phone calls, and text messages of all types (including those of WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal), every key stroke, and every URL are captured for the vast majority of the world’s population (outside of China, Russia, and a few other countries). They are stored in vast networks of hard drives in locations like Bluffdale, Utah. The US created a global network able to capture and manage nearly every packet of data on all undersea optical cables, all cellular traffic, and satellite data traffic.

Despite military hegemony, capital still needs the approximation of consent. Over time, new techniques such as machine learning created a qualitative leap in the ability of the US to conduct psychological secret warfare against the people, the Global South, and their populations.¹⁴⁷ The economic models of all media companies collapsed with the advent of the internet and the creation of economic tech monopolies, which disintermediated all media profits. A new era of fully weaponised media outlets began – a development that is part of the overall hybrid war strategy (including economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation) that has been utilised by the US establishment around the world.

The pivot to Asia, in reality a pivot to China, began formally in 2012 under Obama. The US combined propaganda, diplomatic, economic, and political strategies to try to curb, at first, China’s economic development and, later, its growing influence in institutions like BRICS. Starting in 2016, Trump attempted to avoid conflict with Russia and began to focus all US energies against China.

Over the last eight years, the US used a coterie of selected and curated topics to define the Western media narrative on China. Despite millions of dead Muslims at the hands of NATO forces in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the West managed to integrate their formidable array of soft-power resources to wage a fierce cold war against China. Even the chief propagandist of the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels, might have been amazed at the hubris of the West in claiming the mantle of human rights and attempting to use Xinjiang as the whipping point against China.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and former army colonel, noted that an important strategic goal of the US military’s invasion and long-term stationing in Afghanistan was to contain China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2013–present) and to create ethnic divisions and social unrest in Xinjiang.¹⁴⁸ The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC became central props in a hallmark US psyops campaign.

As we have explained in the economic analysis of Western economies, it is not irrational for the West to seek to retard China’s growth. Central to the next stage of development of China’s economy is promoting a dual circulation economy, i.e., to increase the weight of the domestic market while continuing to keep growing its international trade, switching to high quality development, and advancing the economic development of the western provinces of China. Attacking Xinjiang simultaneously accomplishes many Western interests: weakens China’s domestic growth strategies, isolates China internationally, masks US violence against Muslim countries, and continues to support extremist groups to destabilise their adversaries.

Fabricated allegations of genocide among the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, entirely unsubstantiated by the US State Department, enabled the US government to impose sanctions on China, aiming to strike at China’s entire textile industry chain, which exports more than US$ 300 billion and accounts for over one-third of the world’s textile exports, ranking first globally.¹⁴⁹ But despite US sanctions, Xinjiang’s foreign trade surged by 51.25% year-on-year, reaching US$ 30 billion in the first three-quarters of 2023, with trade with five Central Asian nations increasing by 59.1%.¹⁵⁰ China has just announced a free trade zone in Xinjiang to promote connectivity with regional Belt and Road countries.

In addition to ‘soft-power’ warfare, the US spared no effort to contain China’s development in high-tech sectors, especially in weakening China’s capacity to produce or even purchase top-end semiconductor chips. By imposing long-arm jurisdiction on technology such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines manufactured by the Dutch company ASML, the US seeks to prevent China from entering the future of chip technology. The Biden administration believes that its impact will extend far beyond weakening China’s military advancements, but also threatening China’s economic growth and scientific leadership.

Gregory C. Allen, director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project and senior fellow in the Emerging Technology Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believes that the message conveyed by the export controls against China issued by the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in October 2022, is part of ‘a new US policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry – strangling with an intent to kill’.¹⁵¹ C.J. Muse, an industry analyst in the US, stated: ‘If you’d told me about these rules five years ago, I would’ve told you that’s an act of war — we’d have to be at war’.¹⁵²

Despite severe restrictions by the US, China continues to outgrow the Global North (Figure 50).

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China strengthens its economic connections with the Global South. From 2013 to 2022, China’s total trade volume with countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative reached US$ 19.1 trillion, with an average annual increase of 6.4%. Cumulative bilateral investment exceeded US$ 380 billion, and China’s foreign direct investment exceeded US$ 240 billion. China’s new contracted projects reached US$ 2 trillion, with a cumulative turnover of US$ 1.3 trillion completed.¹⁵³

Ironically, US containment in high-tech fields has only strengthened China’s resolve for self-reliance in innovation. In recent years, China has made significant breakthroughs in independent innovation in high-end chips, electric vehicles, and digital technology, making the US blockade and containment in high-tech fields increasingly unrealistic.

The Global North Pushing the World Towards War

The peaceful rise of the Global South countries, led by Asia and especially China, poses a comprehensive economic challenge to imperialist world dominance. For the first time in 600 years, the Atlantic imperialist powers are confronted with a non-white economic force capable of countering them.

To contain China’s rise, the US is intensifying internal integration within the imperialist camp, allowing and demanding that two fascist countries defeated in WWII – Japan and Germany – rearm themselves. US political leaders unanimously consider it essential to contain and defeat China as a core strategic enemy and started a New Cold War. US military leaders make alarming statements about China. The US geopolitical goal is to overthrow the regimes of China and Russia, de-nuclearise and if possible, dismember both countries, split them into several small countries, and ensure they can never again challenge US military or economic hegemony.

On Russia’s western border, NATO’s eastward expansion has brought the security issue of Ukraine to a critical boiling point. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States had promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward since its original mission – countering the Soviet Union and containing European communism – had concluded with the end of the Cold War. However, NATO reneged on that ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ and it inducted 14 new member states, including several former Soviet Republics. In 2018, Ukraine amended its constitution to prioritise joining NATO and the European Union as its national strategy, posing a significant threat to Russia’s national security. With Kiev only 760 km away from Moscow, allowing NATO to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine would constitute an uncontrollable military threat to Russia.

Simultaneously, neo-Nazi forces in western Ukraine were on the rise. In January 2022, torchlight processions were held in cities like Kiev and Lviv, commemorating the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Prior conflicts saw western Ukrainian nationalist extremists hoisting Nazi flags and threatening to annihilate eastern Ukrainians and pro-Russian elements. Ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine had to organise resistance and seek Russian aid. Under these circumstances, Russia launched a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, essentially facing a direct confrontation with NATO’s military force.

In the Western Pacific, the United States continuously attempts to stoke tensions over the South China Sea and Taiwan. In August 2022, despite strong opposition and solemn representations from China, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, seriously violating the One-China principle and the provisions of the three US-China joint communiqués, severely impacting the political foundation of Sino-American relations; it is important to recall that in 1972, in the Shanghai communiqué, the United States accepted the ‘One China’ policy, which acknowledges that there is only one China and that Taiwan is not a separate, sovereign state). In August 2023, the US Navy, along with forces from Canada and the Republic of Korea, conducted joint military exercises in the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea.¹⁵⁴ However, the exercises ended abruptly after just five hours due to China’s targeted military mobilisations.¹⁵⁵ Since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became president of the Philippines in June 2022, the Philippines has opened multiple military bases to the US, strengthened security ties with Australia and Japan, and sparked disputes with China over sovereignty issues in the South China Sea. Warships from the US, Canada, Australia, and other countries also frequently patrol and exercise in the South China Sea, causing several close encounters and frictions with the Chinese Navy.

To date, faced with continuous provocations from the United States and its allies, China has maintained a restrained stance, striving to avoid military conflicts with the US and its allies – a confrontation that could escalate into a global nuclear war. However, Taiwan holds a special significance for China. As part of China, historically and under international law, Taiwan’s continued separation signifies that China’s civil war, and even the ‘century of humiliation’ that began with the Opium Wars in 1840, has not ended. The division of Taiwan is unacceptable to China, ultimately even if it means the risk of direct war against the United States.

With the direct support of Biden and Blinken, Israel is advancing an ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The situation in Gaza starkly reveals the true face of the imperialist camp of the Global North as a collective of white settlers: when conflicts arise between white settlers and colonised people of colour, the imperialist camp uniformly stands with the settlers.

The fault lines of Ukraine and Palestine have exacerbated the polarisation of the social democrats, sections of whom have proven unable to overcome their desire for acceptability and join in a robust movement for peace.

Let us return to the quote from NATO and the EU that they would be ‘protecting our one billion citizens, preserving our freedom and democracy… against all threats’. This sentence, appearing in the first paragraph of the NATO-EU 2023 communiqué, clearly outlines the structure of today’s world: the imperialist camp, centred around the US and based on NATO infrastructure, is fully united and mobilised militarily, politically, and economically, ready to stifle any emerging forces that might pose a threat to their hegemonic status. This unprecedented immense imperialist pressure has forced many in the ‘rest of the world’ (those outside the imperialist camp) to identify alternative structures and identities for self-preservation.

EPILOGUE: A Credible Economic and Political Alternative World Order

Twenty-five years after the publication of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) – identifying this as the greatest geopolitical danger for the US – China, Russia, and Iran have indeed grown closer in various fields, including economics, politics, and security. Not coincidentally, they are the only three countries that are in the BRICS10, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter and United Nations (Figure 51). The driving force behind this convergence – precisely as Brzezinski predicted – is the escalating hegemonic pressure from the imperialist group led by the United States. Compared to NATO, which is highly unified in ideology, military command, and intelligence sharing, there is no anti-imperialist international organisation that is comparable. Nevertheless, three influential international organisations have emerged within the Global South:

The BRICS organisation, initiated by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is an economic cooperation mechanism that expanded to 17 official and unofficial cooperating partners after the BRICS summit in August 2023. BRICS10 represents 45.5% of the world population, 35.6% of the GDP (PPP), and 44% of the global industrial output. The BRICS New Development Bank began with US$ 100 billion in capital investment and its Contingent Reserve Structure also holds US$ 100 billion.¹⁵⁶

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) started with a focus on security issues. It brings together countries from the Eurasian continent – from the large economic performers like China, India, and Turkey to the leading OPEC countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as member countries of the League of Arab States – to address security challenges through multifaceted development approaches. The SCO represents 60% of the Eurasian territory, a quarter of the world’s GDP, and 40% of the global population.¹⁵⁷ In July 2023, Xi Jinping proposed the creation of an SCO development bank.

The newly established Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations (FUNC) seeks to advocate for multilateralism and oppose hegemony and unilateralism within the framework of the UN Charter. Currently, this group has 20 member countries, with Venezuela as its initiator. On the issue of Palestine, the group supports the just demand for national independence of the Palestinian people, backs Palestine’s bid to become a formal member of the United Nations and supports the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Hitting its 10-year milestone, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has also had a significant impact on the Global South. To date, with an investment surpassing US$ 1 trillion, the BRI has been a pivotal force in infrastructure development in the Global South.¹⁵⁸

Contrary to the imperialist camp, the primary aspirations of the Global South countries are sovereignty and development, and to achieve peace. Specifically, they face at least eight common challenges and opportunities (Figure 52), elaborated on below:

Multilateralism: Engaging in profound multilateral dialogues and cooperation among Global South countries without reliance on platforms provided by the Global North countries.

New Modernisation: Building regional economic integration through economic corridors and belts within the Global South to realise economies of scale at the continental level.

De-dollarisation: Reducing dependence on the US dollar (especially for those countries facing sanctions) in international trade through mechanisms like local currency transactions, currency swaps, and regional common currencies.

Innovation led by the Global South: Promoting democratic and open technological innovation among Global South countries. This includes reducing the economic premium caused by intellectual property monopolies in areas like medicine, new energy, and information technology.

Reparations and Debt Resolution: Addressing the century-old debt trap imposed by imperialist countries through collective negotiations for reductions and compensations.

Food Sovereignty: Ensuring the peoples’ and states’ right to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries, transnational corporations, and free trade agreements.

Digital Sovereignty: Enhancing the capability of Global South countries to control digital spaces in hardware, software, data, content, standards, and regulations, and constructing alternatives to the US monopolised digital platforms.

Environmental Justice: Formulating fair emission rights allocation plans and urging imperialist countries to compensate for their long-term cumulative pollution. Financialisation of nature is a dead end for the Global South.

Humanity faces a dangerous and ruthless military power. The US is on a march to rearm the two main fascist powers of WWII, as it itself turns more towards a politics of the extreme right and neo-fascism.

It is sadly very true that the left forces outside the socialist camp are indeed weak and that the subjective aspect of revolution in most countries is not ready for conducting revolution. But we are witnessing significant changes and breaks in consciousness, albeit not full class consciousness. Millions of people are in the streets reviled by the sickness of not only the US and Israel’s genocidal regimes but also of France and the UK. The four nuclear powers of imperialism have banded together, demonstrating their power. The likely cost of this will be the creation of a future generation of youth in the Arab and Muslim world who will never forget nor forgive this flaunting of brutality and humiliation. Mao Zedong described this historical dialectic:

Imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are – paper tigers. On this, we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers that can devour people. On this, we should build our tactical thinking.¹⁵⁹

Under President Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has proposed visionary recommendations for humanity. The China model of modernisation, a result of socialism with Chinese characteristics, indicates a path for the Global South countries that does not rely on exploiting and oppressing other nations. It balances the material and spiritual civilisation, economic development, and the ecological environment, offering an essential reference for the development of the Global South.

As a result of over 600 years of humiliation, racial violence, and economic exploitation by the Global North, we have arrived at this stage of Hyper-Imperialism. However, an emerging Global South, even with its contradictions, reminds us that human beings are not constrained to remain victims of history. Despite the different context of subjective factors, the concluding call of The Communist Manifesto (1848) remains compelling today:

We have a world to win.

***

‘Black Woman’

by Cuban Poet Nancy Morejón

Still I smell the foam of the sea they forced me to cross.

Night, I cannot recall the night.

Nor could the ocean itself recall it.
But never have I forgotten the first seagull I glimpsed.
High up, the clouds, like innocent ever-present witnesses.
Perhaps I’ve not forgotten my lost coast nor even my ancestral tongue.
They dropped me here and here I’ve lived.
And because I work like a dog,
Here is where I was reborn.
And I sought to rely on epic story of the Mandinga after epic story.

I rebelled.

His Grace purchased me in a public square.
I embroidered His Grace’s cloak and I bore him a son.
My son was given no name.
And His Grace, he died at the hands of an impeccable English lord.

I trudged forward.

This is the land where I was lashed and beaten upside down.
I paddled along all its rivers.
Under its sun I sewed, harvested, and ate none of the crops.
I got a slave barracks for a house.
I myself carried the stones to build it,
but I sang in the natural beat of the nation’s birds.

I rose in rebellion.

In this very land I touched the warm blood
and rotten bones of many others like me,
brought here, or not, as I was.
Then I stopped thinking about the way to Guinea forever.
To Guinea or Benin? Was I thinking about Madagascar or Cape Verde?

I worked even more.

Then I laid the foundation for my best millenary chant and my hope.
Here I built my world.
I went to the mountains.
My true independence happened at the palenque
and I rode with Maceo’s cavalry.

Only one century later, alongside my descendants,
from atop a blue mountain,

I came down from the Sierra

to put an end to capitalists and usurers,
and generals and the petit bourgeois.
Now I am: only now do we hold and create.
Nothing is beyond our reach.
Our land.
Ours the sea and sky.
Ours the magic and the amazing dreams.
My equals, here I see you dance
around the tree we planted for communism.
Its generous wood is clearly resounding.

APPENDIX

Methodology

This report was compiled with data and charts from Global South Insights (GSI), based on diverse sources, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, OECD, the Conference Board, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Monthly Review, and World Beyond War, among others (see Figure 55). In this section, we present the methodological definitions and criteria that guided the elaboration of this report.

All 193 UN Member States and Palestine as an Observer State are included in the Global North Rings or the Global South Groupings.

In analysing the Global North, we found that among the factors included in our investigation – historical, military, and intelligence relationships – a critical factor was each country’s relationship to US intelligence. As a result, we have divided the Global North into four rings, comprising 49 countries in the US-Led Imperialist Camp. Our analysis of the Global South indicated factors such as the country’s economic and political independence from imperialism and the strategic relationships between Global South countries. However, a critical factor was the relative degree to which they were targets of regime change and their role in publicly advancing international anti-imperialist stances. Therefore, the 145 Global South countries are divided into six groupings.

In addition to UN member countries, we have included the number of military bases in non-UN member countries and in the territories – sometimes contentious – where foreign bases are located.

Other comparative calculations in this report include all countries and territories from their respective source database.

Although invaluable, international databases, such as those from the IMF and the World Bank, are burdened by limitations arising from disparities in national statistical production processes, particularly in the methodologies for variable measurement. This leads to the non-harmonisation of national data compiled by international databases at its sources. Similarly, international databases may have limitations regarding completeness. The data governance and rigorous audit procedures conducted by GSI sought to ensure maximum data consistency.

Regarding GDP-related data, this report primarily uses the IMF data. Notably, the IMF database does not include data for four countries: Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, due to their sovereign decision of not being subject to IMF dictates, as well as Monaco and Liechtenstein. The GDP (PPP) field in tables featuring these four countries is left blank.

Economic data from the World Bank is used only to calculate world industry value added. The World Bank publishes the value added of industry as a percentage of GDP using current prices and exchange rates, referred to in this study as the Current Exchange Rate (CER) method. Only in this case are both CER and GDP (PPP) values presented.

In this document, GDP (PPP) is adopted as the standard. This is not a choice free of controversy, and due to the scope of this report, we will not delve into our methodological reflections on such controversies. PPP conversion factors are statistical estimates based on baskets of goods and services for benchmark years, further applied to GDP for GDP (PPP) estimates. Although there are arguments that GDP (PPP) data could overestimate countries in the Global South, it is a more accurate measure in comparing economic performance and living standards across different countries, as it adjusts for differences in price levels and provides a more stable metric for international comparisons. At the same time, GDP (PPP) delivers a more meaningful basis for ranking countries regarding their economic size and contribution to the global economy, compared to the GDP rankings using CER. In such rankings, countries with strong currencies may rank higher, even if their actual economic output is not as significant.

Figures 53 and 54 show the comparisons for CER versus PPP calculations of percentage of world total GDP for 1) China versus the United States and 2) the Global South versus the Global North. Both CER and PPP show a dramatic rise in relative percentages for China and the Global South.

However, PPP conversion factors to measure military spending are necessarily less reliable than current exchange rates because no price data is collected for military expenditure. Therefore, the nature of military spending lacks this information for international comparisons. SIPRI recognises that using the PPP adjustment for military spending is inaccurate and, therefore, is less reliable than using currency exchange rates. Regarding military spending, we combined data from Monthly Review for actual US military spending, along with SIPRI data, to calculate the real worldwide military spending using CER.

As for other military data, various sources were used to comprehensively address this central phenomenon to analyse Hyper-Imperialism; however, limitations persist due to differing methodologies, measurement variables, data scarcity, and secrecy. We used data from the US Congressional Research Service combined with the Military Intervention Project (MIP) for the quantity of interventions. While the former is an official US publication that serves as a primary data source on US military interventions, it does not include some secret missions and does not aggregate its data to differentiate between the various types of US Armed Forces’ overseas interventions. The latter uses a more comprehensive definition of military intervention, although it only publishes a data summary. Finally, we used the lists published by World Beyond War, Declassified UK, and the US Department of Defence Base Structure Report for data on military bases.

In addition to the aforementioned data sources, GSI’s elaboration in this report draws from a broader set of data sources listed below. GSI carefully created new categories and built complex data integration platforms to provide the analysis from a Global South standpoint. Classification processes are inherently challenging and subject to modification since domestic and regional politics can change quickly. Extensive data collection and integration across diverse countries allowed for hypothesis testing. For example, in determining who were the closest allies of the US, we assessed closeness to US intelligence. The data for this analysis was exposed by Edward Snowden when he showed that, in addition to the ‘Five Eyes’ – the world’s oldest intelligence partnership between five anglophone Western states, which began with the 1946 British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement – there were two other hidden groups, the ‘Nine Eyes’ and the ‘Fourteen Eyes’ (SIGINT Seniors Europe, formed in 1982).

The foundation for this report is the integration of databases, data analysis, and GSI’s elaboration.

Global South Insights

Global South Insights (GSI) is a network of researchers committed to advancing quantitative, data-driven research in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is a partner of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

GSI has employed advanced data technologies focused on statistical databases from multiple authoritative institutions, embedding comprehensive data governance and audit mechanisms.

Common issues facing researchers include:

Complex data sources, difficultly in data integration. For commonly used data such as population and GDP statistics, organisations like the United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund each have different statistical approaches. The data released by these institutions lack standardisation, leading to various compatibility and interoperability issues during data integration.

Poor data quality, difficultly in data auditing. Missing and erroneous data exist in the datasets published by various organisations. Auditing original data and integrated/analysed data relies heavily on manual operations, which is labour-intensive, inefficient, error-prone, and lacks repeatability.

Basic processing tools, difficultly in advanced analysis. Data integration and analysis depend significantly on basic tools like Excel, which are inefficient and cumbersome for operations like 10-year rolling averages and linear regression. These challenges make it difficult to conduct higher-level abstract analyses.

Limited visualisation, difficultly for insight presentation. Relying on the limited chart formats provided by Excel makes it difficult to create more expressive data presentations like composite charts, maps, heatmaps, etc. Charts created with professional design tools cannot automatically update with data changes.

Lack of data asset management, difficultly in team collaboration. Quantitative research processes based on Excel files lack the accumulation and management of data assets such as source data, data audit results, data processing workflows, process data, and interim outcomes, making it difficult to support long-term collaborative research among multiple people and multiple topics.

Full list of ‘One Hundred and Eleven Diverse Global South Countries’

Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist 'Rules-Based Order'

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist 'Rules-Based Order'

Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist 'Rules-Based Order'

Article 4 of 10

Orinoco Tribune

By Vijay Prashad

Originally published at https://orinocotribune.com/eight-contradictions-of-the-imperialist-rules-based-order/

Publication Date: March 17, 2023

By Vijay Prashad – Mar 9, 2023

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has now moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to the symbolic time of the annihilation of humanity and the Earth since 1947. This is alarming, which is why leaders in the Global South have been making the case to halt the warmongering over Ukraine and against China. As Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, ‘We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities’.

In line with the alarm from the Doomsday Clock and assertions from people such as Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, the rest of this newsletter features a new text called Eight Contradictions in the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based Order’ (which you can download as a PDF here). It was drafted by Kyeretwie Opoku (the convenor of the Socialist Movement of Ghana), Manuel Bertoldi (Patria Grande /Federación Rural para la producción y el arraigo), Deby Veneziale (senior fellow, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), and me, with inputs from senior political leaders and intellectuals from across the world. We are offering this text as an invitation to a dialogue. We hope that you will read, circulate, and discuss it.

We are now entering a qualitatively new phase of world history. Significant global changes have emerged in the years since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. This can be seen in a new phase of imperialism and changes in the particularities of eight contradictions.

1. The contradiction between moribund imperialism and an emerging successful socialism led by China.
This contradiction has intensified because of the peaceful rise of socialism with Chinese characteristics. For the first time in 500 years, the Atlantic imperialist powers are confronted by a large, non-white economic power that can compete with them. This became clear in 2013 when China’s GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) overtook that of the United States. China accomplished this in a much shorter period than the West, with a significantly larger population and without colonies, enslaving others, or military conquest. Whilst China stands for peaceful relations, the US has become increasingly bellicose.

The US has led the imperialist camp since World War II. Post-Angela Merkel and with the advent of the Ukraine military operation, the US strategically subordinated dominant sections of the European and Japanese bourgeoisie. This has resulted in weakening intra-imperialist contradictions. The US first permitted and then demanded that both Japan (the third-largest economy in the world) and Germany (the fourth-largest economy) – two fascist powers during World War II – greatly increase their military expenditure. The result has been the ending of Europe’s economic relationship with Russia, damage to the European economy, and economic and political benefits for the US. Despite the capitulation of most of Europe’s political elite to full US subordination, some large sections of German capital are heavily dependent on trade with China, much more than on their US counterparts. The US, however, is now pressuring Europe to downgrade its ties to China.

More importantly, China and the socialist camp now face an even more dangerous entity: the consolidated structure of the Triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan). The US’s growing internal social decay should not mask the near absolute unity of its political elite on foreign policy. We are witnessing the bourgeoisie placing its political and military interests over its short-term economic interests.

The centre of the world economy is shifting, with Russia and the Global South (including China) now accounting for 65% of the world’s GDP (measured in PPP). From 1950 until the present, the US share of the global GDP (in PPP) has fallen from 27% to 15%. The growth of the US’s GDP has also been declining for more than five decades and has now fallen to only around 2% per year. It has no large new markets in which to expand. The West suffers from an ongoing general crisis of capitalism as well as the consequences of the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

Maksud Mirmuhamedov (Tajikistan), Hearth, 2020.

2. The contradiction between the ruling classes of the narrow band of imperialist G7 countries and the political and economic elite of capitalist countries in the Global South.
This relationship has undergone a major change from the heydays of the 1990s and the height of US unilateral power and arrogance. Today, there are growing cracks in the alliance between the G7 and Global South power elites. Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, India’s largest billionaires, need oil and coal from Russia. The far-right Modi-led government represents India’s monopoly bourgeoisie. Thus, the Indian foreign minister now makes occasional statements against US hegemony in finance, sanctions, and other areas. The West does not have the economic and political ability to always provide what power elites in India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey need. This contradiction, however, has not sharpened to the degree that it can be a focal point of other contradictions, unlike the contradiction between socialist China and the US-led G7 bloc.

The Global South Births a New Game-changing Payment System

3. The contradiction between the broad urban and rural working class and sections of the lower petty bourgeoisie (collectively known as the popular classes) of the Global South versus the US-led imperial power elite.
This contradiction is slowly becoming sharper. The West has a great soft power advantage in the Global South amongst all classes. Yet, for the first time in decades, young Africans have come out to support the expulsion of French troops in Mali and Burkina Faso in West Africa. For the first time, the popular classes in Colombia were able to elect a new government that rejected the country’s status as a vassal outpost of US military and intelligence forces. Working-class women are at the forefront of many critical battles of both the working class and society at large. Young people are rising up against the environmental crimes of capitalism. Growing numbers of the working class are identifying their struggles for peace, development, and justice as explicitly anti-imperialist. They are now able to see through the lies of US ‘human rights’ ideology, the destruction of the environment by Western energy and mining companies, and the violence of US hybrid war and sanctions.

Zayasaikhan Sambuu (Mongolia), Survivors, 2013.

4. The contradiction between advanced rent-seeking finance capital versus the needs of the popular classes, and even some sections of capital in non-socialist countries, regarding the organisation of societies’ requirements for investment in industry, environmentally sustainable agriculture, employment, and development.
This contradiction is a result of the decline in the rate of profit and the difficulty of capital to increase the rate of exploitation of the working class to a sufficient level able to finance increasing investment requirements and remain competitive. Outside of the socialist camp, in almost all of the advanced capitalist countries and in most of the Global South – with some exceptions, especially in Asia – there is an investment crisis. New types of firms have arisen that include hedge funds such as Bridgewater Associates and private equity firms such as BlackRock. ‘Private markets’ controlled $9.8 trillion worth of assets in 2022. Derivatives, a form of fictitious and speculative capital, are now worth $18.3 trillion in ‘market’ value but have a $632 trillion notional value – a value more than five times higher than the world’s total actual GDP.

A new class of information technology-based network-effect monopolies, including Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon – all under full US control – have emerged to attract monopoly rents. US digital monopolies, under the direct supervision of US intelligence agencies, control the information architecture of the whole world, outside of a few socialist and nationalist countries. These monopolies are the basis for the rapid expansion of US soft power in the last 20 years. The military-industrial complex, the merchants of death, also attract growing investments.

This intensified speculative and monopoly rentier accumulation phase of capital is deepening a strike by capital against necessary social investments. South Africa and Brazil have seen dramatic levels of deindustrialisation under neoliberalism. Even advanced imperialist countries have ignored their own infrastructure, such as the electricity grid, bridges, and the railway. The global elite has engineered a tax strike by providing huge reductions in tax rates and taxes as well as legal tax havens for both individual capitalists and their corporations to increase their share of surplus value.

Tax evasion by capital and the privatisation of large swathes of the public sector have decimated the availability of basic public goods like education, healthcare, and transportation for billions of people. It has contributed to Western capital’s ability to manipulate and gain high interest income from the ‘manufactured’ debt crisis facing the Global South. At its highest level, hedge fund profiteers like George Soros speculate and destroy the finance of entire countries.

The impact on the working class is severe, as their work has become increasingly precarious and permanent unemployment is destroying large sections of the world’s youth. A growing section of the population is superfluous under capitalism. Social inequality, misery, and desperation are abundant.

Owusu-Ankomah (Ghana), Bapende, 1993.

5. The contradiction between the popular classes of the Global South and their domestic political and economic power elites.
This manifests quite differently by country and region. In socialist and progressive countries, contradictions amongst the people are resolved in peaceful and varied ways. However, in several countries in the Global South where the capitalist elite has been fully in bed with Western capital, wealth is held by a small percentage of the population. There is widespread misery amongst the poorest people, and the capitalist development model is failing to serve the interests of the majority. Due to the history of neocolonialism and Western soft power, there is a decidedly pro-West middle-class consensus in most of the large Global South countries. This class hegemony of the local bourgeoisie and the upper stratum of the petty bourgeoisie is used to block the popular classes (who make up most of the population) from accessing power and influence.

6. The contradiction between US-led imperialism versus nations strongly defending national sovereignty.
These nations fall into four main categories: socialist countries, progressive countries, other countries rejecting US control, and the special case of Russia. The US has created this antagonistic contradiction through hybrid warfare methods such as assassinations, invasions, NATO-led military aggression, sanctions, lawfare, trade war, and a now incessant propaganda war based on outright lies. Russia is in a special category, as it suffered more than 25 million deaths at the hands of European fascist invaders when it was a socialist country. Today, Russia – which notably has immense natural resources – is once again a target for complete annihilation as a state by NATO. Some elements of its socialist past are still present in the country, and there remains a high degree of patriotism. The US’s goal is to finish off what it started in 1992: at a minimum, to permanently destroy Russia’s nuclear military capacity and install a puppet regime in Moscow in order to dismember Russia in the long term and replace it with many smaller, permanently weakened vassal states of the West.

Taisia Korotkova (Russia), Technology, 2007.

7. The contradiction between the millions of discarded working-class poor in the Global North versus the bourgeoisie who dominate these countries.
These workers are showing some signs of rebellion against their economic and social conditions. However, the imperialist bourgeoisie is playing the white supremacist card to prevent a larger unity of working people in these countries. At this moment, workers are not consistently able to avoid falling prey to racist war propaganda. The number of people present at public events against imperialism has diminished precipitously over the last thirty years.

Ukraine is Blackmailing the Global South by Officially Demanding Weapons for Wheat

8. The contradiction between Western capitalism versus the planet and human life.
The inexorable path of this system is to destroy the planet and human life, threaten nuclear annihilation, and work against the needs of humanity to collectively reclaim the planet’s air, water, and land and stop the nuclear military madness of the United States. Capitalism rejects planning and peace. The Global South (including China) can help the world build and expand a ‘zone of peace’ and commit to living in harmony with nature.

Victor Ehikhamenor (Nigeria), Lagos Hide and Seek, 2014.

With these changes in the political landscape, we are witnessing the rise of an informal front against the US-dominated imperialist system. This front is constituted by the convergence of:

• Popular sentiment that this violent system is the main enemy of the people of the world.
• Popular desires for a more just, peaceful, and egalitarian world.
• The struggle of socialist or nationalist governments and political forces for their sovereignty.
• The desires of other Global South countries to reduce their dependence on this system.

The main forces against the US-dominated imperialist system are the peoples of the world and the socialist and nationalist governments. However, there must be space provided for integrating governments that wish to reduce their dependency on the imperialist system.

The world currently stands at the beginning of a new era in which we will witness the end of the US global empire. The neoliberal system is deteriorating under the weight of numerous internal contradictions, historical injustices, and economic unviability. Without a better alternative, the world will descend into even greater chaos. Our movements have revived hope that something other than this social torment is possible.

Norma Bessouet (Argentina), Abracadabra, 1947.

We hope that Eight Contradictions in the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based Order’ will stimulate debate and discussion and assist us in our broader Battle of Ideas against toxic social philosophies that seek to suffocate rational thought about our world.

(Tricontinental)

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution(University of California Press, 2016), and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

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NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth

NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth

Article 5 of 10

The Tricontinental

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-nato-the-most-dangerous-organisation/

Publication Date: June 10, 2025

Cover art by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

A collaboration with No Cold War and Zetkin Forum for Social Research

The posters in this dossier were created by artists from around the world and displayed in the (In)security exhibition organised as part of the 2022 Madrid Peace Summit in the lead-up to the NATO Summit held in the same city. The exhibition was a collective initiative of the International Peoples’ Assembly’s European secretariat with support from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the World March of Women, and others.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) claims that it is facing the greatest existential crisis in its nearly eighty-year history. As US President Donald Trump and his national security team have – on the surface – turned their back on Europe and said that they will no longer pay for its security, the region’s leaders scramble to raise the funds to increase their support for the war in Ukraine and build up their own military production and capacity. Yet, there has been no concrete indication that the United States, which is the dominant force in NATO, will either withdraw from that military instrument or seek to disband it. NATO serves a wide range of purposes for the United States and has done so since it was founded in 1949. To pressure European states to pay more for their own defence is one thing; to mistake this for a broader US strategic withdrawal from Europe is another. Despite the rhetoric, what Trump is doing is not outside the ambit of the US elite’s overall approach: namely to maintain global power through instruments such as NATO and a pliant European state system, rather than isolating the United States behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. NATO will remain an instrument of Global North power regardless of the surface bumps that are inevitable in the period ahead.

The title of this dossier, NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth, is in line with the judgement of political scientist Peter Gowan (1946–2009), who wrote at the time of the NATO bombardment and break-up of Yugoslavia in 1999:

We must bear in mind two unfortunate facts: first, that the NATO states have been and are hell-bent on exacerbating the inequalities of power and wealth in the world, on destroying all challenges to their overwhelming military and economic power and on subordinating almost all other considerations to these goals; and second, the NATO states are finding it extraordinarily easy to manipulate their domestic electorates into believing that these states are indeed leading the world’s population toward a more just and humane future when, in reality, they are doing no such thing.¹

NATO uses the language of human rights and collective security to conceal the underlying motivations for its birth and current existence. It would be worthwhile to set aside this rhetoric and look at the actual record of this military – not human rights – alliance.

This dossier comes in three parts. The first provides a history of NATO and an assessment of its role in the US-led imperialist system. The second focuses on how NATO, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has redefined itself as a global policeman and intervened – as the third part shows – in different ways in the Global South.

Part 1: The Aggressive Alliance

The idea of NATO originated during the last years of World War II, when the United States and the United Kingdom began to discuss new security arrangements once the fascist powers in Europe had been defeated.² In 1945, the United States hosted the San Francisco Conference, where the United Nations was formed. The UN Charter, ratified by the fifty participants of the conference, allowed (in Chapter VIII, Article 52) for the formation of regional security organisations and granted them enforcement action – such as sanctions and military intervention – but only with the authorisation of the UN Security Council (in Chapter VIII, Article 53).³ It was based on this allowance by the UN Charter that the United States gathered ten European countries and Canada to sign the Washington Treaty in 1949 and create NATO. The European countries that joined NATO had a variety of post-war experiences: most of them, such as France and Germany, had to rebuild their militaries virtually from scratch; others, such as Britain, retained relatively intact militaries, while one – Iceland – had no standing army at all. NATO provided these countries with a US military (and nuclear) shield. In 1949, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) circulated a memorandum to explain that NATO’s true objective was not only to deter the Soviet Union from threatening Europe, but also to continue the ‘long-term control of German power’ and settle the question of ‘who is going to control German potential and thus hold the balance of power in Europe’. This hard-nosed assessment is a more accurate view of NATO than an exegesis of its charter.⁴ The CIA’s understanding had a European cognate. As NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, wrote in an internal memorandum in 1952, the organisation must ‘keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’.⁵

The year before NATO’s founding, George Kennan of the US State Department mused about how the United States had ‘about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population’. The implications of this would need to be settled. As Kennan wrote in the twenty-third Report by the Policy Planning Staff:

This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.⁶

The ‘pattern of relationships’ that needed to be built to control the ‘envy and resentment’ of the peoples of Asia and the broader Global South began the year before NATO was formed, when the US reshaped the security arrangements in the Americas with the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (or the Rio Treaty) of 1947 and then with the adoption of a new charter for the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1948. Both of these arrangements yoked the countries of Latin America to the United States. A few years after the founding of NATO in 1949, the United States built security pacts in East Asia (the Manila Pact of 1954, which created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, or SEATO) and in Central Asia (the Baghdad Pact of 1955, which created the Central Treaty Organisation, or CENTO). Along with these pacts, the US-led OAS committed itself to anti-communist action with the 1962 Special Consultative Committee on Security Against the Subversive Action of International Communism.⁷ The United States established this ecology of military pacts for two purposes: to constrain the development of any communist parties or forces in the regions and to enable US influence on governments around the world. This was part of a broader projection of power that enabled the US to build and maintain military bases – in some cases with nuclear capability – far from its own shores but close to the Soviet Union, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the People’s Republic of China, effectively laying the groundwork for a global military presence.

The need for military pacts began to wane for several reasons from the 1960s to the 1980s. First, the United States had already established an enormous global military footprint, with bases from Japan to Honduras that had been created through bilateral treaties. Second, military technology had improved dramatically, allowing the US to be far more flexible and mobile with its arsenal of intermediate-range missiles, nuclear-powered submarines, and enormous aerial capacity. Third, the US had developed a strategy known as ‘interoperability’, which allowed it to use sales of its own military technology to allied countries as a way to promote joint military exercises – effectively conducted under US military command and mostly for US strategic interests. Finally, the US had created regional command structures – such as Pacific Command in 1947 (Pacom, which would become the Indo-Pacific Command in 2018), Southern Command (Southcom) in 1963, and Central Command (Centcom) in 1983 – which had already established bilateral and multilateral agreements with allied militaries. It therefore did not require additional regional military alliances. These new mechanisms for the US global military footprint made security pacts less necessary in places such as Asia and the Middle East. SEATO was dissolved in 1977, largely due to lack of interest by the Southeast Asian countries, and two years later, after the Iranian Revolution, CENTO was shut down.⁸ This was not the case, however, in Latin America, where the OAS continues to operate to this day, focused with laser sharpness on how to minimise the role of the left in Latin America (Cuba was suspended from the organisation in 1962, after which Fidel Castro referred to it as the ‘Ministry of Colonies’).

Alongside the OAS, NATO was the other, crucial exception. It was not disbanded. Lord Hastings’ formula was intact. Keep the Soviet Union out: retain US and NATO military bases with US nuclear weapons in Europe as a deterrent to any Soviet moves beyond the established lines after World War II. Keep the Americans in: from a US perspective, this in fact meant keep the Europeans down, which implied that they must never be allowed to create their own continental army and that whenever expanding European Union (EU) was discussed, expanding NATO went along with it so as to maintain US influence in the region. Keep the Germans down: ensure that the old imperialist powers have no ambitions beyond being the subordinate allies of the United States, a vision that the US maintained not only for Germany but also across Eurasia – especially for Japan. NATO, therefore, remained an essential element of the architecture of US imperialism.

Regardless of what the US and NATO officials said, it was clear that they had three objectives for this military pact: to prevent the left from growing in their own countries (destroying the popular fronts in France, Greece, and Italy during the late 1940s and 1950s, as well as the anti-war movement in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s), to contain and roll back the socialist bloc (including, after 1959, the Cuban Revolution), and to prevent the national liberation movements in Africa and Asia from succeeding (including supporting Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa from the 1960s to the 1970s and assisting the United States in Korea in the early 1950s and Vietnam from the 1960s to the 1970s).⁹

Madrid Peace Summit Poster, 2022.

Part 2: Global NATO

In November 1991, a month before the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, NATO released a report called New Strategic Concept that acknowledged that there was a ‘new, more promising, era in Europe’.¹⁰ In this climate, NATO members could have built the confidence to say let us dissolve the alliance. Instead, they legitimised NATO’s continued existence, warning of ‘multidirectional’ threats that necessitated coordinated interventions, even outside the territories of NATO member states.

In 1997, at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that with the Soviet Union gone, ‘many people believe that we no longer face such a unifying threat, but I believe we do’. What, then, was NATO’s purpose? Albright explained:

It is to stop the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. It is to douse the combustible combination of technology and terror, the possibility, as unthinkable as it may seem, that weapons of mass destruction will fall into the hands of people who have no compunctions about using them. This threat emanates largely from the Middle East and Eurasia, so Europe is especially at risk.¹¹

In other words, NATO had to intervene in areas outside Europe to protect Europe. This is the charitable, surface interpretation. But there is another way to understand what Albright said so clearly. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia – under a pliant President Boris Yeltsin (who owed his 1996 re-election to US interference) – effectively surrendered to the US, and so the United States took the opportunity to use its own overwhelming military power and that of its main global instrument, NATO, to expand its dominion across Eastern Europe and punish any ‘backlash states’ (as Anthony Lake of the US State Department called them in 1994) that refused to adopt the policies of globalisation, neoliberalism, and US primacy.¹²

Global North governments require the image of a menacing enemy to legitimise NATO’s existence. Whether the perceived threat of communism (the Soviet Union during the Cold War) or allegations of terrorism (al-Qaeda) or authoritarianism (Russia and China more recently), NATO member states sow fear about the ‘enemies of the free world’ to convince their own populations of the necessity to further militarise their societies, such as by expanding their military and police forces.¹³ Such demagoguery also serves to integrate otherwise progressive movements and trade unions into NATO’s war drive.

In fact, in 1991, it had already become clear that the United States would use NATO to subordinate Eastern Europe and Russia and that it would then be used as a global policeman against any ‘rogue state’ that decided to defy US power in this new era. NATO’s lines of engagement would follow US policy to the letter. As US President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America noted, ‘Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in the hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States’.¹⁴ The concept of ‘potential adversaries’ – initially ‘backlash states’ or ‘rogue states’ in 1994 and then ‘catastrophic terrorism’ in 1998 – would soon be focused on Russia and China.¹⁵

There were geopolitical mandates that informed this decision, but there was also money involved. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the weapons industry feared that a ‘peace dividend’ would follow and that their profits, which had grown immensely during this period, would suffer. So, the weapons industry created the US Committee to Enlarge NATO, chaired by Bruce Jackson (then vice president of Lockheed Martin), which lobbied the US Congress to pass the NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act of 1996. Over the next two years, from 1996 to 1998, the six largest military contractors spent $51 million lobbying Congress to promote NATO expansion.¹⁶ As Joel Johnson of the Aerospace Industry Association put it, ‘the stakes are high. Whoever gets in first will have a lock for the next quarter century’ (since aircraft sales presume enormous additional purchases of spare parts and new aircraft to maintain and expand fleets).¹⁷

New NATO members were strongly encouraged to buy from the US weapons industry, and so the enlargement of NATO was also the enlargement of the weapons market for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Textron (known at the time as the ‘big six’, all based in the United States).¹⁸ Between 2015–2019 and 2020–2024, for example, European NATO members more than doubled their imports from the weapons industry, with 64% coming from the United States.¹⁹

Europe’s reliance on US arms manufacturers has been an issue for the region’s bureaucrats for decades. In 2003, for instance, a European Commission study wrote that ‘there is a danger that European industry could be reduced to the status of sub-supplier to prime US contractors, while the key know-how is reserved for US firms’.²⁰ This was part of the overall vision to subordinate Europe to US ambitions.

In 1999, exceeding any UN mandate for peacekeeping, NATO went to war in Yugoslavia to break up the country. During this war, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which the Chinese continue to believe was a deliberate act.²¹ This was the first indicator of NATO’s push outside it’s area of operations. Two years later, NATO conducted another ‘out of area’ operation by entering the US-initiated war on Afghanistan. This provided NATO with the confidence that it now had the ability and permission to operate as the policeman of the US-led order, with Ivo H. Daalder – who became the US ambassador to NATO in 2009 – and James Goldgeier (a long-time advocate for NATO expansion) writing in Foreign Affairs about ‘Global NATO’ in 2006.²² While NATO did not formally enter the illegal war on Iraq in 2003, it nonetheless supported both Poland and Turkey with logistics and communications in the war. During this period, NATO began to expand its relationships with military forces across the world, notably in Eastern Europe and East Asia, and participated in the US War on Terror in different ways.²³

Before the Soviet Union collapsed, and to allow for the annexation of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), the United States government made a commitment to the Soviet government that NATO would not expand beyond Germany’s eastern border.²⁴ However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO did exactly that. The 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia sent a clear message to Eastern European nations: you are either with us or against us. In the years that followed, these countries were incorporated into NATO: Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; and North Macedonia in 2020. During this process, the US took steps to ensure that the now reunified Germany was ‘kept down’ and operated only within the boundaries set by Washington.²⁵ The EU’s eastward expansion was permitted, but it was preceded by (or at least concurred with) NATO expansion. US hegemony in the Western bloc was thus secured, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Though four countries that border Russia (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland) had already joined NATO by the mid-2000s, the Russian government was not going to permit Georgia and Ukraine, two countries that share sizeable borders with Russia, to join. At the April 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, in the context of Europe’s increasing reliance on Russian natural gas and oil, France and Germany blocked Georgia and Ukraine’s entry into NATO. The deployment of Russian troops following a Georgian military confrontation with Russia in South Ossetia that same year provided the first indication of how far Moscow would go to prevent Georgia’s ambitions to join either the EU or NATO. The US-influenced removal of the Ukrainian government in 2014, the insistence by the Global North that Ukraine join NATO, and the US withdrawal from key arms control treaties – including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (2002) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (2019) – suggested to Russia that Washington aimed to place mid-range nuclear weapons on its border.²⁶ This was non-negotiable to Moscow, and it led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Since the early 1950s, the United States has complained about having to shoulder the burden of NATO spending because European countries do not spend enough on their military capacity.²⁷ In 1952, even the UK parliament debated the unevenness of military spending and of compulsory military service across NATO countries.²⁸ Nonetheless, the low level of military expenditure by European countries remained, and indeed there was even a decline in the 1970s due to the process of détente that followed the signing of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the 1975 Helsinki Accords as well as the stagflation that smothered European economies in the same period. In the 1980s, then US President Ronald Reagan’s administration mounted pressure on Europe to increase military spending. In the post-Cold War era, US officials again sang in harmony over the need for higher European military spending.

At the same time, however, Europe recognised that its reliance on the US prevented it from operating independently. After the wars in Bosnia (1995) and Yugoslavia (1999), for instance, there was a debate in European capitals about their dependence on the United States.²⁹ The push to build Europe’s navigation satellite system, Galileo, was motivated largely by this anxiety. ‘If the EU finds it necessary to undertake a security mission that the US does not consider to be in its interest’, a European Commission paper noted in 2002, Europe ‘will be impotent unless it has the satellite technology that is now indispensable’.³⁰ By the 2006 NATO Riga Summit, the members agreed that they should raise their military spending to 2% of their GDP, a norm reinforced at the 2014 NATO Wales Summit.³¹

While aware of the problems of military dependence, European states nonetheless wanted to remain under the cover of the US military blanket. European leaders hastened from NATO summit to NATO summit to agree to raise their military spending regardless of the damage this would do to their societies and to their own foreign policy, which was becoming increasingly militarised. In 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a speech later known as Zeitenwende (meaning ‘turning of an era’), where he pledged a $100 billion fund to increase military spending.³² Then, in 2025, when the US government decided to cut military assistance to Ukraine, the German government (now led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz) – which had been an arrogant voice of fiscal prudence toward its own people and against the peoples of poorer European countries (such as Greece) – ignored its debt brake rule (a cap that limits government borrowing and was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2009) in order to increase military spending.³³ That same year the EU also announced plans to approve 800 billion euros in war credits.³⁴ In other words, money can be found for NATO but not for social protections or key infrastructure.³⁵

Goyen Chen, War Only Brings Pain, 2022.

Part 3: NATO and the Global South

In 2023, a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, German Ambassador Christoph Heusgen hectored Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila about why her country had not condemned Russia. Kuugongelwa-Amadhila calmly responded that her country was ‘promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities’.³⁶ The money that is used to buy weapons, Kuugongelwa-Amadhila added, could be used even in Europe, ‘where many people are experiencing hardships’. What is significant from this exchange was not what Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, but that she said anything at all that was contrary to the Global North consensus.

Bewilderment spread across the room and beyond. Why are these leaders of small and poor Global South countries speaking out against the Global North, and why are they not as subordinate as they once were? As Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi wrote in the preface of the country’s Diplomatic Bluebook 2023, which set out to understand the emergence of the Global South, ‘The world is now at a turning point in history’.³⁷ In a November 2024 report, NATO’s rapporteur and former Lithuanian foreign minister Audronius Ažubalis acknowledged the changes taking place in the world with the rise of the Global South:

Arguably, the West did not adapt quickly enough to this new reality, allowing authoritarian powers such as Russia and China to make significant inroads into Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, reaping significant economic and geopolitical benefits.³⁸

Ažubalis’s assessment demonstrates how little the Global North’s leaders understand about the rise of the Global South. Indeed, it is the emergence of a new hub of industry and productive forces in Asia (from India and China to Vietnam and Indonesia) and the creation of a new set of development institutions (including the New Development Bank) that have allowed poorer states some leverage against the US Treasury Department-dominated International Monetary Fund. In other words, it is not that China is making ‘significant inroads’ into these continents, but that China – and other countries – are able to underwrite development efforts in the poorer nations. Since the Global North is not doing this, these countries are no longer beholden to it. To simply dismiss China and Russia as ‘authoritarian powers’ and assume that the tired rhetoric of Western liberalism and democracy is going to attract countries that want to develop their economies is foolhardy. Equally absurd is the accusation of authoritarianism from countries that routinely ally with monarchies. The failure to understand the actual movement of history paralyses the NATO intellectuals, who instead fall back on the assumption that the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific are merely being duped by Russia and China, and that if they only knew the truth about Western liberalism and democracy, they would make the correct decision to subordinate themselves to the Global North.

Nonetheless, NATO has developed a major presence in the Mediterranean region, on the African continent, and in Asia (and has a minor role to play in Latin America, where its major ally is Colombia). For the remainder of this section, we will focus on these three regions of significant NATO activity.

The Mediterranean, the War on Terror, and the Instrumentalisation of Migration

By the 1990s, NATO had set out its tentacles to explore collaborations around the world, beginning with what it called its ‘southern neighbourhood’ (namely the countries to the south of the Mediterranean Sea). In 1994, it launched the Mediterranean Dialogue, a forum for countries outside the NATO zone to exchange with NATO countries. Countries joined the dialogue in waves, from Algeria, Egypt, and Israel to Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia, many of which had no relations with Israel and yet sat around the table with that country’s representative. In 2004, one year after the United States and several of its NATO allies participated in the illegal war on Iraq, NATO gathered four Gulf Arab countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates) into the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative to enhance military cooperation between NATO and the Arab Gulf. Several of the countries in these initiatives (including at least Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Morocco) participated in NATO’s 2011 Operation Unified Protector, which destroyed the Libyan state. In 2016, NATO opened the Strategic Direction South Hub near Naples, Italy; in 2017, it opened an Istanbul Cooperative Initiative Regional Centre in Kuwait; and then, within that dialogue process, it suggested opening a NATO Liaison Office in Amman, Jordan. This office was announced at the 2023 NATO Summit in Vilnius and then opened the following year.

These pronouncements and communiqués speak effusively of human rights and democracy, but the key words in reality are counterterrorism and the interdiction of migrants across the waters. After the atrocity of NATO’s 2011 war on Libya, when the alliance was already knee-deep in the swamp of the War on Terror, it began its war on migrants from various parts of the Global South who travelled to that war-torn country to attempt to cross the sea to Italy. NATO leaders began to speak of this tragedy as the ‘instrumentalisation of migrants’, which meant to them that their enemies were deploying migrants as a ‘hybrid threat’ to overwhelm their countries (a phrase that was used specifically when Russia allowed asylum seekers from a range of countries to cross the border into Finland in 2024). At a meeting in Washington in 2024, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg directly acknowledged that ‘NATO has a role to play’ in the ‘instrumentalisation of migration’.³⁹ This is NATO bringing its entire panoply of military assets to defend Fortress Europe, a right-wing, anti-immigrant idea.

Africa Says, ‘NATO, Dégage!’

NATO’s most consequential action south of the Mediterranean was its use of force to destroy the Libyan state in 2011. That action both opened the door for Africans and others to migrate to Europe through Libya and set in motion a terrorist assault on Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. More than a decade later, the detritus of the NATO intervention remains.

Notably, this intervention took place under the pretext of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), an international norm developed by a beleaguered United Nations that ‘seeks to ensure that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’.⁴⁰ While the International Committee on Intervention and State Sovereignty developed R2P in 2001 in response to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, it was only after the United States damaged the idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’ with its illegal war on Iraq in 2003 that more concrete steps were taken to consolidate R2P as an international norm until it was formally adopted at a UN World Summit in 2005.

France, which was one of the authors of the destruction of Libya, used the subsequent terrorist assault on the Sahel to legitimise its own military intervention in the region, which has now been pushed out by popular coups under the slogan France, dégage!.⁴¹ That sentiment, ‘France, get out!’ slides into a wider orbit: Europe, get out! NATO, get out!

For most people on the African continent, it would not be easy to distinguish between the EU, the US, and NATO. The EU’s policy on migration, for instance, is not a civilian policy but a paramilitary one that used Italy’s Arma de Carabinieri and Spain’s Guardia Civil to patrol the Sahel through the Rapid Action Groups for monitoring and intervention in the Sahel (GAR-SI) from 2017 to 2021. Meanwhile, the US flew drones to provide surveillance capacity from AB 201, a massive US military base in Agadez, Niger.⁴² French military intervention, US bases in the region, the use of surveillance technologies in the Sahel and Sahara that are tightly regulated or banned in Europe: this is how northern Africa experiences the NATO project – not for human rights, but for brutality.⁴³

Yet, NATO’s presence in Africa has posed a challenge for governments on the continent, which continue to seek money and technical assistance. In 2015, this dynamic bought NATO the right to create a liaison office in the African Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.⁴⁴ It is this concession to NATO that allows African states to request training and funds for the fledgling African Standby Force (one of its five regional forces being the Economic Community of West African States Standby Capacity, which almost invaded the states of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger after their popular coups in 2021, 2022, and 2023, respectively).⁴⁵ African military leaders continue to circle in and out of the military headquarters of NATO countries, which have now been formalised as the NATO and AU Military-to-Military Staff Talks.⁴⁶ With this kind of cosiness, it means almost nothing that the AU’s Peace and Security Council made a statement in 2016 asking member states to be ‘circumspect’ about foreign military bases on their soil.⁴⁷

Goyen Chen, Know Love, Know Peace. No Love, No Peace, 2022.

NATO’s China Challenge

The wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya took NATO out of its direct area of operations. Yet this is far from the limit of NATO’s geography of imperialism. As Sten Rynning of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study wrote in his 2024 book NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance, ‘Naturally, NATO cannot afford to ignore the Indo-Pacific, because this theatre has become the primary geopolitical preoccupation of the United States’.⁴⁸ This formulation would interest a linguist: NATO ‘cannot afford to ignore’ the central issues that preoccupy not the NATO members as a whole, but the United States. In other words, Rynning, whose book is the closest we will get to an authorised study of NATO, openly makes two admissions. First, that the organisation’s policy is determined not by the North Atlantic Council (officially NATO’s primary decision-making body), but by the United States. Second, that since 2009 (when Barack Obama became the president of the US), the US has increasingly come to see China as its principal rival, pushing NATO to expand its orbit to threaten the Chinese and put them in their place.

Until recently, NATO described China as providing both ‘opportunities and challenges’, as it wrote in the 2019 London Declaration. Two years later, under US pressure, NATO decided that China no longer provided ‘opportunities’ but that its ‘stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security’ (according to the 2021 Brussels Declaration).⁴⁹ In an essay published on NATO’s website in 2023, Luis Simón of the Madrid-based Real Instituto Elcano (which is founded and funded by the Spanish state) argued that ‘China constitutes a challenge to an international system that still largely reflects transatlantic values and interests’.⁵⁰ This is a correct observation: it is not that China opposes the ‘rules-based international order’, as the US State Department claims, but that it might oppose the transatlantic domination of this system.

Simón notes two other significant ways that China is ‘relevant’ to NATO’s security. First, China has weapons systems that could reach Europe, and it has ‘critical infrastructure holdings in Europe’. Second, because the New Cold War on China is ‘immensely consequential for the United States’, NATO must be involved in the Indo-Pacific frontier. This reinforces Rynning’s point that if it is important to the US, then it must be important to NATO (here, Simón, a Spanish national, is in agreement with Rynning, a Danish national, that the sovereignty of their own countries’ foreign policies can be surrendered before Washington).

It is this attitude that has motivated NATO to use its Individually Tailored Partnership Programme (created in 2021) to build close ties with Australia and New Zealand (both of which were already members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance) as well as Japan and South Korea. These countries are now part of the Indo-Pacific 4 (IP4) and attended the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid as near members.⁵¹ Then, in September 2024, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba called for the formation of an ‘Asian NATO’. However, even though the alliance has considered opening a liaison office in Tokyo in the past, an Asian NATO would be largely redundant given the already established elements of the United States’ Indo-Pacific Strategy, such as:

Five Eyes, a network of intelligence agencies bound by undisclosed agreements comprised of Australia, New Zealand Canada, the UK, and the US.

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad), which includes Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.

The Squad, which substitutes out a less enthusiastic India for the Philippines.

The Australia-United Kingdom-United States alliance (AUKUS).

The Japan-South Korea-US alliance (JAKUS).

Additionally, the United States government has very provocatively drawn the Chinese province of Taiwan into NATO’s growing role in Asia. For instance, the US Congress’ draft Taiwan Policy Act considers Taiwan to be a ‘major non-NATO ally’ while a recommended amendment to the 1976 Arms Export Control Act includes it on the list of ‘NATO Plus recipients’, allowing it to sidestep non-proliferation rules of different kinds.⁵²

In other words, there are already several platforms that do the work of an Asian NATO, and NATO is already fully involved in the Indo-Pacific, as evidenced by its willingness to join the US project of patrolling the waters around China and building security projects such as bases and alliances. NATO’s Atlantic alliance has already set sail in the Pacific Ocean. This is twenty-first century gunboat diplomacy.

In 1839, the British ships that forced opium on the Chinese came with evocative names such as the HMS Volage and the HMS Hyacinth, the former (Volage) indicating fickleness, and the latter (Hyacinth) a reference to Greek mythology indicating jealousy. These names are worth preserving. NATO’s alliances, too, are fickle. NATO’s interests, too, are driven by jealousy, protecting the interest of its member states over global interests, as it pretends. It wants to maintain the US rules-based system and prevent other countries from developing. That is what makes NATO the most dangerous and reactionary organisation in the world today.

Othman Ghalmi, Where Can I Find Peace, 2022.

Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

Article 6 of 10

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

Originally published at https://www.anti-imperialists.com/magazine/imperialism-and-anti-imperialism/

Publication Date: September 26, 2025

Imperialism has been at the center of Marxist and leftist dialogues throughout the radical decades of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, the prominence of such topics started to wane. Readers who are familiar with the history of leftist politics would recognize that waves of scholars and activists have declared the death of the idea of "imperialism". Despite the various academic disciplines in which these critiques were situated, they often share a fundamental political understanding that capitalism is almost undefeatable for now, and the best progressive politics is to spread better versions of capitalism worldwide and end all sorts of "authoritarian" or "repressive" regimes. I will briefly engage with such critiques on two levels.

First, is the concept of imperialism still relevant to understanding world capitalism today? We have for sure moved beyond the era of world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. Thanks exactly to the anti-imperialist struggles both in the West and the Third World, the Western powers lost most of their grip of world territories. In Lenin's time, imperialism referred to at least two main themes: inter-capitalist competition and war, as well as the hierarchical relationship between a handful of Western states and the rest of the world. And since the end of WW2, the Russian and the Chinese revolutions, and the independence movement, the old political map has changed profoundly, and much of Lenin's analysis ceased to be meaningful. For example, the existence of monopoly, or centralization of production, finance, and trade became prevalent in much of the third world following national liberation struggles. So, it is no longer a useful method to divide imperialist from non-imperialist states. And in that sense, I am also against the use of inter-imperialist rivalry in cases of US-China, or US-Russia relationships.

However, world capitalism remains a system where a small number of countries control the others, and thus imperialism remains a crucial concept. Imperialism was not and is not a purely "class-based" phenomenon. The emergence of imperialism in the capitalist era involved much of the nation-building and welfare state policies in the imperialist nations. The capacity of capitalists to rule their imperialist nations (primarily the working people) often depended on how much they could nurture the labor aristocracy based on the surplus that they stole, robbed, or expropriated "peacefully" from the non-imperialist nations. Marx and Engels have repeatedly talked about the corruption of the British working class by imperialism. In Lenin's words, a defining feature of imperialism is "the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations". Despite many changes in the details, the hierarchy of world capitalism has changed very little. For example, the ranking of country-level per capita incomes was relatively stable from the late 19th century to the present.

Globalization in the last few decades was in essence based on the extension of world capitalism to the third world and former socialist states. For a while, under the so-called “rules-based”/US-centered global order, world capitalism functioned rather smoothly with the participation of capitalists from all over the world. But even during the honeymoon phase of the post-Cold War era, the hierarchy of world capitalism was evident, as the West, the so-called transition and emerging markets including China, and the rest of the third world occupied distinct positions in the world division of labor. It still makes sense to use the terms such as imperialists and compradors, considering the striking similarities between the 21st century and the pre-independence era capitalist world orders.

Such an order, however, was based on the specific historical conjunction with unquestionable US hegemony. With the crises of capitalism within the West and the rest of the capitalist world, the conditions where globalization once prospered started to crumble. We just need to note the ongoing conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America as signs of the weakening of Pax Americana. Particularly, Russia gave up on its post-Cold war effort to rejoin the West and was even able to gain an upper hand against the West militarily and economically. The world is changing fast, and when ideas of trade wars, de-risking, and decoupling are explicitly circulating among the Western elites, we know the days of “transnational capitalist class” being an important force in world capitalism are very likely numbered.

Now we can move on to the socialist strategy part. A strategy is related to, but quite distinct from scholarly inquiries. Unless we are talking about purely intellectual exercises for the few, an effective socialist movement would not be possible when world capitalism still runs normally with the usually dominant capitalist ideology, market, and violence.

To formulate such a strategy, at least for the initial spark, we need a thorough and sober understanding of the dynamics of world capitalism. Not all contradictions are of the same strategic importance in the transition from capitalism to socialism. There are myriads of problems in every corner of capitalism. But comparatively speaking, the advanced capitalist states have more bargaining chips (due to their position in world capitalism) in their hands and can afford much better material conditions for class compromises. Therefore, if we just focus on concrete problems in capitalism, we will simply be exhausted by reformism and easily embrace Eurocentric accusations of tyrants, authoritarianism, despotism, and other common features of the periphery in the third world. Exposing and fighting all the inherent problems in capitalism is never wrong, but by itself, that is not a socialist strategy.

We still face the same question that Lenin and Mao faced a century ago, namely, to locate the weak links in world capitalism. In both Russia and China, socialists made unprecedented advances, in much-weakened states with relatively backward economies. The ruling classes were often paralyzed by wars and were not strong enough to lead meaningful struggles and/or to bribe the working people. In colonies and semi-colonies such as China, anti-imperialism had wide appeal and mobilized millions. A significant weakening of the imperialist powers and their compradors were often important preconditions for initial progressive social changes in such cases. As an important example, the Chinese communists greatly strengthened their political and military power under the united front with the nationalist government during the long and successful struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Even though they worked with different historical conditions, both Lenin and Mao supported the revolutions in the third world as well as national independence movements not led by communists. They for sure knew the general existence of exploitation and oppression in the third world, but they saw the overall tide against imperialism as of strategic importance in building the momentum of the world revolution.

Today's world capitalism is safeguarded by the US-led Western countries militarily and ideologically, while economically supported by the global capital with contributions from the so-called transition and emerging economies such as China. The anti-imperialist forces that target the US hegemony on various levels are an indispensable part of any socialist strategy to ending capitalism in the world. Compared to that, I would argue the many conflicts and contradictions that we see every day in the Third World are not always of the same magnitude of significance.

To end capitalism on earth also necessarily requires conscious and unconscious collaborative efforts on a worldwide scale. People can debate whether such collaborations should be framed as a united front or a division of labor within the left. Nevertheless, I do see the urgency of a common understanding of anti-imperialism (particularly the US hegemony) as a core of today’s socialist struggles. People still can and should have important disagreements, but we can respectfully work with a constellation of practices. Let a hundred flowers bloom!

Zhun Xu is a member of AISC.

This post is based on a contribution to a 2024 symposium issue on William Robinson's work for Science & Society. Xu, Z. (2024). Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in the 21st Century. Science & Society, 88(3), 357-361.

The Architecture of Power: The Dollar, Financialisation, and the Struggle for Sovereignty

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — The Architecture of Power: The Dollar, Financialisation, and the Struggle for Sovereignty

The Architecture of Power: The Dollar, Financialisation, and the Struggle for Sovereignty

Article 7 of 10

The Tricontinental

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-de-dollarisation/

Publication Date: July 7, 2026

In a capitalist society, money performs an essential function. It is the material representation of an immaterial social relation: value, which is established through the labour of millions of people across the world. Money serves as a means of exchange, a unit of account, and a way of storing that value. Yet money is never neutral. When a specific national currency transcends its borders to become a world currency, it becomes a powerful instrument of hegemony, discipline, and imperial power.

The history of the last two hundred years is the history of the rise and contestation of two such key currencies: the British pound sterling in the nineteenth century, and, far more expansively, the US dollar from the twentieth century to the present.

The current global order, underpinned by the dollar, grants the United States what has appropriately been called an ‘exorbitant privilege’: the power to issue the currency that the rest of the world needs as a store of value, means of payment, and unit of account.¹ This allows the United States to finance its deficits, consume more than it produces, and project its military power simply because its public debt is treated as the safest asset on the planet. It also enables the United States to host the world’s most important financial market, shaping expectations that extend far beyond the financial sphere and influencing investment and production worldwide. In turn, these financial flows establish key conditions that determine the direction of global finance and limit the autonomy of dependent and subordinated countries.

National currencies exist within a hierarchy defined in relation to the dollar. For countries of the Global South, this architecture imposes a high cost. Their currencies are treated as volatile financial assets, and their economies are held hostage to the discipline imposed by international financial capital. The need to accumulate dollars as a defence against speculative attacks and to guarantee imports results in a perverse net transfer of wealth from the Global South to the Global North, particularly to investors and speculators in Western Europe and the United States. Given these structural features of contemporary capitalism, understanding the rise of the dollar, the mechanisms of its present domination, and the structural limits facing any alternative is therefore a central task for those who seek a more just and cooperative international order.

Money, Value, and the Need for a World Currency

In any society based on the division of labour and the exchange of commodities, money emerges as a practical necessity. When different producers specialise – one growing wheat, another making cloth, yet another extracting ore – they need to exchange their products with each other in order to meet their needs. But direct exchange, or barter, presents obvious difficulties: the farmer who wants cloth must find a weaver who at that same moment wants wheat, in the exact amount, and accepts the proposed exchange ratio.

Money solves this problem by functioning as a universal equivalent: a special commodity that everyone accepts in exchange for any other. With money, the farmer can sell wheat to any buyer, keep the value received, and later buy cloth from any seller. Money thus fulfils three basic functions: it serves as a means of circulation, facilitating exchange; a unit of account, allowing the value of different commodities to be compared; and a store of value, allowing wealth to be preserved for future use.

In Marxist analysis, money is not an arbitrary invention or a mere technical instrument. It is the material expression of a social relation called value. The value of a commodity corresponds to the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. When millions of independent producers exchange commodities on the market, they are, in practice, comparing quantities of human labour. Money is therefore the form through which that comparison becomes possible and visible. It represents social labour in condensed form.²

Within a single country, the use of money is relatively simple: there is a national currency, issued and guaranteed by the state, which all inhabitants recognise and accept. But what happens when producers in different countries want to trade with one another? Let us consider a concrete example. A Brazilian company exports coffee to Germany. The German importer has euros, while the Brazilian exporter needs reais to pay workers, suppliers, and taxes. How can these two currencies be reconciled? The problem unfolds on several levels. First, an exchange rate must be established: how many reais are equivalent to one euro? Second, there must be a mechanism to convert one currency into the other. Third, both parties must trust that the currency they receive will hold its value and be accepted by others.

When international trade was small-scale and sporadic, such problems could be resolved on a case-by-case basis, often with universally accepted precious metals such as gold and silver. But as the world market expanded, that solution became insufficient. As international trade grew, there emerged a need for an organised system to settle accounts between countries. It is not practical for each individual transaction to involve either the physical transfer of gold or the direct conversion of one currency into another. A clearing mechanism is needed. Imagine that, over a given period, Brazil exports US$100 million in coffee to Germany and imports US$80 million in machinery. Rather than making two separate transfers, the two amounts are offset against each other, and Germany only needs to transfer the net difference of US$20 million to Brazil. This is the principle of clearing.

For such a mechanism to work on a global scale, involving dozens of countries and currencies, a common reference point is required – a currency that everyone accepts as a unit of account and means of payment for settling balances. Historically, that role was first played by gold and later by the national currencies of economically dominant countries. The advantages associated with controlling the reference currency are anything but simple. They include:

the possibility for the issuing state to expand its capacity for debt and spending disproportionately in relation to other national states;

the use of the currency as an instrument of foreign policy and domination through control over key channels of international liquidity, as in the case of economic sanctions; and

the advantages granted to the international operations of its banks, which, because they operate within a fractional reserve system backed by a currency that can be expanded, occupy a privileged position in the circuit of global high finance.

This gives rise to fundamental questions: who issues this reference currency? Through what mechanisms does it become dominant? What are the consequences when a country’s national currency is elevated to the status of a world currency?

The World Market Expands and Imperial Currencies Take Hold

Since the sixteenth century, the expansion of the world market has been driven by colonial conquest, the trafficking of enslaved people, the seizure of land and natural resources, and the imposition of unequal trading relations on subjugated populations. Originary accumulation, which Marx analysed in the first volume of Capital, was a global and violent process.³ As capitalism consolidated itself as the dominant mode of production, the volume of international trade grew exponentially.

In the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution intensified this process: the European powers needed raw materials from across the world, such as cotton, minerals, and agricultural products, and sought markets for their manufactured goods. This growth made the problem of an international currency increasingly urgent. With thousands of daily transactions between dozens of countries, an organised international monetary system became indispensable: a set of rules, institutions, and practices that defined how currencies relate to one another, how payments are settled, and how trade imbalances are adjusted. The solution adopted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the power structure at the time: a world divided among competing colonial empires. Each imperial power organised its own monetary zone, integrating its colonies and spheres of influence into a system of trade, credit, taxation, and payments centred on its national currency.

As the leading industrial, commercial, and financial power of the nineteenth century, Britain made the pound sterling the principal currency of international trade, enforcing its system of ‘imperial preferences’ on the rest of the world. The so-called gold standard, which prevailed from the 1870s until 1914, was in practice a sterling-gold standard: sterling was the currency in which most trade contracts were denominated, major commodities were priced, and international loans were issued.

The sterling system’s dominance as an international currency was made possible by draining wealth from the colonies. India maintained large current-account surpluses (meaning that it earned more from exports and other external payments than it spent abroad) with continental Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, but it ran a current-account deficit with Britain (meaning that it paid more to Britain than it received from it). This was partly because of British exports to India and, above all, the obligations imposed by the British on the colony, including ‘gifts’ of huge sums of wealth transferred from British India to the metropole.⁴ As S. B. Saul writes in Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870–1914, ‘The key to Britain’s whole payments pattern lay in India, financing as she probably did more than two-fifths of Britain’s total deficits’.⁵

The British colonies – from India to Africa and the Caribbean to Oceania – were integrated into the metropole’s monetary zone through the British system of imperial preferences. Their exports were quoted in sterling; their imports, largely supplied by Britain because of the metropole’s trade monopoly, were paid for in sterling; and their banking systems operated with sterling as their reference currency. Colonial populations were forced to obtain sterling to pay taxes and buy essential goods, which subordinated them entirely to the terms of trade set by the metropole.

The French colonial empire – stretching across North and West Africa, Indochina, and islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean – constituted its own monetary zone based on the franc. To this day, remnants of that structure survive in the CFA franc, used by fourteen African countries and tied first to the French franc, then to the euro.⁶ Although they did not possess a formal colonial empire comparable to those of the European powers, the United States exercised economic hegemony over much of the Americas from the late nineteenth century onwards. An early expression of this ambition was the Monroe Doctrine (1823), often summarised by the phrase ‘America for the Americans’, which opposed further European colonisation or intervention in the Americas while asserting the United States’ claim to regional pre-eminence. The dollar circulated widely in Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of South America, often imposed through military interventions and the presence of US companies that controlled strategic sectors, such as the United Fruit Company in Central America. Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal also maintained their own colonial monetary spheres, although on a smaller scale.

The result was a fractured international monetary system. There was no world currency but rather several competing regional currencies, each dominant within its own sphere of influence. Though sterling was the most important globally, it was not universal. This system reflected the structure of imperialism as analysed by Lenin and other Marxists in the early twentieth century: a world divided among rival capitalist powers, each controlling its own bloc of colonial and semi-colonial territories. The tensions between these blocs – the struggle for markets, raw materials, and fields of investment – were among the primary causes of the First World War (1914–1918).⁷

The war destroyed this order. It demanded colossal expenditures, financed through monetary issuance and indebtedness. Most countries suspended gold convertibility. Britain, once the world’s great creditor, emerged as a debtor. The United States, which entered the war late and supplied the Allies, became the primary international creditor.

The interwar period (1918–1939) was marked by failed attempts to restore the gold standard, chronic exchange-rate instability, competitive devaluations – the so-called currency wars – and the collapse of international trade following the crisis of 1929. The Great Depression showed that a disorganised international monetary system was incompatible with the ‘stability’ of capitalism.

The Second World War (1939–1945) created the conditions for a radical reorganisation. The United States emerged from the conflict as the only major power whose economy was not only intact but strengthened. Though global power was now shared with the Soviet Union, the United States stood out as the leading capitalist power: it was willing to keep capital flows relatively open, allow foreign claims on US assets, and use its currency as a world currency. By the end of the war, the United States held around two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves and its industry accounted for nearly half of global manufactured output – not to mention that its territory had not been devastated by the war.⁸ This asymmetry of power allowed the United States to impose a new international monetary architecture. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, a system was created that, for the first time in history, established a single national currency as the axis of the world monetary system: the US dollar.

The Bretton Woods system marked the transition from a world of competing monetary zones linked to rival empires to a single, dollar-centred monetary order led by the United States. This process represented the shift from an inter-imperialist system, characterised by rivalry between multiple powers, to an imperialist model of unipolar order led by the United States in which one dominant power organised the system as a whole.⁹ This transition was neither automatic nor purely economic. It was the result of war, the destruction of rival powers, the military occupation of former empires such as Germany and Japan, and the construction of a vast network of military bases, alliances, and international institutions under US leadership.

How the Dollar Became Hegemonic

The real consolidation of the dollar as the dominant currency was the result of a strategic project meticulously carried out by the United States during and immediately after the Second World War. The rise of the dollar was not a historical accident; it was the result of three decisive strategic moves.

I. Financing the Wars

The United States used its position as an ‘arsenal of democracy’, a term coined by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, to structure global dependence on its currency. Initially, the Cash-and-Carry rule of 1937 required buyers of US supplies to pay immediately in dollars or gold and transport the goods themselves, a condition that favoured countries with access to hard currency, gold reserves, and naval capacity.

Later, the Lend-Lease mechanism allowed the United States to supply allied countries with military equipment, food, fuel, and other goods on credit or deferred payment rather than requiring immediate purchase. But it also had a deeper structural effect: by the end of the war, the Allied powers and dozens of other countries had accumulated massive debts denominated in dollars. Given their wartime vulnerability, dependence on US supplies, and limited bargaining power, the United States could impose the currency in which its credits would be denominated. This created a permanent structural demand for the US dollar. Countries now had to export real goods or contract new debts to obtain the dollars required to settle their debt obligations.¹⁰

II. Control over Oil

The second pillar was to secure control over the energy source that would fuel postwar industrial capitalism. Oil transformed the logic of conflict from the First World War onwards. It became the central natural resource of the international system, and control over producing regions became a core element of global geopolitical disputes. More specifically, oil became the main fuel of the armed forces and assumed a decisive position in the world transport matrix, and its derivatives, such as fuel, plastics, fertilisers, synthetic materials, and petrochemicals, came to be widely used across countless production chains. This had further implications for international relations: oil became a recurring instrument on the diplomatic chessboard, functioning as a mechanism of pressure, retaliation, deterrence, support, or strategic backing. In other words, states could use access to oil, oil prices, and control over producing regions to reward allies, punish adversaries, and shape geopolitical outcomes.

By 1940 the United States was the dominant oil power, accounting for 63% of global oil production.¹¹ As it became clear that the future centre of gravity of oil production would shift to the Middle East, the United States acted decisively. As early as 1933, US companies had acquired exploration rights in Saudi Arabia. In 1943, President Roosevelt incorporated the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into the ‘dollar monetary territory’, authorising the financing of Ibn Saud’s kingdom through Lend-Lease. The United States’ intense diplomatic and military activity in the region, which consolidated its dominance over Saudi Arabia, laid the basis for oil from this new nerve centre to be priced and traded in dollars, a process that was institutionalised in the 1970s through the petrodollar system. Saudi Arabia was thus transformed into a US zone of influence and economic space and incorporated into the dollar’s monetary sphere.¹² This decision compelled most countries, especially industrialised and energy-importing nations, to join the dollar’s monetary territory. In order to buy energy, they first had to obtain dollars.

In this sense, the imposition of a monetary architecture on the global oil market was more decisive than direct control over production. From the 1970s onwards, this move was institutionalised through the ‘petrodollar’, especially with the oil shocks (the sharp increases in oil prices that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo by Arab members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Oil-producing Arab states used oil as a political weapon and OPEC price increases helped quadruple the price of oil, pushing the world economy into a severe crisis. In this context, the Nixon administration negotiated a secret agreement with Saudi Arabia. The terms were: the Saudis would sell oil exclusively in dollars and invest their surpluses in US Treasury securities (US government debt instruments such as Treasury bonds). In return, the United States would guarantee military protection to the Saudi kingdom. The other OPEC countries soon followed the same model. By tying the world’s main commodity to its currency, the United States structurally expanded the international reach of the dollar.

III. The Bretton Woods System

In 1944, at Bretton Woods, the United States formalised and institutionalised its hegemony, especially in the economic sphere. In 1945, the Yalta Conference helped reorganise the geopolitical and military order after the war by setting the terms for the occupation of Germany, the division of spheres of influence in Europe, and the postwar balance between the major powers. In monetary terms, the Yalta agreements stipulated that German war reparations would be accounted for in dollars.

At Bretton Woods, two opposing visions of the postwar order collided. The British proposal, led by John Maynard Keynes, was radically different from the one that prevailed. Keynes proposed the ‘Bancor’, a supranational international unit of account that would be controlled by a multilateral body called the Clearing Union. His aim was to create a symmetrical system that would penalise both chronically deficit countries and chronically surplus countries. In essence, Keynes’s proposal sought to prevent the kind of ‘exorbitant privilege’ later associated with the dollar from passing from sterling to the dollar by ensuring that no single national currency could become the anchor of the international monetary system.

Keynes’s proposal was summarily defeated. Given the balance of forces, the US plan, led by Harry Dexter White, prevailed. White’s plan was centred on US power: the dollar would be defined as the international unit of account and would be the only currency with full convertibility into gold, at the fixed rate of US$35 per ounce of gold. All other currencies would maintain convertibility into the dollar at fixed but adjustable exchange rates.

To manage this new order, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, today the World Bank) were created. The capital of both institutions was defined in dollars, and their structure was designed to guarantee US control. The voting power of each member country was linked to its quota or capital subscription. In the IMF, these subscriptions were paid partly in gold and partly in national currency. In the IBRD, part of the capital had to be paid in gold or dollars. Since the United States held the largest share in both institutions, with Britain in second place, an asymmetrical decision-making structure was consolidated. In the case of the IMF, because crucial decisions require a qualified majority of 85% of the vote, the United States acquired, in practice, veto power over fundamental reforms.¹³

The Centrality and Decline of Dollar Hegemony in the Twentieth Century

The Bretton Woods system, sometimes called the dollar-gold standard, consolidated the centrality of the dollar and of the United States in the world economy. But the system could not function by itself. It needed liquidity – enough dollars circulating internationally to allow trade, payments, and reconstruction to take place. The devastated economies of Europe and Japan did not have the dollars needed to import inputs, restart exports, or rebuild cities, infrastructure, and productive apparatuses.

The United States solved this problem through the Marshall Plan for Europe (1948–1952) and the Dodge Plan for Japan (1949), which provided the dollars needed to finance reconstruction. These plans ‘saved’ the Bretton Woods system by ensuring that rebuilding Washington’s strategic allies would integrate them fully into the dollar’s monetary territory from the start. At the same time, the United States encouraged the global expansion of its multinational corporations, which entered these reconstructed markets through dollar-denominated direct investment. Because the dollars supplied were, to a great extent, used to buy goods and services produced in the United States itself, the plans also won domestic support from various economic sectors. In a conjuncture of cooling domestic activity, aggravated by the growth of industrial capacity during the war years in Europe and the Pacific, this external demand helped sustain the US economy.

From a strategic standpoint, the United States not only made possible so-called reconstruction and growth ‘miracles’ in several countries, stabilising regions central to the logic of the Cold War, but also consolidated the hegemonic position of the dollar. In the decades that followed, the areas under its influence experienced a long cycle of expansion and prosperity anchored in the centrality of the dollar.

More concretely, while financing economic recovery in regions central to the containment of the USSR, the United States reinforced the primacy of the dollar by:

injecting dollars directly into allied economies through programmes such as the Marshall Plan;

significantly expanding its military spending abroad, denominated in dollars, as in the case of the Korean War;

unilaterally opening its market to exports from strategic partners, thereby guaranteeing them dollar revenues;

accepting that these countries would maintain artificially undervalued exchange rates, using the dollar as their monetary reference; and

encouraging outward direct investment from its large corporations, which naturally took place in dollars given the origin of those firms.

In addition, the United States tolerated unilateral controls on cross-border capital movements, accepted the non-convertibility of other currencies, did not react forcefully to protectionist policies, and even sent technical assistance missions. This tolerance was conditional: Washington permitted its allies to use state intervention and trade protections while keeping them within the dollar-centred order.

The Triffin Dilemma

Despite its apparent solidity, the Bretton Woods system contained a fatal contradiction identified by the economist Robert Triffin. The ‘Triffin Dilemma’ exposed the logical flaw in using a national currency as an international one. The contradiction was as follows: for world trade and economic growth to expand, the world needed a growing supply of international liquidity – that is, more dollars. But in order to provide those dollars to the rest of the world, the United States had to run balance-of-payments deficits, meaning that it had to send more dollars abroad through spending, lending, investment, and imports than it received back from abroad. However, by issuing more and more dollars than it held in gold reserves, the United States would inevitably undermine global confidence in the dollar’s convertibility into gold.¹⁴ The system was therefore doomed. If the United States stopped running these deficits – that is, stopped supplying the world with dollars – world trade would stagnate. If it continued, confidence in the dollar would collapse.

During the 1960s, this contradiction became critical. Massive increases in US public spending, driven simultaneously by the Vietnam War and domestic social programmes, led to growing deficits and uncontrolled money issuance. At the same time, US hegemony was being challenged by revolutions in the periphery and by criticism from European allies, especially the French. Even the IMF created Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in 1969 – a synthetic supranational reserve asset nicknamed ‘paper gold’, whose value was based on a basket of currencies – in an attempt to create a source of liquidity that did not depend on US deficits.

In 1971, the Triffin Dilemma reached a breaking point. With surplus countries, led by France, exchanging dollars for gold, US reserves fell drastically. On 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon acted. In a unilateral decision that reconfigured a system that had been created multilaterally, Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold indefinitely. The dollar-gold standard was dead. The world entered a new era: that of flexible exchange rates, financialisation, and a fiat dollar. The hegemonic currency no longer had any backing in a physical commodity; its value was determined purely by confidence – or, more precisely, by the economic, financial, military, and geopolitical power of the United States.

After 1973, in the face of successive devaluations and instability in the dollar’s value, major capitalist countries adopted a regime of ‘floating exchange rates’. In other words, currencies ceased to have fixed parity with the dollar and their value came to be determined in each national economy’s foreign exchange market, where currencies are bought and sold according to demand, supply, interest rates, trade flows, and expectations about each economy.

The Interest-Rate Shock and Dollar ‘Diplomacy’

Faced with growing challenges to the US economy, especially in the economic and monetary spheres, the United States resorted to what came to be known as the interest-rate coup. In response to domestic inflationary pressures and concern over the weakening dollar, Paul Volcker, then chair of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, raised short-term US interest rates from around 10–11% in 1979 to nearly 20% by late 1980 and early 1981. This sharply increased borrowing costs across the world because much international credit was denominated in dollars or tied to US financial conditions.¹⁵

According to the Brazilian economist Maria da Conceição Tavares in her seminal text ‘A retomada da hegemonia norte-americana’ (The Resumption of North American Hegemony), before the interest-rate coup the private banking system had been operating largely beyond the control of central banks, especially the Federal Reserve.¹⁶ Transnational branch networks structured a regional division of labour within the firms themselves, often at odds with the national interests of the United States, and fostered growing competition among capitals that proved unfavourable to the US economy. Overall, a world economy without a clearly defined hegemonic pole contributed to the disorganisation of the postwar order and to the growing fragmentation of private and regional interests. From 1979 onwards, with the interest-rate coup, the conduct of US domestic and foreign economic policy moved precisely in the direction of reversing these tendencies and recovering command over international finance.

Tavares used the expression ‘the diplomacy of the strong dollar’ to refer to this unilateral US action, which made deliberate use of US monetary and financial power as an instrument of foreign policy and as a means of reconstructing US hegemony.¹⁷ The rise in interest rates cannot be understood only as a monetary policy measure aimed at dealing with domestic US macroeconomic problems. It was a central move in reasserting dollar hegemony and completely restructuring the international monetary and financial system.

When US interest rates are high, wealthy investors leave their positions in other countries and seek gains from the interest-rate differential offered by US public debt – that is, from the higher returns paid by US Treasury securities compared with assets elsewhere. As a result, the Eurodollar market, which had been developing in Europe outside the control of the US central bank, largely returned to the financial centre of Wall Street. That move reinforced US domination over financial capital and strengthened the power of its banking system. In this sense, the US currency was used as a geo-economic weapon: by controlling interest rates, liquidity, and access to international credit through the dollar-centred financial system, the United States disciplined allies, brought competitors into line, and deepened the dependence of the periphery. Thus, the policy of high interest rates and a strong dollar is not merely economics: it is a strategy of power.

This action, however, had consequences. First, it plunged the United States and the rest of the world into a prolonged recession as higher borrowing costs squeezed firms, households, banks, and indebted states. The result was a wave of bankruptcies, including among firms and even some US banks. Second, it caused a sudden contraction of international credit, inflicting damage especially on the capitalist periphery, which had taken advantage of the period of high international liquidity to accumulate dollar debts at floating interest rates – debts whose costs rose sharply once US rates increased. Third, the interest-rate coup led to the recentralisation of interbank credit and the large international banks in New York under the Federal Reserve’s umbrella, placing the international private banking system more firmly under US monetary command.

Another objective of the interest-rate coup was to bring US competitors in line. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan had achieved strong industrial and technological dynamism, generating growing trade surpluses with the United States and appearing to be on a path to becoming the world’s largest creditor as the United States became (and remains) the world’s largest debtor. With high interest rates, the dollar remained overvalued and the enormous returns on US Treasury securities produced a capital inflow into the United States, including from Japan, with Japanese firms and banks buying US Treasury bonds. Even while running trade surpluses, Japan found itself in a position in which it financed the US deficit by buying dollar assets, and its own development became increasingly tied to the US financial system and asset cycle.

When the US trade deficit with Japan exploded and domestic political pressure increased, the second part of the disciplining process began. In 1985, the Reagan administration threatened heavy protectionist measures and forced a coordination agreement in the G5 in what became known as the Plaza Accord. The goal was to bring about a coordinated devaluation of the dollar against the yen and the German mark. The result came quickly: between September 1985 and April 1986, the yen appreciated by around 35% against the dollar, making Japanese exports more expensive, weakening Japan’s trade advantage, and helping contain the yen’s potential as a rival reserve currency.¹⁸ Then came the Louvre Accord of 1987, which sought to stabilise exchange-rate parities after this sharp correction. According to Brazilian economists Tavares and Luis Eduardo Melin, this was not a neutral technical adjustment but a political move aimed at consolidating US power: the United States used its position at the centre of the system to force Japan to accept a strong appreciation of the yen and a reorganisation of its growth pattern.¹⁹

The United States thus compelled Japan to adjust its growth path, exchange rate, and financial policy to suit the interests of US hegemony. This ensured that the yen would not become a rival reserve currency and that Japanese surpluses would be recycled in ways that benefited the financing of the US deficit and US financial leadership. Rather than a rupture, what occurred was Japan’s reabsorption into an order commanded by the dollar: the country retained high productive sophistication but under strong financial and geopolitical constraints defined in Washington.

How the Dollar Sustains Itself

The collapse of Bretton Woods, paradoxically, did not weaken the dollar. On the contrary, it freed the United States from any material constraint on its monetary policy and consolidated a new form of hegemony, no longer anchored in gold but in three new pillars: oil and petrodollar recycling; the depth and liquidity of US financial markets, especially the market for Treasury securities; and the weaponisation of dollar-based finance.

To understand the post-1971 order, it is crucial to turn to the Marxist analysis of financialisation. The abandonment of metallic backing (gold) was a watershed moment. It removed the material restriction on the limitless creation of money, which had previously been a representation of a commodity (gold) but became a representation of itself – mere numbers in computerised accounts. In other words, there was an autonomisation of the world currency. This allowed capital to migrate massively from the sphere of value production (investment in manufacturing, agriculture, and so on, based on the application of social labour) to the sphere of circulation – that of fictitious capital. Fictitious capital is investment in property titles (shares) and, above all, debt titles (mortgages and public debt), whose value is based not on value already produced but on the anticipation of future income. With the unlimited creation of fiat money (money issued by the state that is not convertible into a commodity such as gold), fictitious capital could feed itself, generating more fictitious capital that was no longer tied to the value base of social labour.

Pillar 1: Oil and Petrodollar Recycling

Though this process began in the 1930s and 1940s, as noted above, after 1971 it took on new importance as the United States reinforced its strategic and military alliance with Saudi Arabia and ensured that OPEC would continue to price and trade oil exclusively in dollars. This recreated structural demand: because every industrialised nation needs oil, every industrialised nation needs dollars. It also created a new recycling mechanism. Oil-producing countries in OPEC accumulated enormous dollar surpluses (petrodollars) from oil sales. These were deposited in Wall Street banks and reinvested in US government debt and other dollar assets, helping to finance US deficits.

Pillar 2: The Dictatorship of Liquidity (Treasuries)

Today, dollar dominance rests on a pragmatic fact: the dollar provides access to financial markets deep enough to absorb very large transactions without sharp price movements and liquid enough to allow assets to be bought and sold quickly. The central pillar of this system is US Treasury securities, which are universally regarded as global ‘safe-haven’ assets: high-grade financial assets with minimal credit risk and immediate liquidity. This allows the United States to completely subvert normal economic logic: it is the world’s largest debtor, yet its debt is treated by other countries as the most valuable asset.

In moments of global financial crisis – even crises that originate in the United States itself, as in 2008 – international capital does not flee the dollar; it rushes towards it, seeking the safety of Treasuries. This flight to Treasuries reinforces the Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM), an expanded form of petrodollar recycling in which export surpluses – not only oil revenues – are recycled into US financial assets. It operates as follows:

The United States absorbs the world’s surplus products, running massive trade deficits with countries such as China, Germany, and Japan.

The profits from those exports accumulated by the surplus countries (in dollars) return to Wall Street because those countries recycle the dollars they receive from exports into US public debt.

Wall Street uses this inflow of foreign capital to buy Treasuries, financing the deficit of the US government and supplying credit to US consumers so that they can continue consuming imported goods.

Under this system, the rest of the world is forced to finance the twin deficits of the United States – trade and fiscal – thereby subsidising US consumption and, crucially, its global military power.

In Latin America, this process accelerated after the recommendations of the Washington Consensus, which urged countries to give up controls over their capital accounts (the channels through which investment, loans, and other cross-border financial flows enter and leave a country). This means that capital can enter and leave each country freely, but it has direct effects on the volatility of national exchange rates. Countries, in turn, seek to protect themselves from this volatility by accumulating foreign reserves in US public debt. That is why we can say that the dollar is a weapon of extortion against the periphery: to protect their domestic economies from exchange-rate volatility and capital flight, countries in the periphery must accumulate dollar reserves, often in US public debt. In doing so, they help finance the United States’ twin deficits (trade and fiscal), which in turn sustain US military spending, overseas bases, imperialist wars, and so on.

The crisis of 2008 was the moment when the ‘pyramids of private money’ (fictitious capital) built by Wall Street on top of this mechanism collapsed. Yet the crisis did not break the system. Instead, the Federal Reserve acted as the central bank of the world, supplying dollar swap lines (agreements that allowed other central banks to obtain dollars from the Federal Reserve and provide them to their own financial systems in moments of stress). This proved that, in the collapse, dependence on the dollar was total rather than showing that the dollar had become dispensable.

Pillar 3: Currency as a Weapon of War

Because most global trade, finance, and commodity transactions – especially oil – are denominated in dollars and cleared through the US financial system, Washington has gained enormous coercive power. Dollar ‘diplomacy’ is used both to constrain strategic enemies and to reward allies. The United States can impose financial sanctions, freeze the reserves of foreign central banks – as it has done with Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, for instance – and exclude entire countries from the international payments system (SWIFT).

When a country is sanctioned, as happened to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Russia, and many others, it can be excluded from dollar payment networks and may have its foreign assets frozen. This raises the cost of imports; blocks access to credit and payment systems; obstructs the purchase of food, fuel, medicine, and industrial inputs; and makes ordinary trade far more difficult. The dollar, therefore, is not merely an economic tool: it is a weapon of war, an instrument of geopolitical discipline that ensures US interests prevail.

Is De-dollarisation Already Underway?

Data on the currencies used in trade invoicing and international finance is scarce, and it is published with longer delays than other trade data.²⁰ Even so, the available evidence indicates that the dollar’s predominance exceeds the weight of the United States’ share of global gross domestic product, trade, and international finance, reflecting a structural asymmetry in the international use of currencies.

Sources: BIS Triennial Survey 2025 · SWIFT Watch 2024 · IMF COFER 2024 · Federal Reserve 2025

SWIFT data shows that the dollar is used in more than 80% of trade-finance transactions processed through its network, largely because a significant share of commodity trade continues to be invoiced and settled in dollars. In addition, the dollar still accounts for close to 60% of global foreign exchange reserves. On the other hand, the evolution of global foreign exchange reserves in 2022–2023 was marked by a significant increase in gold purchases by central banks. Considered a safe asset, gold offers protection against geopolitical risks, even though it has limitations as a means of payment. This pattern suggests that the intensification of gold purchases by certain central banks is associated with efforts to mitigate economic and geopolitical risks, especially those related to international sanctions. In China, for example, the share of gold in total reserves rose from less than 2% in 2015 to 4.3% in 2023, while the proportion of assets denominated in US Treasury and agency securities fell from around 44% to approximately 30%, reflecting a recomposition of the country’s reserve portfolio.²¹

Source: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends: Full Year 2024 (gold.org)

Although a decline in the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has been observed in recent decades, the data indicates that this movement does not correspond to a direct substitution by another single currency. On the contrary, the reduction has been absorbed by a set of currencies that the IMF classifies as ‘non-traditional currencies’: the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, South Korean won, Swedish krona, and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese renminbi. Taken together with the increase in gold reserves, this suggests that the process currently underway is not driven primarily by a coordinated political project of de-dollarisation but rather by portfolio diversification strategies adopted by monetary authorities oriented towards risk management and greater security in a context of growing global financial instability.

This movement can be interpreted as a response to the contradictions of US- and Europe-driven financialisation, whose dynamics tend to generate recurring volatility and asset bubbles (sharp rises in prices that often end in collapse). In this sense, reserve diversification (the spreading of foreign-exchange reserves across a wider range of currencies and assets) appears less as a political rupture than as a technical adjustment to the system’s fragilities. This makes the process of transforming the international monetary system both more robust and slower than more immediate geopolitical narratives suggest.

Source: IMF COFER | Federal Reserve, The International Role of the US Dollar, 2025 edition | The CNY series excludes data for the fourth quarter of 2016

An analysis of trade invoicing from 2000 to 2023 shows that the combined share of the dollar and the euro remained broadly stable. The dollar retained its dominant position, while the euro was used predominantly within the European Union. Although China has significantly expanded its share of world exports since 2000, approaching that of the United States, the renminbi remains limited as a currency for international trade invoicing and has not been fully internationalised.

These data demonstrate the resilience of the dollar in trade invoicing. They also show that, although the renminbi’s share of international reserves has grown notably, broader monetary diversification remains limited.

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade in a Fragmenting World Economy

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade in a Fragmenting World Economy

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade; IMF Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade

Advances in financial technology and payment infrastructure are driving the rise of alternative systems of payment, asset custody, and settlement. These are becoming concrete alternatives to the dollar-centred international financial system. Far from being a recent debate, this is the materialisation of new institutional architectures capable of enabling transactions outside of the traditional circuits. Noteworthy initiatives include the Financial Messaging System (SPFS, developed by Russia) and the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS, led by China), which expand the capacity for international settlement in local currencies and reduce dependence on infrastructures dominated by the core countries.

At the same time, the BRICS countries have intensified efforts to strengthen domestic digital payment systems and develop solutions for cross-border operations with the aim of expanding international trade denominated in local currencies and advancing the construction of a more multipolar monetary system.²² China, in particular, has expanded the international use of the renminbi by developing CIPS and participating in central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects.²³ There has also been a rapid global spread of CBDC projects: 137 countries and monetary unions, representing around 98% of world GDP, are at some stage of developing these digital currencies.²⁴

At the same time, initiatives such as mBridge (involving the People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, and the Bank of Thailand, with the support of the Bank for International Settlements) and the ACUMER system (developed by the Central Bank of Iran) signal the potential of new digital infrastructures for settlement in local currencies between central banks through CBDCs without the need for traditional intermediaries such as correspondent banks or systems like SWIFT.

Moreover, bilateral currency swap agreements have played a growing role, especially since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. These instruments have been used to provide liquidity in moments of stress and to reduce the costs associated with the accumulation of international reserves. This enables countries to access foreign currencies without relying exclusively on international financial markets. In this sense, currency swaps have become a central component of contemporary strategies for monetary diversification and for mitigating dependence on the dollar.²⁵

In sum, the available data indicates that while the dollar remains dominant and relatively stable in the international monetary system, there are also important changes in the composition and functioning of that system. One significant example is the renminbi, whose share of international reserves rose from virtually zero at the start of the 2010s to around 2.2% in less than a decade – a historically unprecedented development for the currency of a country that still maintains important controls over its capital account. This growth in reserve holdings has not, however, been matched by a comparable expansion of the renminbi’s use in international trade invoicing.

An analysis of de-dollarisation therefore requires a distinction between different dimensions of the international monetary system. In the sphere of foreign exchange reserves, the process is slow and gradual and still far from amounting to a rupture with the centrality of the dollar. In the sphere of bilateral payments there is more dynamism, though still geographically concentrated in specific arrangements, such as transactions between Russia and China, which, according to a report published in November 2025, are settled 99.1% in roubles and yuan.²⁶ Finally, in the field of financial infrastructure, which includes payment, clearing, and settlement systems, the process is still incipient but has a structural character, given that the creation of these platforms tends to reduce dependence on the dollar-centred financial system in a lasting way.

In this sense, the importance of de-dollarisation lies in the direction in which this transformation moves and, above all, in the construction of institutional and productive alternatives capable of reducing the costs of exiting the dollar system.

To De-dollarise Is to Fight for Sovereignty

For the overwhelming majority of countries in the Global South, the international monetary and financial system centred on the dollar is not a safety net but a straitjacket. Insofar as countries need to accumulate international reserves – hard currencies such as the dollar – they are subjected to monetary extortion by the dollar system, since they must maintain those reserves and do so by purchasing US public debt. In doing so, they continue to finance the outsized capacity of the United States to act, including by funding wars. Furthermore, the system is also a mechanism of punishment, since the United States can, through sanctions, blockades, and exclusion from the international payments system, penalise countries that are not subservient to it. In recent decades, Washington has increased economic sanctions against the targets of its foreign policy by 933%.²⁷

In practice, national currencies are not seen as stores of value but as volatile ‘financial assets’. International demand for them is speculative, subject to panic and capital flight. In addition, Global South countries suffer from the structural inability to issue external debt in their own currencies. They borrow in dollars but generate revenue in local currency, creating a devastating currency mismatch: when their currencies depreciate, they must use more local currency to obtain the same amount of dollars needed to service their external debts.

Dollar hegemony is therefore not limited to the dollar’s centrality as a means of payment or store of value. It also expresses itself in the way the dollar’s domestic dynamics are transmitted to the rest of the world. In moments of dollar appreciation, peripheral currencies tend to depreciate, making imports more expensive and putting pressure on domestic inflation, especially in economies that are dependent on energy, food, and intermediate goods. Because a large share of international commodities is priced in dollars, these effects are amplified even in the absence of variations in the real conditions of supply and demand.

In financial markets, decisions in US monetary policy, such as interest-rate hikes, frequently trigger capital flows towards dollar-denominated assets. This causes exchange-rate depreciations, raises the cost of external financing, and restricts the space for economic policy in countries of the Global South, which are often forced to adopt contractionary measures to contain inflation and stabilise their currencies – even in contexts of low growth. In economies with high levels of debt in foreign currency, dollar appreciation immediately raises the burden of that debt in domestic-currency terms, deepening structural fragilities. In order to attract volatile international capital, assets in the Global South must offer much higher interest rates than the ‘safe’ assets of the North. This results in a constant net transfer of wealth from poorer countries to the richest financial centres.

With neoliberal policies and the liberalisation of capital movements, the capacity of states to conduct macroeconomic policy has been weakened. Any government that attempts to implement expansionary fiscal or monetary policies, such as cutting interest rates to stimulate investment, is immediately punished by the ‘market’ through capital flight, which devalues the currency, generates inflation, and can lead to collapse. Governments become hostages to the confidence of financiers. To protect themselves from this volatility, Global South countries are forced to accumulate massive international reserves. Brazil, for instance, held more than US$358 billion in December 2025.²⁸ These reserves are mostly invested in dollar assets, especially US Treasury securities. This is the final paradox: to defend themselves from the system, Global South countries are obliged to finance their oppressor, lending trillions of dollars to the US Treasury at low interest rates.

Dollar hegemony imposes unsustainable costs on the Global South. Dissatisfaction with this destabilising asymmetry is not new, but it has taken on renewed urgency in a world moving towards multipolarity. De-dollarisation has become a long-term structural trend, though one that faces immense structural obstacles. According to the economist Bruno de Conti, several developments may, in the medium or long term, trigger changes in the international monetary and financial system, namely:

the redefinition of the role of certain countries in the hierarchy of the world economy;

the intensification of geopolitical tensions among the leading powers; and

the growing distrust of the dollar, sharpened during the Trump administration, combined with the political willingness of a broad set of countries to seek ways to reduce their dependence on the US currency, whether individually or in coordination.²⁹

The discussion of de-dollarisation, however, cannot be reduced to protection against sanctions or the mitigation of external vulnerabilities. A deeper analysis must ask what purpose de-dollarisation is meant to serve. The replacement of one hegemonic currency by another does not necessarily imply a qualitative transformation of the international order, nor does it guarantee greater stability or benefits for peripheral countries. Historical experience suggests that monetary hierarchy tends to reproduce itself, albeit in new configurations.

De-dollarisation must be understood not merely as a dispute between currencies but as part of a broader debate about the nature of international economic relations. For countries of the Global South, this means shifting the focus away from the mere substitution of instruments and towards the construction of structural alternatives involving new forms of participation in international trade, technological cooperation, productive integration, and political coordination. An effective transformation of the international monetary system would therefore require more than the creation of alternative financial mechanisms. It would require confronting the pillars that sustain dollar hegemony, including the centrality of commodity pricing, the dominance of dollar-denominated financial markets, and the capacity for geopolitical coercion.

De-dollarisation is not an end in itself but part of a broader struggle for economic sovereignty and for the construction of a more equitable international order capable of interrupting the systematic transfer of wealth from the Global South to the centres of power. The struggle for de-dollarisation, therefore, is not merely an accounting adjustment. It is a fundamental political struggle over sovereignty, development, and the right of the peoples of the Global South to organise their economies outside the discipline of imperial finance.

Contradictions (& exploiting them)

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Contradictions (& exploiting them)

Contradictions (& exploiting them)

Article 8 of 10

Socialista Champagne

By Isabella Aidar

Originally published at https://socialistachampagne.substack.com/p/contradictions-and-exploiting-them

Publication Date: May 9, 2026

Contradiction is not a failure of policy or a sign of hypocrisy. It is the very motor of historical development. When a contradiction arises in politics, they must be analyzed dialectically, instead of reacted to in isolation. Every social system, nation, and political actor exists within a web of opposing forces, internal and external, progressive and reactionary. Seeking pure, contradiction-free politics is an idealist fantasy that never materializes. The key is to assess which contradictions are primary, and which side of a contradiction is advancing the struggle against imperialism.

How is it that Russia still trades gas and grain with Israel, while also supporting Iran as they fight them? The same way the USSR maintained trade with both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy to survive, yet no historian would argue the USSR supported the Nazis; the Soviets were the single greatest force that destroyed them. The main contradiction is what determines the real character of relations. Weaker nations can and must exploit the internal tensions of stronger ones for material gain. The Sahel states—Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger—and the Global South do not need Russia be socialist yet; they only need to leverage its guns and access against the West. Trade Russian military support for their state-owned mining rights. Demand technology transfers in exchange for diplomatic recognition. China has been a masterclass at exploiting capitalist states to its benefit. Where China once played the US and Japan against each other to industrialize, today the Sahel and the rest of the Global South can play Russia, China, and Turkey to break their own French and American neocolonial chains.

Military, geopolitical, and ideological antagonisms matter more than isolated commercial ties. Russia supports Iran militarily and politically, sharing live satellite photos and geolocation data of US military assets like warships and soldier locations. They provide the intel that helps Iranian drones and missiles strike Gulf targets, a critical support behind their operations. They provide upgraded Shahed drones featuring their Kometa-B satellite navigation modules and anti-jamming tech. They have used their veto power at the UN Security Council to block resolutions against Iran. Russia (and China) proposed an alternate peace plan before the UN that immediately would force Israel to withdraw, honour 1967 borders and grant Palestinian statehood. It was rejected.

But Russia itself has been at its own war for years. They are heavily sanctioned by the finance capitalist nations, which dramatically restricts their trade capacity. As a result of sanctions, their economy has also become super dependent on China. Their main European market has been diverted from them by NATO, and Russia’s economy itself is a net resource exporter economy, meaning, they export more than they import in. They also don’t have a globally dollarized finance capital economy that collects debts and interest, which is the highest manifestation of capitalism, and why the US has functionally been the world’s empire. Russia relies on its exports of raw resources, especially gas. Without these exports they cannot survive and fight their own war, or help Iran. The Russian economy since Putin took over has become 70% public sector based, one of the largest public sectors in the world. Almost half of that are state gas companies. The state has to employ and pay its citizens, keep their people stable and secure.

Lenin, Mao and Stalin all repeatedly emphasized the need to exploit contradictions among capitalist states rather than isolate socialism economically and treat politics as moral absolutism. To quote Lenin in In Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder: “To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie... and to refuse beforehand to manoeuvre, to exploit the conflict of interests among one’s enemies... is ridiculous in the extreme.”

Consider the United States: the principal contradiction today is between its declining unipolar hegemony and the urgent need of the Global South for multipolar, sovereign development. Into this breach step China and Russia—not as perfect socialist states either, but nations managing deep contradictions of their own.

China, despite being on the socialist path, has integrated deeply with global capitalism, accumulated immense capital, and even invests abroad in ways that mimic imperialist logic. Yet its primary contradiction with US imperialism—over Taiwan, over technological sovereignty, over financial control—overrides the secondary one. By using its capitalist surplus to build ports in Peru, railways in East Africa, and trade corridors across Eurasia, China has objectively weakened dollar hegemony. It did not wait for socialism to triumph at home before challenging US power; it exploited the very contradictions of global capital to rise within it and then turn that weight against its architects.

Russia, a state capitalist state, has bred its own internal exploitation. Yet its military confrontation with NATO, its weaponization of energy and grain deals, and its strategic pivot to the Global South have shattered the post-Cold War unipolar consensus.

Now contrast this with the political contradictions of someone like Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist in New York. On one hand, he champions rent control, public transit, and working-class healthcare—tactically useful reforms. But his primary contradiction? When pressed, he aligns with Zionism and refuses to break fully with the US imperial apparatus. Synagogues in New York are openly selling stolen Palestinian land acquired through American colonial genocide, protected by armies of police (deployed by Jessica Tisch, the Zionist daughter of a real estate oligarch that Mamdani willfully kept on his team). When asked about it, Mamdani condones the use of state violence to stop people from protesting the sale of stolen native land in the middle of a genocide. This blatant protection of Zionism holds more weight than some micro wealth tax that he pushes which are also less than crumbs. It’s dually problematic as Mamdani is pacifying Americans to accept both imperialism and Zionism. He supports the mastermind imperial state that is actively arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza, funding Ukraine’s proxy war against Russia, and imposing coups in Africa. Unlike Russia or China, whose contradictions are external and antagonistic toward US hegemony, Mamdani’s internal contradictions lead him back into the imperialist camp. That is not a productive contradiction; it is a fatal compromise. The Sahel cannot afford such confusion. They must exploit every capitalist tendency of Russia and China for immediate material gain—debt relief, vaccines, radar systems—while building their own productive forces. Do not moralize. Seize the contradiction.

In dialectics, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend, but their contradictions are your tool. China rose by playing two imperialists against each other. Russia today needs the Sahel more than the Sahel needs Russian ideology. And as for Mamdani and his kind, their contradictions serve only to re-legitimize empire. The Global South must learn to distinguish: contradictions that weaken U.S. imperialism are progressive, even if imperfect. Contradictions that tether you back to Washington are death. Choose accordingly, and exploit ruthlessly.

Primary contradiction in our time and anti-imperialism

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Primary contradiction in our time and anti-imperialism

Primary contradiction in our time and anti-imperialism

Article 9 of 10

Amy Yang

Originally published at https://amyyyang00.substack.com/p/primary-contradiction-in-our-time

Publication Date: March 28, 2026

As Mao pointed out in “On Contradiction”, it’s important to identify the primary contradiction in a complex situation with many contradictions. So what’s the primary contradiction in our time? To identify it, we need first to identify the most serious threats to humanity, which are undoubtedly the climate and environmental crisis and nuclear war. So what is the root cause of these threats?

For anyone with normally functioning eyes and brains, it’s easy to see that for the last 500 years, especially since the second half of the last century, natural resources from the global south have been robbed by the West, air, water, and soil in the global south are polluted during the production of consumer goods for the west, workers in the global south have been forced to toil more than 10 hours per day for slave wages, villages and beaches in the global south have been contaminated by plastic, electronic, and textile waste mountains from the west. If any country in the global south refuses to subordinate itself to this unjust world order, it will be labelled by the West as “rogue state/ authoritarian regime”, and be threatened by sanctions, infiltration, invasion wars, and regime change.

All of these sacrifices the global south makes serve for only one purpose: to support the imperialist mode of living in the global north. Through exploitation and expropriation in the global south, workers in the global north are rewarded with above-subistence wages and social welfare, enabling them to consume goods produced in the global south. This not only solves the inherent problem of capitalism, overproduction, but also enhances cross-class solidarity between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, softening the class contradictions in the global north.

It’s thus reasonable to conclude that the primary contradiction in our time is the sustainable development of productive forces in the periphery and the global imperialistic capitalism with an imperial core (US, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan with 13% of world population) and a periphery (all other countries in the global south with more than 80% of world population, including China). Despite the fact that many countries in the global south officially became independent at the end of the 20th century, they don’t have economic sovereignty and are still neocolonized by Western imperialists.

To solve this contradiction, the global south has to break free from its subordinate periphery role, in other words, the current world order has to be torn apart. But how to kill the monster of imperialism?

There are only two options, either the monster is stabbed to death from inside, or from outside. But which one of these two is feasible?

Lenin hoped for the former and wanted to see workers in Europe turn imperialist wars into civil wars. But he was disappointed. Instead of showing solidarity with oppressed people in the periphery, workers in Europe, or rather the labour aristocracy, chose once and once again to support their national bourgeoisie and imperialism, most recently regarding the genocide in Gaza and the imperialist war on Iran.

Some may argue that 80% of Germans are against the genocide and 60% of Americans think the war has gone too far. But words have no meaning without deeds. Only insane people with no understanding of basic morality will say they support genocide or war when they are asked in an interview. To know if people in the West are really against what their imperialist governments are doing, we need to see if they take actions to cut the pipelines of imperialism.

The inaction and silence of people in the major imperialist countries (the US, Germany, the UK, France) have become louder and more violent recently. A big portion of workers in those countries refuse to give up their “privileges” earned from the current imperialist world order and tear the system apart.

Of course, there are some exceptions. In Italy, workers showed the highest level of internationalism and class solidarity with oppressed people in the global south, dock workers in Italy, Sweden, Spain etc refused to ship weapons to isnotreal, activists sabotaged the factories producing weapons by direct action. However, it’s far from enough because these brave people are only a minority of the working class in the West. The majority of the working class still has very low levels of class consciousness, mostly as a result of the constant propaganda in Western media owned by the Epstein class.

However, to kill a monster collective actions of the mass is the key. In light of the urgency of the matter, it’s clear that we don’t have the time to wait for the majority of workers in the imperialist cores to develop their class consciousness. Thus, the only feasible option under current circumstances is for the oppressed people in the periphery to take matters into their own hands and fight against imperialism until its demise.

One can easily see that countries in the periphery have already chosen this option if one is not blinded by the mainstream media in the West. The increasing south-south collaboration, the expansion of BRICS to more countries in the global south, and the use of one’s own currency in south-south transactions are all of these are undermining the economic power of imperialist countries in the West. The recent war on Iran also shows the determination of oppressed people in the global south to defeat Western imperialism and the gradual decline of the US empire.

However, it’s disheartening to see how little people on the left in the global north understand this situation. Instead of unconditionally supporting countries that refuse to subordinate themselves to Western imperialism, they help their imperialist governments to promote anti-anti-imperialism sentiment by nuancing and whataboutism.

They refuse to support countries like Iran, Yemen, North Korea, and Russia because they are not socialist and democratic. They refuse to support China because China, in their opinion, is or will soon be an imperialist country. This shows that the views of leftists in the West, including some Marxists, are completely away from reality and extremely Eurocentric, or using the Chinese term, empty thinking (空想).

As the primary contradiction, or the primary enemy is Western imperialism, we should support all anti-imperialist forces in the global south, no matter whether reactionary or religious (political Islam). There are almost no Marxist anti-imperialist forces in the global south due to the strangling of Western imperialism. Without defeating the western imperialism first, the oppressed people in global south can never get the chance to develop Marxist socialist forces. Thus it’s funny to hear Western leftists saying “I refuse to support IRGC and Hamas because they are not socialist”. It’s like you blame a hungry homeless person for not working while refusing to give her/him food and shelter to meet the most urgent needs.

Regarding the China question, it’s definitely “the question” that causes the most controversy on the left. To understand a country like China and Iran with 5000 years history, one has to study its history.

In the Tang and Ming Dynasties, China was extremely prosperous and powerful. However, in contrast to the European countries that started developing weapons, colonizing other countries, and robbing their resources once they got more powerful, China did what a powerful empire should do from the view of the Chinese, namely to show generosity to smaller countries and trade with them in a friendly and respectful manner as a big country. It’s actually deeply rooted in Chinese culture that a rich person shows off his/her wealth by being extremely generous (as far as I know cultures in West Asia are very similar regarding generosity). As a result of this Chinese mindset, firework was invented in China and used as fireworks for celebrations rather than as weapons to bring deaths for conquering others. Thus, it’s almost nonsense to claim China aims to replace the US as the hegemonic empire.

However, people in the West refuse to learn about Chinese culture, or actually not only Chinese culture, but any culture in the East, due to Eurocentrism that’s deeply rooted in Western societies. So when they analyse China or any country in the east, they use western mindset and western lens. This explains why their predictions about these countries are always wrong.

Despite the Chinese culture mentioned above, one has to admit that nationalism is increasing in China, and many other countries in the global south. Nationalism is of course the opposite of internationalism and can lead to imperialistic tendencies. However, we need to understand the root causes of this kind of nationalism in the global south. It’s a product of resentment towards colonisers and Western imperialists, or in Chinese terms, the century of humiliation. Although it’s reasonable to worry about the negative effects of nationalism in China, this type of nationalism will gradually fade away with the current imperialist world order being torn apart. Unlike nationalism in the West, nationalism in the East has no root in colonialism, and hence racism, it’s rather the opposite.

So what is the main message I want to convey here to comrades in the West?

As a real anti-imperialist, one has to support anti-imperialist forces in the global south unconditionally. Only when Western imperialism is defeated can we proceed further to solve new primary contradictions, such as class contradictions, gender equality, and the modernisation of Islam. Thus, we have to show unreserved solidarity to Iran, Yemen, Hezbollah, Hamas, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Burkina Faso, and many more anti-imperialist forces. Any reservation for solidarity with the axis of resistance helps maintain the current imperialist world order and the power of the Epstein class.

Long live the resistance! Power to the workers and oppressed people in all countries!

Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

US Imperialism is the Principal Contradiction — Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

Article 10 of 10

Monthly Review

By Cheng Enfu; Lu Baolin

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/five-characteristics-of-neoimperialism/

Publication Date: May 1, 2021

Cheng Enfu is a principal professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, director of the Research Center for Economic and Social Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and president of the World Association for Political Economy. He can be reached at 65344718[at]vip.163.com. Lu Baolin is a professor at the School of Economics, Qufu Normal University.

Neoimperialism is the specific contemporary phase of historical development that features the economic globalization and financialization of monopoly capitalism. The characteristics of neoimperialism can be summed up on the basis of the following five key features. First is the new monopoly of production and circulation. The internationalization of production and circulation, together with the intensified concentration of capital, gives rise to giant multinational monopoly corporations whose wealth is nearly as great as that of whole countries. Second is the new monopoly of finance capital, which plays a decisive role in global economic life and generates a malformed development, namely, economic financialization. Third is the monopoly of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property, generating the unequal international division of labor and the polarization of the global economy and wealth distribution. Fourth is the new monopoly of the international oligarchic alliance. An international monopoly alliance of oligarchic capitalism, featuring one hegemonic ruler and several other great powers, has come into being and provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress on the basis of the monopoly. Fifth is the economic essence and general trend. The globalized contradictions of capitalism and various crises of the system often undergo an intensification that creates the new monopolistic and predatory, hegemonic and fraudulent, parasitic and decaying, transitional and moribund form of contemporary capitalism as late imperialism.

The historical evolution of capitalism has passed through several distinct stages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, capitalism reached the stage of private monopoly, which V. I. Lenin termed the imperialist stage. The era of imperialism brought with it the law of uneven economic and political development. In order to expand overseas and redistribute the territory of the world, the leading powers formed various alliances and launched a fierce struggle that led to two world wars. Eurasia suffered from continuous wars throughout the first half of the twentieth century. One after the other, national democratic revolutions and the communist movement developed continuously. After the Second World War, a number of economically underdeveloped countries adopted a socialist path of development, intensifying the confrontation between capitalism and socialism. Although The Communist Manifesto had long anticipated that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by socialism, this was only possible in a very few countries. The capitalist and imperialist system, despite suffering grave problems, survived. From the 1980s and early ’90s, capitalism carried out a strategic shift to neoliberal policies and evolved into its neoimperialist phase. This represents a new phase in the development of imperialism following the Cold War.

In his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin set out the definition and characteristics of imperialism as follows:

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.… We must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: (1) the concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.¹

In an article published in December 1917, Lenin further elaborated that: “Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism.”²

Based on Lenin’s theory of imperialism, we shall analyze contemporary capitalism while bearing in mind the recent changes it has undergone. Neoimperialism, we shall argue, is the phase of late imperialism that has arisen in the contemporary world, against the background of economic globalization and financialization.³ The character and features of neoimperialism can be summarized, as stated, around five aspects.

The New Monopoly of Production and Circulation

Lenin stated that the most profound economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is deeply rooted in the basic law of capitalist competition, which holds that competition results in the concentration of production and capital, and that this concentration will inevitably lead to monopoly when it reaches a certain level. In the early years of the twentieth century, the capitalist world experienced two huge waves of corporate mergers as the concentration of capital and of production reinforced each other. Production came increasingly to be concentrated in a small number of large companies, with the process bringing about organization on the basis of industrial monopolies with cross-sector multiproduct management. Instead of free competition, monopoly alliances held sway. Beginning in the early 1970s, capitalism encountered a “stagflation” crisis that lasted for nearly ten years, followed by a period of secular stagnation, or a long-term decline in growth rates. Economic recession and competitive pressures in the domestic market drove monopoly capital to seek new growth opportunities overseas. With the support of a new generation of information and communications technologies, foreign direct investment and international industrial transfers have continually reached new heights, with the degree of internationalization of production and circulation dwarfing that of the past.

Monopoly capital is being redistributed globally from production to circulation. Through the decentralization and internationalization of production processes, a system has arisen in which global value chains and the operational networks for organizing and managing multinational corporations have been divided up. The multinational companies coordinate their global value chains through complex networks of supplier relationships and through various governance models. In such systems, the processes involved in the production and trading of intermediate products and services are divided up and distributed around the world. The input and output transactions are carried out in the global production and service networks of the subsidiaries, contract partners, and suppliers of the multinational companies. According to statistics, about 60 percent of global trade consists of the exchange of intermediate products and services, and 80 percent of it is achieved via multinational companies.⁴

Within the new monopoly structures, the second characteristic of neoimperialism is the internationalization of production and circulation. The further concentration of capital leads to the rise of giant monopoly multinational corporations whose wealth may be as great as that of whole countries. Multinational corporations are the true representatives of contemporary international monopolism. The characteristics of the giant monopoly corporations can be summarized as follows.

The number of multinational corporations has grown globally, and the degree of socialization and internationalization of production and circulation has reached a higher level.

Since the 1980s, multinational corporations have become the main driving force of international economic intercourse as the bearers of foreign direct investment. In the 1980s, foreign investment worldwide grew at an unprecedented rate, much faster than the growth during the same period of other major economic variables such as world output and trade. In the 1990s, the scale of international direct investment reached an unprecedented level. Multinationals established branches and affiliates around the world via foreign direct investment, the volume of which had expanded dramatically. Between 1980 and 2008, the number of global multinational companies increased from 15,000 to 82,000. The number of overseas subsidiaries grew even faster, from 35,000 to 810,000. In 2017, an average of over 60 percent of the assets and sales of the world’s one hundred top nonfinancial multinational companies were located or achieved abroad. Foreign employees accounted for approximately 60 percent of total staff.⁵

Ever since the capitalist mode of production came into being, the concentration of production activities, expanding collaboration, and the evolution of the social division of labor have led to a continuous increase in the socialization of production. The decentralized labor processes are increasingly moving toward a joint labor process. The facts have proved that the sustained growth of outward foreign direct investment has strengthened the economic ties between all countries, as well as significantly increased the level of socialization and internationalization of the production and distribution systems, in which multinationals play a key role as the dominant force at the micro level. The internationalization of production and the globalization of trade have extensively redefined the way in which countries participate in the international division of labor, and this in turn has reshaped the production methods and profit models within those countries. Throughout the world, the majority of countries and regions are integrated into the network of international production and trade created by these giant corporations. Thousands of companies around the world form value creation nodes in the system of global production chains. Within the global economy, multinational firms have become the main channels for international investment and production, the core organizers of international economic activity, and the engine of global economic growth. The rapid development of multinational corporations shows that in the new imperialist phase constructed around the globalization of capital, the concentration of production and capital is reaching ever greater dimensions. Tens of thousands of multinational corporations now dominate everything.

The scale of accumulation by multinational monopoly capital is increasing, forming a multinational corporate empire.

Although the number of multinational capitalist corporations is not especially large, they all possess great strength. They not only comprise the main force in the development and use of new technologies, but also control the marketing networks and more and more natural and financial resources. On this basis, they have monopolized the proceeds of production and circulation and equipped themselves with an unparalleled competitive advantage. Between 1980 and 2013, benefiting from the expansion of markets and the decline in production factor costs, the profits of the world’s largest 28,000 companies increased from $2 trillion to $7.2 trillion, representing an increase from 7.6 percent to approximately 10 percent of gross world product.⁶ In addition, these multinational corporations not only form alliances with organs of state power, but also develop links with the global financial system, together forming financial monopoly organizations backed by state support. The globalization and financialization of monopoly capital further consolidate its wealth accumulation. In terms of sales revenue, the economic scale of some multinational corporations exceeds that of a number of developed countries. In 2009, for example, Toyota’s annual sales exceeded the gross domestic product (GDP) of Israel. In 2017, Walmart, rated by the Fortune 500 list as the world’s largest company, achieved total revenues of more than $500 billion, greater than the GDP of Belgium. If we combine the data for multinational corporations and the world’s total of almost two hundred countries, and draw up a list of their annual revenues and GDPs, it becomes clear that the countries represent fewer than 30 percent of the world’s one hundred largest economies, while the corporations account for more than 70 percent.

If world development continues along these lines, there will be more and more multinational companies whose wealth is similar to that of whole countries. Although industrial globalization has made economic activity more fragmented, vast quantities of profits still flow to a few countries of the developed capitalist world. Investment, trade, exports, and technology transfer are principally managed via the giant multinational corporations or their overseas branches, and the parent companies of these multinational monopolies remain tightly concentrated in geographic terms. In 2017, corporations from the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom accounted for half of the top five hundred companies in the world. Some two-thirds of the top one hundred multinationals are from these countries.

Multinational corporations monopolize the industries in their particular fields, controlling and running international production networks.

The multinational giants have immense quantities of capital and formidable scientific and technological strengths, which ensure them a dominant position in global production, trade, investment, and finance, as well as in the creation of intellectual property. The economies of scale that result from the monopoly positions enjoyed by multinational corporations have expanded their competitive advantage. This is because “the larger the army of workers among whom the labour is subdivided, the more gigantic the scale on which machinery is introduced, the more in proportion does the cost of production decrease, the more fruitful is the labour.”⁷ The high degree of monopoly exercised by the multinational corporations means that the concentration of production and the concentration of control over markets reinforce each other, accelerating capital accumulation. Meanwhile, competition and credit, as two powerful levers for the concentration of capital, accelerate capital’s trend of coming under increasingly narrow control as it accumulates. Over the past thirty years, all of the world’s nations have promoted policy options aimed at boosting investment and relaxing the restrictions to which foreign direct investment is subject. Although the increasing scale of outward foreign direct investment by developed countries has to varying degrees accelerated capital formation and the development of human resources in underdeveloped countries, and increased their export competitiveness, it has also brought about large-scale privatization and cross-border mergers and acquisitions in these nations. This has accelerated the process through which small and medium enterprises are bankrupted or forced to merge with multinational corporations. Even relatively large enterprises are vulnerable.

Around the world, many industries now have an oligopolistic market structure. For example, the global market for central processing units has been almost completely monopolized by the firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. As of 2015, the global market for seeds and pesticides was almost entirely controlled by six multinational companies—BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—that together controlled 75 percent of the global market for pesticides, 63 percent of the global market for seeds, and 75 percent of global private research in these areas. Syngenta, BASF, and Bayer alone controlled 51 percent of the global pesticide market, while DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta accounted for 55 percent of the seed market.⁸ According to statistics of the European Medical Devices Industry Group, the sales in 2010 of just twenty-five medical device companies accounted for more than 60 percent of the total sales of medical devices throughout the world. Ten multinationals controlled 47 percent of the global market for pharmaceuticals and related medical products. In China, soybeans are one of the vital food crops. All aspects of global soybean production, supply, and marketing chains are controlled by five multinational companies: Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. Monsanto controls the raw materials for seed production, while the other four control planting, trading, and processing. These multinationals form various alliances through joint ventures, cooperation, and long-term contractual agreements.⁹ As more and more social wealth is seized by fewer and fewer private capitalist giants, monopoly capital deepens its control and exploitation of labor. This leads to capital accumulation on a world scale, aggravating global overcapacity and the polarization between rich and poor.

In the era of neoimperialism, information and communications technology is developing rapidly. The emergence of the Internet has greatly reduced the time and space required for social production and circulation, bringing about a surge of cross-border mergers, investment, and trade. Consequently, more and more noncapitalist regions have been incorporated into the process of accumulation dominated by monopoly capital, which has greatly strengthened and expanded the world capitalist system. The socialization and internationalization of production and circulation have undergone a great leap during the era of capitalist economic globalization in the twenty-first century. The pattern, described in The Communist Manifesto, according to which “a cosmopolitan character” has been given “to production and consumption in every country” has been greatly strengthened.¹⁰ The globalization of monopoly capital requires world economic and political systems to be on the same track in order to eliminate the institutional barriers between them. However, when a number of postrevolutionary countries abandoned their earlier political and economic systems and turned to capitalism, they were not rewarded with the affluence and stability preached by neoliberal economists. On the contrary, the neoimperialist phase is the setting for the rampages of hegemony and monopoly capital.

The New Monopoly of Finance Capital

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry—such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of that concept.”¹¹ Finance capital is a new type of capital formed by the merger of bank monopoly capital and industrial monopoly capital. The turning point in the change from general capitalist rule to that of finance capital appeared around the beginning of the twentieth century, when banks in the leading imperialist countries were transformed from ordinary intermediaries into powerful monopolists. But before the Second World War, due to recurrent wars, high information transmission costs, and technical and institutional barriers such as trade protection, the linkages between global investment, trade, finance, and the market were relatively weak. The degree of globalization of the economy remained low, hindering the outward expansion of monopoly capital. After the Second World War, economic globalization was accelerated by the new technological revolution. In the early 1970s, rising oil prices triggered a worldwide economic crisis and brought about the grotesque phenomenon, impossible for Keynesian economics to explain, in which inflation and economic stagnation coexisted. In order to find profitable investment opportunities and escape from the “stagflation” quagmire, monopoly capital transferred traditional industries overseas, thus maintaining its original competitive advantage. Meanwhile, it accelerated its decoupling from the traditional industries and sought to open up new financial territory. Capitalist globalization and financialization catalyzed and supported each other, accelerating the “virtualization” of monopoly capital and the hollowing out of the real economy. The Western economic recession of the 1970s thus acted not only as a catalyst for the internationalization of monopoly capital, but also as the starting point for the financialization of industrial capital. Since then, monopoly capital has accelerated its turn from monopoly exercised in a single country to international monopoly, from the monopoly of the industrial entity to the monopoly of the financial industry.

Within the context of the new monopoly of finance capital, the second key characteristic of neoimperialism is that financial monopoly capital plays a decisive role in global economic life, giving rise to economic financialization.

Minority of Financial Institutions Control Main Global Economic Arteries

To seek monopolistic power is the very nature of imperialism. “The big enterprises, and the banks in particular, not only completely absorb the small ones, but also ‘annex’ them, subordinate them, bring them into their ‘own’ group or ‘concern’ (to use the technical term) by acquiring ‘holdings’ in their capital, by purchasing or exchanging shares, by a system of credits, etc.,” Lenin explains. “We see the rapid expansion of a close network of channels which cover the whole country, centralising all capital and all revenues, transforming thousands and thousands of scattered economic enterprises into a single national, capitalist, and then into a world capitalist economy.”¹² At the neoimperialist phase, a small number of multinational corporations, most of them banks, have spread a very extensive and detailed operational network over the world via mergers, participation, and shareholding, and thus control not only countless small and medium enterprises but also the main global economic arteries. An empirical study by three Swiss scholars, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, showed that a relatively small number of multinational banks effectively dominate the whole global economy. Based on their analysis of 43,060 multinational corporations all over the world and the shareholding relationships between them, they found that the top 737 multinational corporations controlled 80 percent of total global output. After further study of the complicated network of these relationships, they came up with the even more amazing discovery that a core consisting of 147 multinational corporations controlled nearly 40 percent of the economic value. Of the 147 corporations, some three-quarters were financial intermediaries.¹³

The Globalization of Monopoly-Finance Capital

When imperialism evolved into neoimperialism, the financial oligarchies and their agents set the rules of trade and investment aside, and proceeded to launch currency, trade, resource, and information wars, plundering resources and wealth globally and at will. Within this system, neoliberal economists play the role of spokespeople for the financial oligarchs, advocating for financial liberalization and globalization in the interests of the monopolists and enticing developing countries to liberalize their capital account restrictions. If the countries concerned follow this advice, exercising financial supervision will become more difficult and their vulnerability to the hidden dangers of the financial system will increase. The effect will be to provide more opportunities for financial monopoly capital to plunder these countries’ wealth. In their operations on capital markets, the international financial investment giants tend to attack the fragile financial firewalls of developing countries and seize opportunities to plunder the assets these countries have accumulated over decades. This indicates that financial globalization and liberalization have certainly established a unified and open global financial system, but in the meantime have created mechanisms through which the global center appropriates the resources and surplus value of the less developed periphery. Concentrated in the hands of a minority of the international financial oligarchies and armed with actual monopoly power, finance capital has gained increasing volumes of monopoly profits through foreign investment, new business ventures, and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. As finance capital continuously levies tribute from all over the world, the rule of the financial oligarchs is consolidated.

From Production to Speculative Finance

Financial monopoly capital, which has rid itself of the constraints associated with material form, is the highest and most abstract form of capital, and is extremely flexible and speculative. In the absence of regulation, financial monopoly capital is very likely to work against the goals set by a country for its industrial development. After the Second World War, under the guidance of state interventionism, commercial and investment banks were operated separately, the securities market was strictly supervised, and the expansion of finance capital and its speculative activity were heavily restricted. In the 1970s, as the influence of Keynesianism faded and neoliberal ideas began taking over, the financial industry began a process of deregulation and the basic forces controlling the operation of financial markets ceased to be those of governments and became the leading participants in the markets themselves. In the United States, the Jimmy Carter administration in 1980 enacted the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, which abolished the deposit and loan interest rate controls, and by 1986 interest rate liberalization was complete. In 1994, the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act ended all geographical restrictions on banking operations and allowed banks to conduct business across state lines, increasing the competition between financial institutions. In 1996, the National Securities Market Improvement Act was promulgated, markedly reducing supervision over the securities industry. The Financial Services Modernization Act followed in 1999, and the enforced separation of commercial banking from investment banking and insurance, a provision that had existed for nearly seventy years, was completely abolished. Advocates of financial liberalization initially claimed that if the government relaxed its supervision over financial institutions and financial markets, the efficiency with which financial resources were allocated would be further improved and the finance industry would be better able to boost economic growth. But finance capital has many unruly tendencies, and if restraints on it are lifted, it is quite capable of behaving like a runaway horse. Excessive financialization will inevitably lead to the virtualization of economic activities and to the emergence of huge bubbles of fictitious capital.

Over the past thirty years, finance capital has expanded in a process linked to the continuous deindustrialization of the economy. Because of the lack of opportunities for productive investment, financial transactions now have less and less to do with the real economy. Capital that is otherwise redundant is directed into speculative schemes, swelling the volume of fictitious assets in the virtual economy. In line with these developments, the cash flow of large enterprises has shifted extensively from fixed capital investment to financial investment, and corporate profits now come increasingly from financial activities. Between 1982 and 1990, almost a quarter of the sums previously invested in factory plant and equipment in the private real economy were shifted to the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors.¹⁴ Since the relaxation of financial restrictions in the 1980s and ’90s, supermarket chains have offered a wider and wider variety of financial products to the public, including credit and prepaid debit cards, savings and checking accounts, insurance plans, and even home mortgages.¹⁵ The shareholder value maximization principle popularized since the 1980s has forced CEOs to prioritize short-term goals. Rather than paying off debts or improving their company’s financial structure, CEOs in many cases use profits to buy back the company’s stocks, pushing up the stock price and thus increasing their own salaries. Of the companies listed on Standard & Poor’s 500 Index between 2003 and 2012, 449 invested a total of $2,400 billion to purchase their own shares. This sum corresponded to 54 percent of their total revenues, and another 37 percent of revenues were paid as dividends.¹⁶ In 2006, the expenditure by U.S. nonfinancial companies on repurchasing their own shares was equal to 43.9 percent of non-residential investment expenditure.¹⁷

The financial sector also dominates the distribution of surplus value within the nonfinancial sector. The sums paid as dividends and bonuses in the nonfinancial corporate sector account for a greater and greater proportion of total profits. Between the 1960s and the ’90s, the dividend payout ratio (the ratio of dividends to adjusted after-tax profits) of the U.S. corporate sector underwent a significant increase. While the average in the 1960s and ’70s was 42.4 and 42.3 percent, respectively, from 1980 to 1989 it never fell below 44 percent. Although total corporate profits fell by 17 percent, total dividends increased by 13 percent and the dividend payout ratio reached 57 percent.¹⁸ In the days before the U.S. financial crisis broke out in 2008, the proportion of net bonuses to net after-tax profits amounted to about 80 percent of companies’ final capital allocations.¹⁹ Further, the boom in the virtual economy has no relation whatever to the ability of the real economy to support such growth.

Stagnation and shrinkage in the real economy coexist with excessive development of the virtual economy. The value created in the real economy depends on such purchasing power as has appeared through the expansion of asset bubbles and the rise of asset prices, the so-called wealth effect. As the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, the financial institutions are obliged, with government backing, to rely on a variety of financial innovations to support credit-fueled consumption by citizens who are not asset owners and to disperse the resulting financial risks. Meanwhile, the huge income and wealth effects generated by the appearance on the scene of derivative financial products and the growth of asset bubbles attract more investors to the virtual economy. Driven by monopoly profits, numerous derivative financial products are created. The innovations in the area of financial products also lengthen the debt chain and serve to pass on financial risks. An example is the securitization of subprime mortgage loans; layer upon layer of these were packaged together with the seeming purpose of raising the credit rating of the products involved, but actually in order to transfer high levels of risk to others. Increasingly, the trade in financial products is separated from production; it is even possible to say that it has nothing to do with production and is solely a gambling transaction.

The Monopoly of the U.S. Dollar and Intellectual Property

Again, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital.”²⁰ After the Second World War, the deepening and refining of the international division of labor brought more developing countries and regions into the global economic network. Within the global production mechanism, every country and enterprise is seemingly able to exercise its own comparative advantages. Even the least developed countries can rely on cheap labor and such resource advantages as it might have to allow participation in the international division of labor and cooperation. However, the real motive of monopoly capital is to compete for favorable trading platforms and to plunder high monopoly profits. In particular, the U.S. dollar hegemony and the developed-country monopoly of intellectual property mean that international exchange is seriously unequal. Thus, the characteristics of the old imperialism, coexisting with the commodity output, define the general capital output. Meanwhile, the characteristics of neoimperialism that coexist with the commodity output and the general capital output are the output of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property.

The third characteristic of neoimperialism is defined by the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and the developed-world monopoly of intellectual property, which together generate the unequal international division of labor along with a polarized global economy and wealth distribution. In each of the four aspects that can be summed up as state-capital, capital-labor, capital-capital, and state-state, the dominant forces of giant monopoly capital and neoimperialism are further strengthened under the conditions of economic globalization and financial liberalization.

The Spatial Expansion of the Capital-Labor Relation: Global Value Chains and the Global Labor Arbitrage

Through mechanisms that include outsourcing, setting up subsidiaries, and establishing strategic alliances, multinationals integrate more and more countries and companies into the global production networks they dominate. The reason why capital accumulation can be achieved on this global scale is the existence of a large, low-cost global workforce. According to data from the International Labor Organization, the world’s total workforce grew from 1.9 to 3.1 billion between 1980 and 2007. Of these people, 73 percent were from developing countries, with China and India accounting for 40 percent.²¹ Multinational corporations are all organized entities, while the global workforce finds it exceedingly difficult to unite effectively and defend its rights. Because of the existence of the global reserve army of labor, capital can use the strategy of divide and conquer to discipline wage workers. Over decades, monopoly capital has shifted the production sectors of developed-world economies to the countries of the Global South, compelling workforces in different areas of the globe to compete with one another for basic living incomes. Through this process, multinationals are able to extort huge imperialist rents from the world’s workers.²² In addition, these giant corporations are well able to lobby and pressure the governments of developing countries to formulate policies that benefit the flow of capital and investment. Trying to secure GDP growth by inducing international capital to invest and set up factories, many developing country governments not only ignore the protection of social welfare and labor rights, but also guarantee various preferential measures such as tax concessions and credit support. The globalization of production has thus enabled the developed capitalist countries to exploit the less developed world in a more “civil” fashion under the slogan of fair trade. In order to launch their modernization, developing countries often have little choice but to accept the capital offered by the imperialists—along with the conditions and encumbrances that go with it.

Monopoly-Finance Capital and Multinational Corporate Dominance

The new structure of the international division of labor inherits the old unbalanced and unequal system. Although production and marketing are fragmented, the control centers of research and development, finance, and profit are still the multinational corporations. These corporate entities usually occupy the top of the vertical division of labor, owning the intellectual property rights associated with core components. The giant, globe-straddling corporations are in charge of formulating technology and product standards, as well as controlling the design, research, and development links. Meanwhile, their “partners” in developing countries are typically contracted to multinational corporations and are the recipients of such product standards. They usually engage in such labor-intensive activities as production, processing, and assembly, and are responsible for producing simple parts in mass quantities. Performing relatively unspecialized factory operations for multinationals, these enterprises earn only slender profits. The jobs in these enterprises generally feature low wages, high labor intensity, long working hours, and poor working environments. Although the value embodied in the products is primarily created by production workers in developing-world factories, most of the value additions are plundered by the multinationals via unequal exchange within the production networks. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of U.S. corporations increased from 5 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2008. The proportion of overseas-retained profits increased from 2 percent in 1950 to 113 percent in 2000. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of Japanese corporations increased from 23.4 percent in 1997 to 52.5 percent in 2008.²³ In a slightly different accounting, the share of foreign profits of U.S. corporations as a percent of U.S. domestic corporate profits increased from 4 percent in 1950 to 29 percent in 2019.²⁴ Multinational corporations are often able to use their monopoly of intellectual property to generate huge returns. Intellectual property includes product design, brand names, and symbols and images used in marketing. These are protected by rules and laws covering patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Figures from the UN Conference on Trade and Development show that royalties and licensing fees paid to multinational corporations increased from $31 billion in 1990 to $333 billion in 2017.²⁵

With the advance of financial liberalization, finance capital no longer merely serves industrial capital, but has far overtaken it. The financial oligarchs and rentiers are now dominant. In the space of just twenty years from 1987, debt in the international credit market soared from just under $11 trillion to $48 trillion, with a rate of growth far exceeding that of the world economy as a whole.²⁶

Neoimperialism and the Neoliberal State

Since the mid–1970s, economic stagflation has seen Keynesianism abandoned by governments, or employed much less. Neoliberal approaches such as modern monetarism, the rational expectations school, and supply-side theories are hits among economists, and dominate economic theory and policy in the neoimperialist countries. This is because these approaches accord with the expanding globalization and financialization of monopoly capital. Neoliberalism is a superstructure that has arisen on the basis of financial monopoly capital; essentially, it represents the basis for the ideology and policies required to maintain the rule of neoimperialism. In the 1980s, U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher were the world standard-bearers of neoliberalism. Advocating the ideas of modern monetarism and the positions of the private property and supply-side schools, they implemented privatization and market-oriented reforms, relaxed government supervision, and weakened the power of labor unions to defend working-class rights. After taking office, Reagan immediately approved the establishment of a special group of CEOs, with vice president George H. W. Bush as its director, to revoke or relax regulations. The changes advocated by the group related to job safety, labor protection, and the protection of consumer interests. The Reagan administration also joined forces with big capitalists to crack down on labor unions in the public and private sectors, dismissing union leaders and organizers and leaving the working class, already in a weak position, even worse off. The so-called Washington-Wall Street Complex argued that the interests of Wall Street and those of the United States were identical; what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The U.S. government had in practice become a tool for the financial oligarchy to pursue its economic and political interests.²⁷ Therefore, it was not the votes of citizens, or even the democratic system of the separation of powers, but the Wall Street financial oligarchy and the military-industrial complex that ultimately controlled the government. Wall Street influenced the political process and policy formation in the United States by providing campaign contributions and manipulating the media. Held captive by monopoly interest groups, the U.S. government had little power to promote the sound development of the economy and society and to improve people’s livelihood. The list of Wall Street executives with annual salaries of tens of millions of dollars features numerous matches with the people holding top U.S. government posts. For example, the seventieth U.S. secretary of the treasury, Robert Edward Rubin, had previously spent twenty-six years working for investment bankers Goldman Sachs. The seventy-fourth secretary of the treasury, Henry Paulson, had earlier served the Goldman Sachs Group as its chairman and CEO. Many senior officials of the Donald Trump administration also had histories as executives of monopoly enterprises. The existence of this “revolving door” mechanism means that even if the government were to introduce relevant financial regulatory policies, it would be hard fundamentally to shake the interests of the financial chaebols of Wall Street.

Whenever a financial crisis occurs, the government provides emergency assistance to the monopoly oligarchs of Wall Street. U.S. scholars have found that the Federal Reserve has used secret emergency loans to meet the needs of large Wall Street interest groups, in some instances providing strong support to bankers who are board members of regional Federal Reserve banks. In 2007, the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis broke out. Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s top five investment banks, was acquired by JPMorgan Chase. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch was acquired by Bank of America. Goldman Sachs, however, survived; the main reasons include a decision by the government to urgently grant Goldman Sachs the status of a holding company, allowing it to obtain massive life-saving funds from the Federal Reserve. In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission banned the shorting of financial stocks.²⁸

U.S. Dollar Hegemony, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Plundering of Global Wealth

In July 1944, on the initiative of the U.S. and British governments, representatives of forty-four countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss plans for the postwar monetary system. In the course of the Bretton Woods Conference, the documents Final Act of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund, and Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—collectively known as the Bretton Woods Agreements—were passed. A key point of the Bretton Woods system was to construct an international monetary order centered on the U.S. dollar.²⁹ Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, which was in turn pegged to gold. The U.S. dollar then began to play the role of world currency, replacing the British pound. The unique advantage that derives from the central place of the U.S. dollar in the international monetary system gives the U.S. a special position compared to the rest of the world’s countries. The U.S. dollar makes up 70 percent of global currency reserves, while accounting for 68 percent of international trade settlements, 80 percent of foreign exchange transactions, and 90 percent of international banking transactions. Because the U.S. dollar is the internationally recognized reserve currency and trade settlement currency, the United States is not only able to exchange it for real commodities, resources, and labor, and thus to cover its long-term trade deficit and fiscal deficit, but can also make cross-border investments and carry out cross-border mergers of overseas enterprises employing the U.S. dollars that it prints at almost no cost. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar provides an excellent illustration of the predatory nature of neoimperialism. The United States can also obtain international seigniorage by exporting U.S. dollars, and can reduce its foreign debt by depreciating the U.S. dollar or assets that are priced in U.S. dollars. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar has also caused the transfer of wealth from debtor countries to creditor countries. This means that poor countries subsidize the rich, which is completely unfair.

Since the mid–1990s, international monopolies have controlled 80 percent of the world’s patents, technology transfers, and most of the internationally recognized trademarks, something that has brought them large quantities of revenue. According to figures from Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Digest, released by the National Science Council of America in January 2018, the total global cross-border licensing income from intellectual property in 2016 was $272 billion. The United States was the largest exporter of intellectual property, with income from this source comprising as much as 45 percent of the global total. The corresponding figure for the European Union was 24 percent, for Japan 14 percent, and for China less than 5 percent. In sharp contrast, the royalties on intellectual property paid by China to other countries increased from $1.9 billion in 2001 to $28.6 billion in 2017, and China’s deficit on cross-border intellectual property transactions reached more than $20 billion. During this period, the U.S. annual net income from licensing intellectual property to other countries was at least $80 billion.³⁰

The New Monopoly of the International Oligarchic Alliance

Lenin stated in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that “the epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the “struggle for spheres of influence.”³¹ Finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. Two main groups of countries—those owning colonies and colonies themselves—are typical of this epoch, as are the diverse forms of dependent countries that, politically, are formally independent, but in fact are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence.³² Nowadays, neoimperialism has formed new alliances and hegemonic relations in the economic, political, cultural, and military fields.

Within the context of the new monopoly of the international oligarchs, the fourth characteristic of neoimperialism is the formation of an international monopoly capitalist alliance between one hegemon and several other great powers. An economic foundation consisting of money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats has been formed for them to exploit and oppress via monopoly both at home and abroad.

The G7 as the Mainstay of the Imperial Capitalist Core

Neoimperialism’s current international monopoly economic alliance and the framework of global economic governance are both dominated by the United States. The G6 group was formed in 1975 by six leading industrial countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and Italy, and became G7 when Canada joined the following year. G7 and its monopoly organizations are the coordination platforms, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are the functional bodies. The global order of economic governance that was set up under the Bretton Woods system after the Second World War is essentially a high-level international capitalist monopoly alliance manipulated by the United States to serve its strategic economic and political interests. In the early 1970s, the U.S. dollar was decoupled from gold and the Bretton Woods currency system collapsed. One after another, summits of the G7 countries then shouldered responsibility for strengthening the Western consensus, contending against the socialist countries of the East, and boycotting the demands made by the less developed countries of the South for reforms to the international economic and political order.³³ Since neoliberalism became the set of concepts dominating global economic governance, these multilateral institutions and platforms have become the driving force for the expansion of neoliberalism throughout the world. In line with the wishes of the international financial monopoly oligarchy and its allies, these bodies spare no effort to induce the developing countries to implement financial liberalization, the privatization of production factors, marketization without prior supervision, and free exchange in capital projects so as to facilitate inward and outward flows of international “hot money.” These institutions are constantly ready to control and plunder the economies of developing countries, extracting huge profits by encouraging speculation and creating financial bubbles. As Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in The Grand Chessboard, “the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can be said to represent ‘global’ interests, and their constituency may be construed as the world. In reality, however, they are heavily American dominated.”³⁴

Since the 1980s, the IMF and World Bank have lured developing countries to implement neoliberal reforms. When these countries have fallen into crisis because of privatization and financial liberalization, the IMF and other institutions have forced them to accept the Washington Consensus by adding various unreasonable conditions to loans provided earlier. The effect is to further intensify the impacts of neoliberal reform. Between 1978 and 1992, more than seventy developing countries or former socialist countries implemented a total of 566 structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.³⁵ In the early 1980s, for example, the IMF used the Latin American debt crisis to force Latin American countries to accept neoliberal “reforms.” In order to curb inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1979 pushed short-term interest rates up from 10 percent to 15 percent, and finally to more than 20 percent. Because the existing debt of the developing countries was linked to U.S. interest rates, every 1 percent rise in U.S. interest rates would result in developing-world debtor countries paying an additional $40 to 50 billion per year in interest. In the second half of 1981, Latin America was borrowing at the rate of $1 billion a week, mostly in order to pay the interest on existing debt. During 1983, interest payments consumed almost half of Latin American export earnings.³⁶ Under pressure to repay their loans, Latin American countries were forced to accept neoliberal reform plans initiated by the IMF. The main content of these plans consisted of privatizing state-owned enterprises; liberalizing trade finance; implementing economic austerity policies, with the effect of reducing living standards; cutting the taxes on monopoly enterprises; and reducing government spending on social infrastructure. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the IMF attached numerous conditions to assistance provided to South Korea, including that the allowance for foreign shareholdings be relaxed from 23 percent to 50 percent, and then to 55 percent by December 1998. Moreover, South Korea was required to allow foreign banks to set up branches freely.³⁷

NATO and the International Monopoly-Capitalist Military and Political Alliance

Established in the early days of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an international military alliance for the defense of monopoly capitalism. It is led by the United States and involves other imperialist countries. During the Cold War, NATO was the main tool used by the United States to actively contain and counter the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, as well as to influence and control the Western European countries. At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Treaty Organization was dissolved and NATO became the military organization through which the United States sought to achieve its strategic goals on a global level. A capitalist military oligopoly, involving one hegemon and several other great powers, had come into being. Former U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher stated: “Only the United States can act as a leader.… For the United States to exercise leadership requires us to own a credible force threat as a backup for diplomacy.”³⁸ The National Security Strategy for the New Century, published in the United States in December 1998, claimed unambiguously that the goal of the United States was to “lead the entire world” and that no challenge to its leadership, from any country or group of countries, would ever be allowed to come into being.³⁹ On December 4, 2018, U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared in a speech to the Marshall Fund in Brussels: “The United States has not given up its global leadership. It reshaped the order after WWII based on sovereignty but not the multilateral system.… Under President Trump’s leadership, we will not give up international leadership or our allies in the international system.… Trump is recovering America’s traditional status as the world center and leadership.… The United States wants to lead the world, now and always.”⁴⁰

To achieve leadership and domination over the world, the United States has made every effort to promote NATO’s eastward expansion, and has expanded its own sphere of influence to control Central and Eastern Europe and to compress Russia’s strategic space. Under the control of the United States, NATO has become an ideal military tool for U.S. global interests. In March 1999, a multinational NATO force led by the United States launched a large-scale air attack on Yugoslavia. It was the first time that NATO had launched a military strike against a sovereign country during the fifty years since its foundation. In April 1999, NATO held a summit meeting in Washington, formally adopting a strategic concept that can be summarized under two points. First, NATO was permitted to conduct collective military intervention outside its defense area in response to “crimes and conflicts involving common interests.” This effectively changed NATO from a “collective defense” military alliance into an offensive political and military organization with the so-called purpose of defending common interests and shared values. Second, NATO’s military actions did not require authorization from the UN Security Council.⁴¹

In addition to NATO, U.S. military alliances formed on the basis of bilateral treaties include pacts with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. There are U.S. military bases on the territory of all its military allies, and these comprise a major part of the neoimperialist military alliance. The United States and its allies make military threats and carry out provocations in many regions of the world, resulting in many “hot wars,” “warm wars,” “cool wars,” and “new cold wars,” intensifying the new arms race. The acts of “state terrorism” carried out by neoimperialism, and the double standard it applies to counter-terrorism, have caused other forms of terrorism to multiply.

Cultural Hegemony Dominated by Western “Universal Values”

In addition to its economic might and the hegemony exercised through its military alliances, neoimperialism is also characterized by cultural hegemony dominated by Western “universal values.” U.S. political scientist Joseph Nye emphasized that soft power was the ability to accomplish one’s desires through attraction rather than force or purchase. The soft power of a country is constituted mainly of three resources, namely, culture (which functions where it is attractive to the local population), political values (which function when they can actually be practiced both at home and abroad), and foreign policy (which functions when it is regarded as conforming to legality and as enhancing moral prestige).⁴² The Western developed countries, especially the United States, utilize their capital, technology, and market advantages to infiltrate less powerful countries and regions with their culture, and propose a series of “new interventionist” cultural theories designed to impose U.S. values. The United States subjugates the cultural markets and information spaces of other countries, especially developing countries, by exporting to them U.S. values and lifestyles, with the goal of making its culture the “mainstream culture” of the world.⁴³

Cultural hegemony or cultural imperialism exports the “universal values” of the West and implements both peaceful evolution and “color revolutions” by controlling the field of international public opinion. The objective is to achieve Richard Nixon’s strategic goal of “victory without war.” The evolution of the Soviet Union and of the socialist countries in Eastern Europe is a typical case. As is generally known, the penetration of values is usually slow, long-term, and subtle, and its communication channels are often hidden in academic exchanges, literary works, films, and television shows. For example, Hollywood is “the megaphone of American hegemonic policy.… Hollywood films are showing off the advantages of the United States to the rest of the world and trying to achieve their cultural conquest by this means.”⁴⁴ Former senior CIA official Allen Dulles argued: “If we teach young people in the Soviet Union to sing our songs and dance with them, sooner or later we will teach them to think in the way we need them to.”⁴⁵ Foundations and think tanks are also important driving forces for the spread of neoliberalism. For example, the U.S.-based Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Mont Pelerin Society, and Center for International Private Enterprise participate in the promotion of neoliberal values by funding seminars and academic organizations.

Lenin once stated: “Instead of an undivided monopoly of Great Britain, we see a few imperialist powers contending for the right to share in this monopoly, and this struggle is characteristic of the whole period of the early twentieth century.”⁴⁶ Since the end of the Cold War, global capitalism has been characterized by the undivided monopoly of the United States. Other powers have no intention, and lack the strength, to compete. Some individual countries such as Japan have tried to challenge U.S. “monopoly rights” economically and technologically, but have ultimately failed. So it is with the European Union, which emerged later but eventually failed to shake U.S. hegemony. In the military field, the Gulf War and the subsequent wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have further fueled U.S. unilateralism and hegemonic arrogance. With the help of its economic, military, and political alliances, and employing cultural soft power, the United States promotes its “universal values,” incites street protests and color revolutions in other countries, and forces developing countries to deregulate their financial systems by targeting them for the creation of debt and financial crises. When the global governance system dominated by the United States encounters challenges, it launches trade wars, science and technology wars, financial wars, and economic sanctions, and even goes so far as to threaten or actually launch military strikes. The U.S. dollar, military, and culture are the three pillars of U.S. imperialist hegemony, supporting “hard power,” “soft power,” “strong power” (economic sanctions), and “smart power.”⁴⁷

In short, the international monopoly capitalist alliance made up of one hegemon and several great powers provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress through the exercise of monopoly both at home and abroad, and that amplify the power of the United States as the neoimperialist hegemon.

The Economic Essence, the General Trend, and the Four Forms of Ideological Fraud

Lenin characterized imperialism as a transitional and moribund capitalism. At the neoimperialist stage known as economic globalization, the basic contradiction of the contemporary capitalist economy is manifested in the contradiction between, on the one hand, the constant socialization and globalization of the economy with its production factors under private, collective, or state ownership, and, on the other, the disorder or anarchy of production within national economies and in the world economy.⁴⁸ Neoimperialism rules out the adjustments that states and international communities need to make, instead promoting self-regulation by private monopoly capital and defending its interests. The effect, very often, is to intensify various contradictions within countries or on the world level. Economic, financial, fiscal, social, and ecological crises have all become epidemic diseases. Various of these crises are interwoven with social contradictions, or with the contradictions of capital accumulation. All of them together lend a new cast to the monopolistic and predatory, hegemonic and fraudulent, parasitic and decaying, transitional and moribund capitalism of the present epoch.

If we define neoimperialism with regard to its economic nature and general tendencies, we may conclude that its three characteristics are demonstrated in the respect that the globalized contradictions and various crises of the system frequently become intensified.

The economic essence of neoimperialism is that it is a monopolistic financial capitalism established on the basis of giant multinationals. The production monopoly and financial monopoly of the multinational corporations have their origins in the higher stage of production and capital concentration, giving rise to a phase in which monopoly is deeper and broader to such an extent that “nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.”⁴⁹ The automobile industry may be taken as an example. The production of the top five multinational automobile corporations accounts for almost half of global automobile production, and that of the top ten accounts for 70 percent.⁵⁰ International monopolistic financial capital not only controls the world’s major industries, but also monopolizes almost all sources of raw materials, scientific and technological talent, and skilled physical labor in all fields, controlling the transportation hubs and various means of production. It dominates and controls capital, and controls various other global functions via banks and a variety of financial derivatives and shareholding systems.⁵¹ If we consider the total market value and total income and assets of corporations, the scale of the leading concentrations of economic power around the world is increasing, especially in the case of the top one hundred corporations. In 2015, the market value of the world’s top hundred companies was more than seven thousand times that of the bottom two thousand companies in a database of the world’s largest nonfinancial firms, compared to only thirty-one times in 1995.⁵² According to the data on the Fortune Global 500 for the year 2017, the revenues of 380 of the world’s top 500 companies (excluding Chinese firms) reached $22.83 trillion, equivalent to 29.3 percent of gross world product. Total profits reached $1.51 trillion, breaking the record, and the rate of profit increased by 18.85 percent year on year.⁵³ The rise in the indicators of both profit share and profit rate illustrates the predatory nature of neoimperialism.

Given that economic globalization, financialization, and neoliberal policies are placing a triple squeeze on labor, profits are growing rapidly, while workers’ wages are increasing much more slowly.⁵⁴ Between 1982 and 2006, the average annual growth of the real wages of production workers in nonfinancial corporations in the United States was just 1.1 percent, not only much lower than the 2.43 percent recorded from 1958 to 1966, but also lower than the 1.68 percent during the economic downturn from 1966 to 1982. The slowing of wage growth allowed the corporations’ profit share to rise by 4.6 percent during this period and accounted for 82 percent of the recovery in the rate of profit. The “labor squeeze” can be seen to have played a key role here.⁵⁵ Moreover, since the U.S. economy began to recover in 2009 from the Great Financial Crisis, the average rate of profit, though lower than its peak in 1997, has still been significantly higher than its level during the late 1970s and early ’80s, when it was at a low point.⁵⁶ The essence of neoimperialism is its need to control and plunder. Its drive to “predatory accumulation” is not only demonstrated by its exploitation of labor in the national setting, but also by its plunder of other countries. The forms this takes, and the methods employed, consist mainly of the following.

First, financial plunder. Neoimperialism extracts huge profits from its control over the prices of major international commodities. Employing financialization and other methods, it pressures the countries that produce raw materials, seeking to keep prices low. As part of its pressures and harassment, it may create financial bubbles and crises via large-scale inflows and outflows of capital, affecting the economic and political stability of the countries concerned. Or, it may seek to achieve a “victory without war” by imposing financial sanctions.⁵⁷ Financial innovation and the lag in government regulation contributes to waves of nonproductive speculation. Financial oligarchs and multinational corporations at the top of the pyramid benefit from the price inflation of financial assets and are able to plunder huge quantities of social wealth.

Second is the privatization of public resources and state-owned assets. Since Thatcher-Reaganism came to dominate economic policy-making in numerous countries some forty years ago, the world has experienced a massive wave of large-scale privatization. The public assets of many less-developed countries have fallen into the hands of private monopoly capital and multinational corporate monopolies. The global level of inequality of wealth ownership has soared accordingly. The World Inequality Report 2018 reveals that, since the 1970s, private wealth in various countries has generally increased, while the ratio of private to national income in most “rich” countries has increased from 200–350 percent to 400–700 percent. In sharp contrast, public wealth has steadily declined. The net public wealth of the United States and the United Kingdom has fallen to a negative number in recent years, and that of Japan, Germany, and France is only slightly above zero. The limited value of public assets restricts the ability of governments to adjust the income gap.⁵⁸

Third is the strengthening of the center-periphery pattern. The neoimperialist countries reinforce the center-periphery pattern through their dominant positions in trade, currency, finance, the military arena, and international organizations. Taking advantage of these positions, they continuously extort the resources and wealth of the peripheral countries to consolidate their monopoly or oligopoly status, and to ensure their own development and prosperity. The international transfer rate of surplus value has a positive effect on the general rate of profit in the hegemonic countries.⁵⁹ It is only the neoimperialist countries that are able to use their economic, political, and military power to transform a portion of the surplus value created by underdeveloped countries into their own national wealth. Consequently, the accumulation of monopolistic capital by neoimperialism intensifies the polarization between rich and poor and damages people’s livelihoods in countries such as the United States and France (as proved by the international Occupy Wall Street movement, which involved eighty countries with its slogan of “we are the 99 percent”), while also reinforcing the accumulation of financial and environmental wealth in the countries of the “center” and of relative poverty and pollution in the countries of the “periphery.” In 2018, the combined GDP of the G7 “central” countries reached $317 trillion, accounting for 45.5 percent of gross world product.⁶⁰ According to the Global Wealth Report 2013, prepared by Credit Suisse, the wealth of the 85 richest people in the world that year was equivalent to the total assets of the world’s poorest 3.5 billion people—that is, of half the global population.⁶¹

Economic Hegemony and Fraud

Imperialism as represented by the United States employs hegemony, bullying, and unilateralism, and adheres to double standards in diplomatic policy. At one point, Pompeo publicly admitted and expressed pride in his country’s fraudulent actions. “I was the CIA director,” he said. “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses…it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”⁶² In the post-Cold War era, the United States dominates the world, free from any powerful checks and balances. It relies on its major advantages of military force, U.S. dollar hegemony, external propaganda, and science and technology to carry out bullying all over the world and to commit fraud both at home and abroad.⁶³

In March 2018, the United States issued a document entitled Findings of the Investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which accuses China of “enforcing or compelling US enterprises to transfer technology” and “illegally invading US commercial computer networks to steal intellectual property rights and sensitive business information.” The purpose of this document was to create a pretext for launching a trade war; its accusations are nothing but rumors and do not correspond to the facts. What is the source of China’s technological progress? It flows from the efforts of gifted entrepreneurs who benefit from huge government investments in basic science. As former U.S. secretary of the treasury Lawrence Summers said, “it’s coming from an educational system that’s privileging excellence, concentrating on science and technology. That’s where their leadership is coming from, not from taking a stake in some U.S. company.”⁶⁴ In provoking its economic and trade conflict with China, the United States has had an obvious intention: to blackmail and suppress China on an overall basis, starting with the trade war and gradually expanding into the areas of science and technology, finance, food, resources, and so on. U.S. authorities seek to weaken China’s strengths in trade, finance, industry, and technology, trying to ensure that China will not pose a challenge to the global hegemonic position of the United States.

With its slogan of “America First,” the Trump administration promoted U.S. hegemony and imposed economic sanctions on other economies. Its economic and trade policies were aimed principally at China, but were also directed at traditional allies such as the European Union, Japan, India, and South Korea. Time after time, Washington has practiced economic extortion and containment. It will never be forgotten that as early as the mid–1980s the United States forced Japan to sign the Plaza Accord and induced it to implement a low-interest monetary policy that brought large quantities of foreign capital into Japan. The result was that a surge of short-term demand for Japanese yen caused the country’s currency to appreciate sharply against the U.S. dollar. The influx of foreign capital and the monetary policy of low interest rates brought a soaring increase in Japanese asset prices. Despite the short-term prosperity, the eventual result involved big losses for Japan. The high asset prices meant that the foreign capital was soon cashed out and withdrawn, while the Japanese economy suffered huge setbacks and endured a “lost twenty years.”

Political Hegemony and Fraud

The United States has always labeled itself a representative of countries advocating democracy, freedom, and equality. Using political and diplomatic means, it spares no effort to impose its political system on other countries, especially the developing states it identifies as “dictatorships.” Former U.S. president George W. Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” The United States exerts pressure on the rulers of such countries, applying double standards on questions of human rights. Using its propaganda, it demonizes these states as “undemocratic” and “autocratic,” while subsidizing nongovernmental organizations and media, as well as inciting dissidents and the opposition to mount “color revolutions” aimed at overthrowing the legitimate governments.

Acting at the behest of its military circles and monopoly energy groups, the United States has been a consistently destructive force in the Middle East and Latin America. Syria was listed by Washington among six “evil” countries, and the United States branded the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad as illegal. U.S. senator John McCain, however, revealed the real purpose behind these moves. “The end of the Assad regime,” McCain stated, “would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran, eliminate a long-standing threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the Iranian regime. It would be a geopolitical success of the first order.”⁶⁵ In Latin America, the United States has continued its blockade against Cuba despite twenty resolutions carried overwhelmingly in the UN General Assembly. Meanwhile, the United States is conducting an economic blockade against Venezuela, resulting in the country’s economic deterioration in recent years. Former U.S. vice president Mike Pence, setting aside Venezuela’s elections and popular support for the government, with no consideration of truth—even leaving out the U.S. economic siege war on Venezuela in violation of international law—pronounced: “The Maduro government’s vicious gangs have crippled the economy.… The true cost of the crimes of the Maduro regime cannot be assessed in numbers.… Two million people have fled the result of dictatorship and political repression that’s resulted in deprivation and created conditions near starvation. The United States will continue to help the Venezuelan people restore their freedom. The people will be free.”⁶⁶

The United States is now applying to China the kind of Cold War policies that used to be employed against the Soviet Union. State department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner describes the fractious relations of the United States with China as “a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology.”⁶⁷ The U.S. ruling class knows very well that the socialist system is superior to the capitalist system. Once large socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union and China become rich and strong through peaceful competition, it is inevitable that they are faced with confronting the hegemonic aims of the United States, which seeks nothing less than a unipolar world. Any attempts to promote broad reforms in the outdated imperial economic and political order are seen as a threat to U.S. hegemony. Consequently, the United States has adopted the dual strategy of “contact and containment,” engagement and aggression, which it seeks to pass off as “peaceful evolution.”

In reality, the so-called democratic politics in the United States are nothing but an illusion. First, the electoral process in the United States has increasingly amounted to a political fight between the two parties of the monopoly bourgeoisie. As the candidates of different factions of the monopoly bourgeoisie have campaigned for election, they have resorted to rumors, personal attacks, and slanders against their opponents, sidelining the real issue. Second, so-called democratic politics in the United States involve no more than a pro forma and procedural democracy. The pro forma voting system has been reduced to monetary politics, family politics, and oligarchic politics—that is, to an essentially undemocratic “despotism of monopoly capital,” or democracy for the few.

Cultural Hegemony and Fraud

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Brzezinski believes that “strengthening American culture as the ‘model’ of the world’s cultures is a strategy that must be implemented by the United States to maintain hegemony.”⁶⁸ U.S. cultural hegemony is manifested principally through its control of media outlets and education, and through the propaganda function, both at home and abroad, of its literature and art, its liberal arts academia, and its values. The United States exports films, music, and literature all over the world. It controls almost 75 percent of the world’s television programs, and owns powerful film and television companies such as WarnerMedia, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, and Columbia Pictures, which every year produce dozens of high-budget films involving investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. Research and reporting carried out by the U.S. mainstream media effectively dominate the shaping of world public opinion. The United States also controls the authoritative journals that mold discourse in the area of liberal arts academia, and it is the United States that determines the standards of elite education. The 2020 QS World University Rankings provide an example. The top places in these rankings are all taken by U.S. universities, and this situation provides a powerful tool for spreading deceptive Western “universal values,” Western constitutional views, and neoliberal economic concepts throughout the world. The basic views of the U.S. liberal arts establishment have taken a firm hold on the elites and masses at home and abroad.⁶⁹ For example, the United States extols vulgar examples of literary and artistic kitsch as distinguished works of culture, deserving of Oscars or Nobel Prizes.

Neoclassical economics (and its counterpart in the form of neoliberalism) is responsible for a string of economic crises and for increased polarization between rich and poor. Nevertheless, it is depicted as a scientific theory that promotes development, increases popular welfare, and is worthy of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In the United States, works that do not conform to the literary, artistic, and liberal arts canons of monopoly capital are difficult to disseminate via authoritative media, while writers and artists of real distinction are excluded, suppressed, or defrauded. The United States also holds an absolutely dominant position in the global field of cyberspace. Of the thirteen root Domain Name System servers, nine are under the direct control of U.S. corporations, universities, or government departments, while another is directly controlled by a U.S. nonprofit organization.⁷⁰ Using these root Domain Name System servers, the United States can easily steal global intelligence, carry out network monitoring, and launch cyberattacks. The surveillance program PRISM, revealed by Edward Snowden, shows that the United States has complete control over the hardware and software of networks globally, and is well able to monitor the entire world and strike any other country. Lastly, the United States controls the intelligence alliance known as the Five Eyes (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), through which it conducts large-scale monitoring activities and exercises cyber hegemony domestically and internationally.⁷¹

The cultural hegemony of the United States, its control over liberal arts academia, and the fraudulent use to which these advantages are put also appear in the stances taken by the United States on questions of ideology and values. These stances are always hostile to socialism and communism, and restrict the development of socialist countries. Previously, the United States devoted most of its efforts to smearing the Soviet Union, but the main target is now China. Early in May 1990, Nixon stated frankly: “While rebuilding the relationship with China, it is very important that we continue to pressure them to abandon socialism. Because we will use this relationship to make China’s policies milder. We must stick to this key point.”⁷² According to survey data from the U.S. Pew Research Center—an organization surely influenced by U.S. cultural hegemony and fraud—74 percent of Chinese college or university graduates love U.S. culture.⁷³ It is a fact that most Chinese liberal arts scholars who have studied in the United States favor its basic institutional academic theories. To varying extents, they worship, flatter, and fear the United States. This seriously affects the confidence of Chinese citizens in Marxist culture, in socialist culture, and in China’s own rich traditional culture, and needs to be eliminated as soon as possible.

Military Hegemony and Fraud

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States has become increasingly presumptuous and has tended to resort to military force or threats in dealing with questions of international relations. In 1999, U.S.-led NATO forces bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, invoking the formula of “human rights above sovereignty.” In 2003, despite strong opposition from other countries, the United States invaded the sovereign state of Iraq. The Iraq War was not authorized by the UN Security Council, and Washington did not have any legal basis for its military intervention. The United States falsely claimed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons of mass destruction. After occupying Iraq, however, the United States found no evidence to prove that Iraq could produce chemical weapons of mass destruction. The real purpose of the United States in fabricating this lie was to control Iraq’s oil resources by military means.

The United States has consistently emphasized that its own interests should take first place and that its military advantages are not to be challenged. Although its economic strength has declined in relative terms, the United States is still expanding its arsenal and substantially increasing its defense spending. Since the Cold War, the United States has continued to create various military threats and pressures in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. To consolidate its hegemonic status, the United States has advocated and promoted NATO’s eastward expansion, with the goal of including all the Central and Eastern European countries in NATO’s sphere of influence and thus constricting Russia’s strategic space. In the Middle East, the United States aims to subvert the legitimate regimes of countries such as Syria and Iran by military means, and to support “color revolutions” in the region. In Asia in recent times, Washington has heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula and has also implemented its “Indo-Pacific strategy” aimed at containing China. The U.S. “Indian strategy” is serving to reveal the identity of its military allies and partners. Allies of the United States include Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and its claimed “partners” include Singapore, Taiwan (China), New Zealand, Mongolia; a number of South Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Nepal; and various Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The United States further proposes to strengthen its cooperation with Brunei, Laos, and Cambodia. In addition, it will work together with traditional allies such as Britain, France, and Canada to protect so-called Indo-Pacific freedom and openness.⁷⁴

With the increase in China’s national strength, various U.S. scholars have been eager to invoke the Thucydides trap, claiming that it is difficult for Sino-U.S. relations to escape from this logic. But the truth, as China’s president Xi Jinping has pointed out, is that there is currently no Thucydides trap. Such a trap might, however, be created if the United States and its allies repeatedly make strategic miscalculations involving great powers.⁷⁵ It may be asserted that it is the military hegemony and fraud of the United States that provides the root cause of the widespread instability, constant local wars, rise of war threats, and refugee crises around the world.

Neoimperialism Is a Parasitic and Decaying Late Imperialism

As Lenin stated,

Imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries.… Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons,” who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.⁷⁶

In the era of neoimperialism, the number of rentiers is increasing sharply, and the nature of the rentier countries is becoming more pronounced. The parasitism and decay of a small number of capitalist countries is further worsened, as can be seen specifically in the following aspects.

First, the United States employs its military, intellectual property, political, and cultural hegemony, as well as the U.S. dollar, to plunder the wealth of the world, especially that of developing countries. The United States is the world’s largest parasitic and decaying country. As evidence of this, we may take the trade between China and the United States. China sells to the United States goods produced by cheap labor, land, and environmental resources. The United States does not need to produce anything in order to buy these goods; it can simply print banknotes. With the money earned, China can then buy only virtual assets such as U.S. treasury bonds, and provide finance for U.S. consumer lending and outward expansion. The United States exports to China securities to which value cannot be added, while China exports to the United States mainly physical goods and labor services. The National Health Report released by the National Health Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences shows that the United States is the country with the most hegemonic dividends in the world, due to the position of its currency, while China is the country with the largest loss of hegemonic dividends. For the year 2011, U.S. hegemonic dividends totaled $7396.09 billion, corresponding to 52.38 percent of the country’s GDP, and the average hegemonic dividends obtained per day came to $20.263 billion. Meanwhile, the sum lost by China totaled $3663.4 billion. In terms of labor time, about 60 percent of the working hours of the Chinese workforce were effectively given without recompense to serve international monopoly capital.⁷⁷

Second, military spending has increased, which in turn increases the burden on working-class people. Neoimperialism leads and promotes military-related scientific and technological research, the development of advanced weapons, and the expansion of military production. As the People’s Daily observed in 2016, “the military-industrial complex supported by monopoly capital and the cultural hegemony formed on the basis of colonialism have prompted the western countries to intervene in other countries’ affairs at their will.”⁷⁸ Neoimperialism has thus become the initiator of regional turmoil and instability, and the engine of war. Over the past thirty years, the United States has spent $14.2 trillion on waging thirteen wars.⁷⁹ Meanwhile, lack of money hinders improvements to the living conditions of the U.S. people in areas such as medical insurance. Exorbitant military spending has become a heavy burden on the country and its people, while the parasitic monopolies in the arms industry have reaped immense profits. According to statistics of the British Institute for International Strategic Studies, official U.S. military expenditures in 2018 came to $643 billion, and in 2019 will reach $750 billion, more than the sum of the military spending of the world’s eight next largest military powers. Since the end of the first Cold War, the United States has launched or participated in six major conflicts: The Gulf War (1991), Kosovo War (1999), Afghanistan War (2001), Iraq War (2003), Libya War (2011), and Syria War (2011).⁸⁰ The addiction of monopoly capitalism to war is a manifestation of its parasitic and decaying nature. This barbaric characteristic of the system runs counter to civilization and threatens the shared future of the human community. It proves that neoimperialism is the primary root of war.

Third, wealth and incomes are concentrated in the hands of a specific class of owners of financial assets, as reflected in the 1 percent versus the 99 percent formulation. At the neoimperialist stage, the socialization, informatization, and internationalization of production have reached unprecedented levels, and the ability of human beings to create wealth is many times greater than in the old imperialist period. Nevertheless, the advance of productivity that is supposed to be a common gain for humankind has mainly benefited the financial oligarchy. “The bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation,” one observer notes.⁸¹ In 2001, for example, the financial wealth (excluding property rights) held by the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population was four times greater than that of the poorest 80 percent. The 1 percent held assets on the stock market of $1.9 trillion, roughly equivalent to the value of the stock held by the other 99 percent.⁸²

Fourth, monopoly hinders technological innovation, slowing its advance. The greed and parasitism of financial monopoly capital make its attitude to technological innovation ambivalent. Monopoly capital relies on technological innovation to maintain its monopoly status, but the high profits that result from this status mean that monopoly capital shows a certain inertia in promoting innovation. Even if many advanced functions of mobile phones are successfully developed in the same year, the monopoly producers of mobile phones will divide up these functions to be introduced and promoted over several years. The purpose is to ensure that consumers will continuously purchase mobile phones with new functions, allowing the corporations to obtain high monopoly profits every year.

Fifth, the tendency for monopoly capital and its agents to cause decay in the mass movement is becoming more serious. Lenin observed that “in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.”⁸³ Neoimperialism divides the working class, striking at and weakening the labor unions using the excuse provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tremendous changes in Eastern Europe. It also uses its monopoly profits to buy the support of individuals, and fosters opportunist and neoliberal forces within the workers’ movement and various other mass movements. The results of such ploys include the downturn in size and activity of labor unions and other progressive movements, the low ebb of the world socialist movement, and a more obvious and serious tendency for workers to worship the forces of neoimperialism or to be intimidated by them.

Neoimperialism Is a Transitional and Moribund Late Capitalism

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism has revealed the transitional and moribund nature of monopoly capitalism for more than a century. However, except in a very small number of countries where socialism is being constructed, most capitalist societies have not perished. They have in fact achieved varying levels of development, and will continue to develop. This raises a very important question: How do we judge the transitional nature of contemporary capitalism, or its tendency to decline and perish? If we use the historical materialist method, the transitional nature of neoimperialism can be characterized on the basis of two points. First, like everything in the world, the neoimperialist system is constantly changing. It is a transient phenomenon in human history, and is not eternal. Second, there are reasons to believe that neoimperialism can eventually transition into socialism through various forms of revolutionary struggle.

In the era of neoimperialism, the developed capitalist countries have undergone many important technological and institutional reforms, which have provided the basis for a certain further development of capitalism and have delayed its demise. High and low growth rates continue to succeed each other, and the period of decay mentioned by Lenin has been greatly extended. This is because the capitalist countries have made many adjustments to their production relations and superstructure, including a degree of macroeconomic regulation, improvements to income distribution and social security, and so forth. In particular, there is no doubt that for the developed capitalist countries the advantages of economic globalization outweigh its disadvantages. Within the process of economic globalization, the powerful developed capitalist countries occupy an absolutely dominant position, through which they set out to maximize the benefits they receive. Their general drive to extend globalization in order to expand their markets does not, however, exclude the possibility of particular countries temporarily reversing the process in response to domestic crises, or as part of efforts to damage commercial competitors. “In the past two years,” a 2019 study notes, “the Trump administration has deepened its reverse globalization trend in the light of the domestic crisis. It adheres to the principle of ‘America first,’ and provokes international economic and trade disputes, trying to get rid of and pass on the domestic crisis.”⁸⁴ The purpose of the United States in adopting a range of protectionist anti-globalization measures is to alleviate the domestic difficulties and crises it encounters within economic globalization, so as to advance its hegemonic interests.

Meanwhile, there is no essential conflict between the fact that neoimperialism and capitalism can look forward to existing and developing for some time to come, and the fact that a transition to a higher social formation is practically inevitable, provided that these societies do not degenerate into barbarism. The classic Marxist writers avoided setting out a specific timetable for the demise of capitalism and imperialism. Lenin’s scientific judgment is that “imperialism is a decaying but not completely decaying capitalism, a moribund but not dead capitalism.”⁸⁵ He foresaw that moribund capitalism was very likely to drag out its existence for a prolonged period. Nor, on the basis of a comprehensive analysis, could it be denied that capitalism would see some kind of development even during its moribund stage. Discussing the decay of imperialism, Lenin stated: “It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not.… On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (England).”⁸⁶

John Bellamy Foster also stressed that, “to say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent. It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century.”⁸⁷

The basic contradictions of capitalism still exist and continue to develop. Likewise, the law of capitalist accumulation still exists and continues to develop. At the point when monopoly capitalism was coming into existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the law of uneven economic and political development of imperialism made it possible for the revolution against capitalism to be victorious initially in one or several countries, before eventually spreading globally.

Decades after The Communist Manifesto proclaimed that capitalism would inevitably expire and Capital declared that the death knell of capitalist private ownership was about to ring, the October Revolution brought the downfall of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Then, the proletarian party led by Mao Zedong in China ended the semicolonial and semifeudal society ruled by the Kuomintang (Mao stated that China represented a feudal and comprador monopoly capitalism after the Second World War). The Soviet Communist Party led by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin consciously betrayed Marxism-Leninism, resulting in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries, with the exception of Belarus, regressing to capitalism. This demonstrates the twists, turns, and general difficulties experienced by the development of socialism and its economic system. But it cannot change the nature and general trend of the historical process.

China’s position on the main international fault lines is clear. In October 1984, Deng Xiaoping stated: “There are two major problems in the world that are very prominent. One is the issue of peace and the other is the North-South issue. There are many other issues, which are not of the same underlying importance or global and strategic significance as these two.” In March 1990, he reiterated: “As for the two major issues of peace and development, the peace issue has not been resolved, and the development issue has become more serious.”⁸⁸ Deng emphasized that “peace and development” were the two major questions to be resolved.⁸⁹

Based on the analysis of the character of neoimperialism, it can thus be concluded that neoimperialism represents a new phase of international monopoly into which capitalism develops after passing through the stages of free competitive capitalism, general private monopoly, and state monopoly. In addition, neoimperialism represents a new expansion of international monopoly capitalism, as well as a new system through which a minority of developed countries dominate the world and implement a new policy of economic, political, cultural, and military hegemony. If we examine the current situation on the basis of the international forces of justice and the development of the twists and turns of the international class struggle, the twenty-first century is a new era in which the world working class and the masses can carry out great revolutions and safeguard world peace; in which the socialist countries can carry out great feats of construction and promote ecological civilization; and in which progressive nations can work together to build a community with a shared future for humankind, a world in which neoimperialism and international capitalism gradually make way for global socialism.

Citations

Citations

Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage

End Notes

¹ Vijay Prashad, Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism (New York: Haymarket Books, 2022); Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, dossier no. 56, 20 September 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-ten-theses-on-marxism-and-decolonisation/.

² Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Popular Agrarian Reform and the Struggle for Land in Brazil, dossier no. 27, 6 April 2020, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-27-land/.

³ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Strategic Revolutionary Thought and Legacy of Hugo Chávez Ten Years After His Death, dossier no. 61, 28 February 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-61-chavez/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar, dossier no. 49, 7 February 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-hector-bejar-latin-america/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The US Ministry of Colonies and Its Summit, red alert no. 14, 25 May 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert-14-summit-of-the-americas/.

⁴ Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy’, ed. Lenski, Current Issues and Research in Macrosociology, 1 January 1984, 100–108, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004477995_008.

⁵ Jens Stoltenberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and Charles Michel, ‘Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 10 January 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_210549.htm.

⁶ Leila Khaled, ‘Where There is Repression, There is Resistance’, Capire, 27 October 2023, https://capiremov.org/en/interview/leila-khaled-where-there-is-repression-there-is-resistance/.

⁷ Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (New York: International Publishers, 1939); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972); Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Reprinted (London: Panaf, 2004).

⁸ Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014).

⁹ Donald Trump, ‘President Donald J. Trump Is Ending United States Participation in an Unacceptable Iran Deal’, The White House, 8 May 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-ending-united-states-participation-unacceptable-iran-deal/.

¹⁰ ‘US Completes Open Skies Treaty Withdrawal’, Arms Control Association, December 2020, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2020-12/news/us-completes-open-skies-treaty-withdrawal; C. Todd Lopez, ‘US Withdraws From Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty’, US Department of Defence, 2 August 2019, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/article/article/1924779/us-withdraws-from-intermediate-range-nuclear-forces-treaty/; George W. Bush, ‘Statement by the President’, The White House, 13 June 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020613-9.html.

¹¹ Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, ‘Actual US Military Spending Reached US$ 1.53 trillion in 2022 – More than Twice Acknowledged Level: New Estimates Based on US National Accounts’, Monthly Review, 1 November 2023, https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/actual-u-s-military-spending-reached-1-53-trillion-in-2022-more-than-twice-acknowledged-level-new-estimates-based-on-u-s-national-accounts/.

¹² The Quincy Institute and other authors have also published significantly higher US military spending estimates. Andrew Cockburn, ‘Getting the Defense Budget Right: A (Real) Grand Total, over $1.4 Trillion’, Responsible Statecraft, 7 May 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/05/07/getting-the-defense-budget-right-a-real-grand-total-over-1-4-trillion/.

¹³ ‘SIPRI Military Expenditure Database’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex.

¹⁴ Chen Zhuo, ‘Explainer: Prudent Chinese Defense Budget Growth Ensures Broad Public Security’, Ministry of National Defence, People’s Republic of China, 6 March 2022, http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/TopStories/4906180.html; National Bureau of Statistics of China, accessed 20 December 2023,
https://data.stats.gov.cn/english/adv.htm?m=advquery&cnC01.

¹⁵ The 2022 SIPRI adjustment are expenses related to (a) spending on the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP); (b) soldiers’ de-mobilisation and retirement payments from the Ministry of Civil Affairs; (c) additional military research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) funding outside the national defence budget; (d) additional military construction expenses; (e) commercial earnings of the People’s Liberation Army (zero as of 2015); (f) subsidies to the arms industry (zero as of 2010); (e) Chinese arms imports (zero as of 2020); and (g) the Chinese Coast Guard (since 2013). The new series remains internally consistent over the period 1989–2019. See Nan Tian and Fei Su, ‘A New Estimate Of China’s Military Expenditure’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, January 2021, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/2101_sipri_report_a_new_estimate_of_chinas_military_expenditure.pdf; ‘Sources and Methods’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex/sources-and-methods#sipri-estimates-for-china.

¹⁶ SIPRI figures for China 2021 were on average about 1.36 times larger than China’s official national defence budget, though reducing the estimates made in the past. For instance, for the year 2019, the new SIPRI estimate is 1,660 billion yuan or US$ 240 billion, slightly lower than the old estimate of 1,803 billion yuan or US$ 261 billion. Under the previous estimates, SIPRI increased China’s official 2021 defence budget by 48.6%. Under the new estimates, China’s 2021 budget was increased 36.8% by SIPRI. With the new adjustments China’s military spending corresponds to 1.6% of GDP, compared to 1.3% that the official budget represents. Calculations for GDP are based on IMF WEO GDP CER data.

¹⁷ Office of Management and Budget, ‘Historical Tables. Table 3.2. Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962–2028’, The White House, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/.

¹⁸ Calculations based on the estimates of actual US military spending for the year 2022 by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster. See note 11.

¹⁹ ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.

²⁰ For decades, it has been recognised by independent researchers that actual US military spending is approximately twice the officially acknowledged level. The independent research is not restricted to left-wing circles, but it includes the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, funded by the right-wing billionaire George Soros, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and the ‘liberal’ Centre for American Progress. See Lawrence J. Krob and Kaveh Toofan, ‘A Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget? – Centre for American Progress’, Centre for American Progress, 12 July 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/a-trillion-dollar-defense-budget/; Cockburn, ‘Getting the Defense Budget Right: A (Real) Grand Total, over $1.4 Trillion’; William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, ‘Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget’, Project on Government Oversight, 7 May 2019, https://www.pogo.org/analysis/making-sense-of-the-1-25-trillion-national-security-state-budget.

²¹ Our worldwide military spending figures use current exchange rates (CER). PPP conversion factors to measure military spending are necessarily less reliable than currency exchange rates. PPP rates are statistical estimates, calculated on the basis of collected price data for baskets of goods and services for benchmark years. No such price data is collected for military expenditure. Therefore, the nature of military spending lacks this information for international comparisons. Thus, the calculation of the military spending applying PPP rates through GDP conversion factors is methodologically invalid since it’s based on the implicit assumption that the ratio of military prices equals the ratio of relative prices of GDP for which no evidence is presented. SIPRI recognises that using the PPP adjustment for military spending is inaccurate and therefore it is less reliable than using currency exchange rates. See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, accessed 25 November 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex/frequently-asked-questions#PPP.

²² Since China’s military spending is focused on only Chinese territory, there are clear limits to China’s military expansion, The country does not have significant military bases abroad, unlike the US with 902 in 2022. This idea is supported by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft: ‘China has thus far established only one actual, operating overseas military base, on the horn of Africa, in Djibouti, and is probably establishing a naval facility in Cambodia. But there are real limits to how far China can go in duplicating such places. As Isaac Kardon of the Carnegie Endowment has pointed out, China has no formal military alliances (beyond the dubious case of DPR Korea) and is unlikely to acquire any in the foreseeable future, a fact that imposes major constraints on its ability to establish serious military bases. Few if any countries wish to commit to housing full-fledged, sizeable military facilities that could project Chinese military power across their region and, in the process, invite an American response.’ See Michael D. Swaine, ‘Actually, China’s Military Isn’t Going Global’, Responsible Statecraft, 8 September 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-military/.

²³ The Editors, ‘US Military Bases and Empire’, Monthly Review, 1 March 2002, https://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/u-s-military-bases-and-empire/.

²⁴ ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.

²⁵ The Military Balance 2023, International Institute for Security Studies, 15 February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/the-military-balance/.

²⁶ Sally Williamson ‘Logistics Contractors and Strategic Logistics Advantage in US Military Operations’, Logistics In War, 4 June 2023, https://logisticsinwar.com/2023/06/04/logistics-contractors-and-strategic-logistics-advantage-in-us-military-operations/.

²⁷ ‘Agreement Between the United States of America and Ghana’, Treaties and Other International Acts, series 18–531, US Department of State, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/18-531-Ghana-Defense-Status-of-Forces.pdf.

²⁸ Vijay Prashad, ‘Why Does the United States Have a Military Base in Ghana?’, Peoples Dispatch, 15 June 2022, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/06/15/why-does-the-united-states-have-a-military-base-in-ghana/.

²⁹ Matthew P. Goodman and Matthew Wayland, ‘Securing Asia’s Subsea Network: US Interests and Strategic Options’, Centre for Strategic International Studies, 4 April 2022, https://www.csis.org/analysis/securing-asias-subsea-network-us-interests-and-strategic-options.

³⁰ ‘Utah Data Centre’, Domestic Surveillance Directorate, accessed 27 November 2023, https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/.

³¹ Nick Turse, ‘Pentagon Misled Congress About US Bases in Africa’, The Intercept, 8 September 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/09/08/africa-air-base-us-military/.

³² ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.

³³ The Military Balance 2023.

³⁴ The Military Balance 2023.

³⁵ Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023, Congressional Research Service, 7 June 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738.

³⁶ Kushi and Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’, 4.

³⁷ Salazar Torreon and Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023.

³⁸ Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 4 (2023): 752–779. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027221117546?icid=int.sj-full-text.citing-articles.1.

³⁹ The Military Intervention Project (MIP) has a slightly lower estimate than the larger lists from sources such as the Congressional Research Services (CRS), whose figures are more frequently cited by researchers. MIP uses a range of all known published databases. However, due to its more comprehensive definition, their aggregation process results in a slightly lower total figure due to reclassification. MIP and CRS, therefore, have incomparable data sets and incomparable raw numbers based on the different way they treat dating, scale, duration, legality, and intent. MIP and CRS have incomparable methodological approaches. We use CRS as it is the largest published data available. See Kushi and Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’.

⁴⁰ Claudia Jones, ‘International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace’, speech delivered at a rally on 8 March 1950, Liberation School, 29 March 2023, https://www.liberationschool.org/claudia-jones-1950-iwd-speech/.

⁴¹ Anthony Lake, ‘Confronting Backlash States’, Foreign Affairs, 1 March 1994, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/1994-03-01/confronting-backlash-states.

⁴² Francisco R. Rodríguez, ‘The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions’, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 4 May 2023, https://cepr.net/press-release/new-report-finds-that-economic-sanctions-are-often-deadly-and-harm-peoples-living-standards-in-target-countries/.

⁴³ Agence France-Presse, ‘US Commerce Chief Warns against China “Threat”’, South China Morning Post, 3 December 2023, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3243657/us-commerce-chief-warns-against-china-threat.

⁴⁴ Deutscher Bundestag, China-Strategie der Bundesregierung [China Strategy of the Federal Government], 20/7770, 13 July 2023, https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/20/077/2007770.pdf.

⁴⁵ Own elaboration based on data from Christoph Nedopil Wang, ‘Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – Green Finance & Development Centre’, accessed 2 December 2023, https://greenfdc.org/countries-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-bri/.

⁴⁶ Global South Insights own elaboration based on World Bank WDI and IMF WEO.

⁴⁷ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist “Rules-Based Order”, Studies on Contemporary Dilemmas, 13 March 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/eight-contradiction-of-the-imperialist-rules-based-order/.

⁴⁸ All images in the ‘Common History of Imperialist Countries’ are in the public domain or under Creative Commons. See attribution, listed chronologically: Joseph Swain, On Board a Slave Ship, c.1835, https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:On_Board_a_Slave-Ship,_engraving_by_Swain_c._1835_Colorized.jpg; Unknown, The Destruction of the Pequots, c. 19th century, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mystic_Massacre_1637_Destruction_Of_The_Pequots_in_Connecticut.png; Unknown, The Berlin Conference on Partition of Africa, c. 1884, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afrikakonferenz.jpg; William Heysham Overend, Chinese Officers Tear Down the British Flag on the Arrow, 8 October 1856, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_officers_tear_down_the_British_flag_on_the_arrow.JPG; Edward N. Jackson, Council of Four at the WWI Paris peace conference, 27 May 1919,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Big-Four-Paris_1919.jpg; Charles Levy, Atomic Cloud Rises Over Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasakibomb.jpg

⁴⁹ Utsa Patnaik, ‘Revisiting the “Drain”, or Transfer from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism’, in Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, edited by Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (New Delhi: Tulika, 2017).

⁵⁰ Michael Johnson, ‘Teaching about Slavery’, Foreign Policy Research Institute, August 2008, https://www.fpri.org/article/2008/08/teaching-about-slavery/.

⁵¹ Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, ‘Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023’, Prison Policy Initiative, 14 March 2023, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html.

⁵² ‘Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database’, SlaveVoyage, 2019, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database.

⁵³ Rachel Nuwer, ‘Mississippi Officially Ratifies Amendment to Ban Slavery, 148 Years Late’, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 February 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mississippi-officially-ratifies-amendment-to-ban-slavery-148-years-late-21328041/.

⁵⁴ Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2001).

⁵⁵ Jean Enriquez, ‘From “Comfort Women” to Prostitution in Military Bases’, Capire, 18 July 2023, https://capiremov.org/en/interview/from-comfort-women-to-prostitution-in-military-bases/.

⁵⁶ Cori Bush and et. al., ‘Calling for an Immediate De-escalation and Cease-Fire in Israel and Occupied Palestine’, Pub. L. No. H.Res.786, 118th Congress (2023–2024) (2023), https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-resolution/786/cosponsors.

⁵⁷ Rosalind C. Morris, ‘Ursprüngliche Akkumulation: The Secret of an Originary Mistranslation’, boundary 2 43, no. 3 (1 August 2016): 29–77, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3572418.

⁵⁸ Daniel Larsen, Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108761833.

⁵⁹ Lenin, Imperialism; Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

⁶⁰ Vladimir Lenin, ‘Imperialism and the Split in Socialism’, in V. I. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 114, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.

⁶¹ ‘2023 Bilderberg Meeting Participant List’, Public Intelligence, 19 May 2023, https://publicintelligence.net/2023-bilderberg-participant-list/.

⁶² Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973, dossier no. 68, 5 September 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-68-the-coup-against-the-third-world-chile-1973/.

⁶³ Nalu Faria, ‘O Feminismo Latino-Americano e Caribenho: Perspectivas Diante Do Neo-liberalismo [Latin American and Caribbean Feminism: Perspectives on Neoliberalism]’, in Desafios Do Livre Mercado Para o Feminismo [Challenges of the Free Market for Feminism], Cadernos Sempreviva 9 (São Paulo: SOF, 2005).

⁶⁴ Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks.

⁶⁵ Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance (London: Pluto Press, 2003).

⁶⁶ ‘The Transistor Revolution: How Transistors Changed the World’, Arrow, 22 December 2022, https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/the-transistor-revolution-how-transistors-changed-the-world; Omar Sohail, ’ Apple’s M3 Max Has the Highest Generational Leap in Transistor Count with a 37 Percent Difference Compared to the M2 Max’, WCCF Tech, 3 Novemeber 2023, https://wccftech.com/apple-m3-max-highest-transistor-count-for-any-m-series-chip/.

⁶⁷ 2023 Year in Review – India Review, Comscore, December 2023, https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Events-and-Webinars/Webinar/2023/2023-Year-in-Review-India-Edition.

⁶⁸ Kevin Townsend, ‘Bad Bots Account for 73% of Internet Traffic: Analysis’, Security Week, 16 November 2023, https://www.securityweek.com/bad-bots-account-for-73-of-internet-traffic-analysis/; Unheard Voices: Evaluating Five Years of pro-Western Covert Influence Operations, Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory, 24 August 2022, https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_stanford_internet_observatory_report_unheard_voice.pdf.

⁶⁹ Janan Ganesh, ‘America’s Cultural Supremacy and Geopolitical Weakness’, Financial Times, 19 December 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/dce07860-f39e-432b-a0f6-1a2124e4e1a3.

⁷⁰ See Karl Marx, ‘Component Parts of Bank Capital’, in Capital, vol. III (New York: International Publishers, 1995), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm, 336–337.

⁷¹ ‘OTC Derivatives Statistics at End-June 2023’, Bank of International Settlements, 16 November 2023, https://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy2311.pdf.

⁷² ‘OTC Derivatives Statistics at End-June 2023’.

⁷³ Samir Amin, ‘How to Defeat the Collective Imperialism of the Triad’, Monthly Reviw, 5 December 2022, https://mronline.org/2022/12/05/samir-amin-how-to-defeat-the-collective-imperialism-of-the-triad/; Samir Amin, Globalisation and Its Alternative, interviewed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 30 October 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/globalisation-and-its-alternative/.

⁷⁴ ‘Religion and the Founding of the American Republic’, Exhibitions, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html.

⁷⁵ Mohammad Shahid Alam, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilising Logic of Zionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 109.

⁷⁶ Stuart Laycock, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To (London: The History Press, 2012).

⁷⁷ ‘Israel Hits Gaza Strip with the Equivalent of Two Nuclear Bombs’, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, 2 November 2023, https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5908/Israel-hit-Gaza-Strip-with-the-equivalent-of-two-nuclear-bombs.

⁷⁸ Jeremy M. Sharp, US Foreign Aid to Israel, Congressional Research Service, 1 March 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33222/, i.

⁷⁹ ‘How Much Aid Does the US Give to Israel?’, USA FACTS, 12 October 2023, https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/.

⁸⁰ Vladimir Lenin, ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions: The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin’, in V. I. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 70–107.

⁸¹ Justin Cremer, ‘Denmark Is One of the NSA’s “9-Eyes”’, The Copenhagen Post, 4 November 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20131219010450/http:/cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.7611.html

⁸² Ryan Gallagher, ‘The Powerful Global Spy Alliance You Never Knew Existed’, The Intercept, 1 March 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-sigint-seniors/.

⁸³ Office of Press Secretary, ‘Remarks By President Obama to the Australian Parliament’, The White House, 17 November 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/17/remarks-president-obama-australian-parliament.

⁸⁴ ‘Japan Defence: China Threat Prompts Plan to Double Military Spending’, BBC, 16 December 2022 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64001554.

⁸⁵ According to the World Bank, ‘high-income economies are those with a GNI per capita of $13,846 or more’, see ‘World Bank Country and Lending Groups’, The World Bank, accessed 20 December 2023, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519#High_income; ‘GNI per Capita, Atlas Method (Current US$) – China’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD?end=2022&locations=CN&start=2005.

⁸⁶ Xi Jinping, speech at the Closing Ceremony of the BRICS Business Forum 2023. Full text: https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2023-08-23/Full-text-Xi-Jinping-s-speech-at-the-Closing-Ceremony-of-the-BRICS-Business-Forum-2023-1mulkZSzuso/index.html

⁸⁷ For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, dossier no. 66, 4 July 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-66-development-theory/.

⁸⁸ Larissa Mies Bombardi, Agrotóxicos e Colonialismo Químico [Agrotoxins and Pesticide Colonialism] (São Paulo, SP: Elefante, 2023).

⁸⁹ Larissa Packer and Camila Moreno, eds., O Brasil Na Retomada Verde: Integrar Para Entregar [Brazil in the Green Recovery: Integrate to Deliver] (Brasília: Grupo Carta de Belém, 2021).

⁹⁰ Own elaboration based on IMF data.

⁹¹ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, Studies in Socialist Construction no. 1, 23 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.

⁹² Xi Jinping, Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive in Unity to Build a Modern Socialist Country in All Respects, report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, 16 October 2022, http://my.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zgxw/202210/t20221026_10792358.htm.

⁹³ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 22nd printing of 100th anniversary ed (New York: International Publishers, 1979).

⁹⁴ Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, ‘US Security Cooperation with Ukraine’, US Department of State, 12 December 2023, https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-ukraine/.

⁹⁵ Joe Biden, ‘Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan’, The White House, 31 August 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/31/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-end-of-the-war-in-afghanistan/.

⁹⁶ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Syria’s Bloody and Unforgiving War, dossier no. 3, 5 April 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-3-syrias-bloody-war/.

⁹⁷ ‘Manufacturing, Value Added (% Of GDP) – South Africa’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?locations=ZA.

⁹⁸ Rodríguez, ‘The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions’.

⁹⁹Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘The Emergence of a New Non-Alignment’, newsletter no. 24, 15 June 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/new-non-alignment/.

¹⁰⁰ Patrick Wintour, ‘Gulf States Fend off Call From Iran to Arm Palestinians at Riyadh Summit’, The Guardian, 12 November 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/12/gulf-states-fend-off-call-from-iran-to-arm-palestinians-at-riyadh-summit.

¹⁰¹ Own elaboration based on World Bank data.

¹⁰² Kyunghoon Kim and Andy Sumner, ‘Bringing State-Owned Entities Back into the Industrial Policy Debate: The Case of Indonesia’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 59 (December 2021): 496–509, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2021.10.002.

¹⁰³ ‘Exports of Goods and Services (current US$) – Indonesia’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.CD?locations=ID.

¹⁰⁴ Daniel Kritenbrink et al., ‘Joint Statement on the United States-Indonesia Senior Officials’ 2+2 Foreign Policy and Defense Dialogue’, US Department of Defence, 23 October 2023, https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3566363/joint-statement-on-the-united-states-indonesia-senior-officials-22-foreign-poli/; ‘US Embassy Tracked Indonesia Mass Murder 1965’, National Security Archive, 17 October 2017, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/indonesia/2017-10-17/indonesia-mass-murder-1965-us-embassy-files.

¹⁰⁵ Ana Esther Ceceña and David Rodriguez, ‘La Guerra Contra El Narco En México Como Política de Reordenamiento Social’, OLAG, no. 157 (2022), https://geopolitica.iiec.unam.mx/index.php/node/1294.

¹⁰⁶ Timothy A. Wise, ‘The US Assault on Mexico’s Food Sovereignty’, Global Issues, 6 June 2023, https://www.globalissues.org/news/2023/06/06/33954.

¹⁰⁷ Chaba Brahim, ‘“Until Our Territories Are Free”: Women From Western Sahara in Ceaseless Struggle’, Capire, 18 February 2021, https://capiremov.org/en/interview/until-our-territories-are-free/.

¹⁰⁸ ‘The Spirit of Camp David: Joint Statement of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States’, press statement, White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/18/the-spirit-of-camp-david-joint-statement-of-japan-the-republic-of-korea-and-the-united-states/.

¹⁰⁹ Shanna Khayat, ‘GSOMIA vs. TISA: What Is the Big Deal?’, Pacific Forum, 10 February 2020, https://pacforum.org/publication/yl-blog-19-gsomia-vs-tisa-what-is-the-big-deal.

¹¹⁰ The data and charts for this section of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.

¹¹¹ The data and charts for this section of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.

¹¹¹ Calculated by John Ross from One Hundred Years of Economic Statistics: United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden, compiled by T. Liesner (The Economist, 1989) and ‘International Transactions’, Table 1, Bureau of Economic Analysis Data, accessed 13 November 2022, https://www.bea.gov/data/intl-trade-investment/international-transactions.

¹¹² Lenin, ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions’.

¹¹³ Atish Rex Ghosh and Uma Ramakrishnan, ‘Current Account Deficits’, International Monetary Fund, accessed 7 December 2023, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back-to-Basics/Current-Account-Deficits.

¹¹⁴ Hudson, Super Imperialism, 77.

¹¹⁵ Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1st ed (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1994).

¹¹⁶ Vladimir Putin, speech delivered at the Munich Security Council, Munich, Germany, 10 February 2007, https://is.muni.cz/th/xlghl/DP_Fillinger_Speeches.pdf.

¹¹⁷ To understand why we refrain from using the terms ‘great recession’ or the ‘great financial crisis’, see our study: The World in Economic Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, notebook no. 4, 10 October 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-notebook-4-economic-crisis/.

¹¹⁸ Independent Voter Project, ‘DNC to Court: We Are a Private Corporation With No Obligation to Follow Our Rules’, Independent Voter News, 14 August 2022, https://ivn.us/posts/dnc-to-court-we-are-a-private-corporation-with-no-obligation-to-follow-our-rules.

¹¹⁹Associated Press, ‘Many Who Met with Clinton as Secretary of State Donated to Foundation’, CNBC, 23 August 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/23/most-of-those-who-met-with-clinton-as-secretary-of-state-donated-to-foundation.html.

¹²⁰ Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008).

¹²¹ The Military Balance 2022, International Institute for Security Studies, 15 February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/the-military-balance/.

¹²² Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London & New York: Verso, 2014).

¹²³ A. De La Cruz, A. Medina, and Y. Tang, ‘Owners of the World’s Listed Companies’, OECD Capital Market Series, 17 October 2019, https://www.oecd.org/corporate/Owners-of-the-Worlds-Listed-Companies.htm.

¹²⁴ Who Owns the German DAX? The Ownership Structure of the German DAX 30 in 2020 – A Joint Study of IHS Markit and DIRK, IHS Markit, June 2021, https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/pdf/0621/DAX-Study-2020—DIRK-Conference-June-2021_IHS-Markit.pdf.

¹²⁵  Henrik Ahlers, Wem gehört der DAX? Analyse der Aktionärsstruktur der im Deutschen Aktienindex vertretenen Unternehmen [Who Owns the Dax? Analysis of the Shareholder Structure of the Companies Represented in the German Stock Index] (Ernst & Young, July 2023), https://www.ey.com/de_de/forms/download-forms/2023/07/wem-gehoert-der-dax-2023.

¹²⁶Who Owns the German DAX?.

¹²⁷ ‘Foreign Direct Investment, Net Inflows (BoP, Current US$) – Germany’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD?end=2022&locations=DE&start=1971.

¹²⁸ John Ross, ‘事实表明，中国经济表现继续远优于G7国家 [Facts show China’s economy continues to far outperform the G7 economies]’, Weibo (blog), 12 April 2023, https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404975244548113063.

¹²⁹ ‘US Companies Dominating European TV Market’, Moonshot News (blog), 20 January 2022, https://moonshot.news/news/media-news/us-companies-dominating-european-tv-market/; Agnes Schneeberger, ‘Audiovisual Media Services in Europe – 2023 edition’, June 2023, European Audiovisual Observatory and the Council of Europe, https://rm.coe.int/audiovisual-media-services-in-europe-2023-edition-a-schneeberger/1680abc9bc#:~:text=Around%20one%20in%20five%20(18,in%20documentary%20and%20children’s%20programming, 7.

¹³⁰ Hudson, Super Imperialism.

¹³¹ ‘Namibia Condemns Germany for Defending Israel in ICJ Genocide Case’, Al Jazeera, 14 January 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/14/namibia-condemns-germany-for-defending-israel-in-icj-genocide-case.

¹³² Marx, ‘Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law’.

¹³³ David Hoffman, ‘Russia’s Billionaire Matchmaker To the West’, Washington Post, 24 September 2002, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/09/24/russias-billionaire-matchmaker-to-the-west/e6c98740-ac21-4933-a445-674ea6149102/.

¹³⁴ Brian D. Blankenship, ‘NATO and the Persistent Problem of German Defense Spending’, Cornell University Press (blog), 1 November 2023, https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/burden-sharing-dilemma-coercive-diplomacy-brian-blankenship-11-01-2023/.

¹³⁵ Mari Yamguchi, ‘Japan to Jointly Develop New Fighter Jet with UK, Italy’, Associated Press, 9 December 2022, https://apnews.com/article/business-japan-united-kingdom-government-states-219e0adadd5f14b115766141cd0c5f6f.

¹³⁶ Valerie Insinna, ‘US Gives the Green Light to Japan’s $23B F-35 Buy’, 10 July 2020, https://www.defensenews.com/smr/2020/07/09/us-gives-the-green-light-to-japans-massive-23b-f-35-buy/.

¹³⁷ If there is evidence that industry has a significantly lower conversion than other elements of GDP, the PPP figures we have presented would overstate for the percentages for the Global South. We feel that despite this possible error the direction of this approach provides useful insights. The percentage composition of the GDP by sector depends on the price data used to measure the value added of each of them. The PPP conversion factors are statistical estimates based on baskets of goods and services for benchmark years that are further applied to the GDP for GDP (PPP) estimates.

¹³⁸ Barbara Kollmeyer, ‘“Right Now There Are Changes, the Likes of Which We Haven’t Seen in 100 Years.” Here’s What China’s Xi Said to Putin before Leaving Russia’, Market Watch, 22 March 2023, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/right-now-there-are-changes-the-likes-of-which-we-havent-seen-in-100-years-what-china-president-xi-said-to-putin-before-leaving-russia-d15150ce.

¹³⁹ Agnieszka Bryc, ‘The Russian Federation and Reshaping a Post-Cold War Order’, Politeja 5, no. 62 (31 October 2019): 161–74, https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.16.2019.62.09; Vladimir Putin, speech delivered at the Munich Security Council, Munich, Germany, 10 February 2007, https://is.muni.cz/th/xlghl/DP_Fillinger_Speeches.pdf.

¹³⁹ ‘Special Report: Cables Show US Sizing up China’s Next Leader’, Reuters, 17 February 2011, https://www.reuters.comarticle/idUSTRE71G5WH/.

¹⁴¹ Luke Hunt, ‘The World’s Gaze Turns to the South Pacific’, The Diplomat, 4 September 2012, https://thediplomat.com/2012/09/the-worlds-gaze-turns-to-the-south-pacific/.

¹⁴² Xi Jinping, ‘Remarks by President Obama and President Xi Jinping in Joint Press Conference’, 12 November 2014, The White House, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/12/remarks-president-obama-and-president-xi-jinping-joint-press-conference#:~:text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20I,instead%20of%20mutually%20exclusive%20ones.

¹⁴³ ‘China to Leapfrog US as World’s Biggest Economy by 2028 – Think Tank’, Reuters, 26 December 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN290003/.

¹⁴⁴ Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 55; 30–31.

¹⁴⁵ The Editors, ‘Notes from the Editors’, Monthly Review 75, no. 4 (1 September 2023), https://monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/mr-075-04-2023-08_0/; Jake Sullivan, ‘Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution’, The White House, 27 April 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/04/27/remarks-by-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-on-renewing-american-economic-leadership-at-the-brookings-institution/.

¹⁴⁶ Nomaan Merchant et al., ‘US Announces $345 Million Military Aid Package for Taiwan’, TIME, 29 July 2023, https://time.com/6299419/us-military-aid-taiwan/.

¹⁴⁷ Despite the recent exposures of fraudulent practices, behavioural economics was successfully weaponised by US intelligence in online media campaigns.

¹⁴⁸ Daniel McAdams, ‘“What Is The Empire’s Strategy?” – Col Lawrence Wilkerson Speech At RPI Media & War Conference’, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity, 22 August 2018, https://ronpaulinstitute.org/what-is-the-empires-strategy-col-lawrence-wilkerson-speech-at-rpi-media-war-conference/.

¹⁴⁹ Colum Lynch, ‘State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China’, Foreign Policy, 19 February 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/; ‘Textile Exports by Country 2023’, World Population Review, accessed 26 December 2023, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/textile-exports-by-country; ‘China’s Major Exports by Quantity and Value, December 2022 (in USD)’, General Administration of Customs, People’s Republic of China, 8 January 2023, http://english.customs.gov.cn/Statics/aeb5aefa-b537-4ef3-8e13-59244228cb0e.html.

¹⁵⁰ Li Xuanmin, ‘A Decade of BRI Development Transforms China’s Xinjiang Region into a Core Area of the Silk Road Economic Belt – Global Times’, Global Times, 1 October 2023, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202310/1299158.shtml.

¹⁵¹ Gregory C. Allen, ‘Choking off China’s Access to the Future of AI’, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 11 October 2023, https://www.csis.org/analysis/choking-chinas-access-future-ai.

¹⁵² Alex W. Palmer, ‘“An Act of War”: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China’, The New York Times, 12 July 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/magazine/semiconductor-chips-us-china.html.

¹⁵³ Xinhua, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative: A Key Pillar of the Global Community of Shared Future’, State Council Information Office, People’s Republic of China, 10 October 2023, http://english.scio.gov.cn/whitepapers/2023-10/10/content_116735061_5.htm.

¹⁵⁴ David Choi, ‘US, South Korean, Canadian Warships Train in Yellow Sea Ahead of Incheon Anniversary’, Stars and Stripes, 15 September 2023, https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2023-09-15/trilateral-naval-drill-yellow-sea-incheon-11383145.html.

¹⁵⁵ An Dong, ‘黄海军演仅5小时，美准航母跑路，舰载机坠毁，美军被迫发帖寻找 [Just Five Hours into the Yellow Sea Naval Exercise, a US Quasi-Aircraft Carrier Ran Away, Its Carrier Crashed, and the US Military Was Forced to Post a Search for It]’, IFENG, 18 September 2023, https://i.ifeng.com/c/8TBMF5tH2bY.

¹⁵⁶ ‘Investor FAQs’, New Development Bank, accessed 26 November 2023, https://www.ndb.int/investor-relations/inverstor-faqs/; BRICS Information Centre, ‘Treaty for the Establishment of a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement’, University of Toronto, accessed 26 November 2023, http://www.brics.utoronto.ca/docs/140715-treaty.html.

¹⁵⁷ ‘Answers to the Questions of the Video Conference “SCO – Shaping Eurasia”’, The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, 27 October 2020, https://eng.sectsco.org/20201027/686658.html.

¹⁵⁸ Christoph Nedopil Wang, ‘China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2023 H1’, Green Finance & Development Centre, 1 August 2023, https://greenfdc.org/china-belt-and-road-initiative-bri-investment-report-2023-h1/.

¹⁵⁹ Mao Zedong, ‘Speech at the Wuchang Meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. IV (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958), 98–99, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch06.htm.

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NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth

Notes

¹Peter Gowan, ‘The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy’, New Left Review, no. I/234 (March–April 1999), 103.

²Sevim Dagdelen, NATO: A Reckoning with the Atlantic Alliance, (LeftWord Books, 2024); Sten Rynning, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance (Yale University Press, 2024); Grey Anderson, ed., Natopolitanism. The Atlantic Alliance Since the Cold War (London: Verso, 2023).

³For more on the San Francisco Conference, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The New Cold War is Sending Tremors through Northeast Asia, dossier no. 75, May 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-76-new-cold-war-northeast-asia/.

⁴‘Review of the World Situation’, Central Intelligence Agency, 17 May 1949, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/17548-document-03-central-intelligence-agency-review.

⁵‘Lord Ismay’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, accessed 16 March 2024, https://www.nato.int/cps/ge/natohq/declassified_137930.htm.

⁶Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute, United States Department of State, ‘Report by the Policy Planning Staff’, report no. 23, 24 February 1948, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, General; The United Nations, Volume I, Part 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/d4.

⁷Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘The US Ministry of Colonies and Its Summit’, red alert no. 14, 25 May 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert-14-summit-of-the-americas/.

⁸‘The US Ministry of Colonies and Its Summit’.

⁹Mascha Neumann, ‘East German Weapons in the Fight Against Fascist Portugal’, Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR, 24 April 2024, https://ifddr.org/en/east-german-weapons-in-the-fight-against-fascist-portugal/.

¹⁰‘The Alliance’s New Strategic Concept (1991)’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, accessed 1 July 2022, https://www.nato.int/cps/fr/natohq/official_texts_23847.htm?selectedLocale=en.

¹¹Madeleine K. Albright, ‘Statement by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright During the North Atlantic Council Ministerial Meeting’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 16 December 1997, https://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1997/s971216aa.htm.

¹²In 1997, Peter Gowan wrote: ‘By entering Poland, NATO actually increases the insecurity of the Baltics. The conclusion is inescapable, that the first and main basis for the move into Poland is not a Russian threat but Russia’s current extreme weakness. Because of the catastrophic social and economic collapse inside Russia and the fact that its state has, for the moment, been captured by a clan of gangster capitalists around the West’s protégé Boris Yeltsin, the Russian state is in no position at present to resist the enlargement. This Russian weakness will almost certainly be temporary. We must assume the Russian economy and state will revive. It could easily grow ten-fold stronger in resource terms than it is today. NATO is thus exploiting a “window of opportunity” that will not stay open for very long. It is a case, therefore, of establishing a fait accompli against Russia swiftly’. Peter Gowan, ‘The Enlargement of NATO and the EU’, in The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (Verso, 1999), 298–299.

¹³George Monastiriakos, ‘Invite Ukraine to Join NATO and Win the Peace in Europe’, The Hill, 23 October 2024, https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4947010-ukraine-nato-membership-war-russia/.

¹⁴The White House, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, September 2002, https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/Organisation/63562.pdf, 39.

¹⁵For ‘rogue states’ or ‘backlash states’, see Anthony Lake, ‘Confronting Backlash States’, Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March–April 1994): 45–55. On ‘catastrophic terrorism’, see Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow, ‘Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger’, Foreign Affairs 77, no. 6 (November–December 1998): 80–95. When Lake wrote that essay, he was the US National Security Advisor, and Carter was later the US Secretary of Defence (2015–2017). Deutch had been US Deputy Secretary of Defence (1994–1995) and then head of the Central Intelligence Agency (1995–1996), while Zelikow authored Bush’s National Security Strategy in 2002.

¹⁶Katharine Q. Seele, ‘Arms Contractors Spend to Promote Expanded NATO’, New York Times, 30 March 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/30/world/arms-contractors-spend-to-promote-an-expanded-nato.html.

¹⁷Jeff Gerth and Time Weiner, ‘Arms Makers See Bonanza in Selling NATO Expansion’, New York Times, 29 June 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/29/world/arms-makers-see-bonanza-in-selling-nato-expansion.html.

¹⁸Seele, ‘Arms Contractors’.

¹⁹‘Ukraine the World’s Biggest Arms Importer; United States’ Dominance of Global Arms Exports Grows as Russian Exports Continue to Fall’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 10 March 2025, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/ukraine-worlds-biggest-arms-importer-united-states-dominance-global-arms-exports-grows-russian#:~:text=European%20NATO%20members%20increase%20dependence,19%20(52%20per%20cent); Sylvia Pfeifer, Jana Tauschinski, and Charles Clover, ‘Two-thirds of arms imports to Nato countries in Europe come from US’, Financial Times, 9 March 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/d3214157-639b-4743-ab29-9af662d47ec5.

²⁰European Union, Towards an EU Defence Equipment Policy (Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 2003), 11.

²¹Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire. British Illusions and American Hegemony (Verso Books, 2023), 46–47.

²²Ivo H. Daalder and James Goldgeier, ‘Global NATO’, Foreign Affairs 85, no. 5 (September–October 2006): 105–113.

²³Renée De Nevers, ‘NATO’s International Security Role in the Terrorist Era’, International Security 31, no. 4 (2007): 34.

²⁴For an assessment of the annexation of the DDR, see Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Risen from the Ruins: The Economic History of Socialism in the German Democratic Republic, Studies on the DDR no. 1, 20 April 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-ddr/; for the controversy about NATO’s expansion eastward, see Mary Elise Sarotte, ‘A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion’, Foreign Policy 93, no. 5 (September–October 2014): 90–97, and her book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (Yale University Press, 2021).

²⁵Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, Contemporary Dilemmas no. 4, 23 January 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/.

²⁶For a broad understanding of the neoliberal capture of Ukraine’s structures, see Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: from Marketisation to Armed Conflict (Pluto Books, 2017); for an assessment of the context of the war in Ukraine, see John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, Deborah Veneziale, and Vijay Prashad, The United States is Waging a New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Monthly Review, and No Cold War, September 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/the-united-states-is-waging-a-new-cold-war-a-socialist-perspective/.

²⁷An early summary is available in Karen Busler, NATO Burden Sharing and the Three Percent Commitment (Congressional Research Service, 1985) and a more recent one is Assessing NATO’s Value (Congressional Research Service, 2019). The similarity in tone and argument over thirty-four years and five presidents is stunning.

²⁸‘Nato Countries (Military Service)’, UK Parliament Hansard, 30 May 1952, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1952-05-30/debates/92c8849d-0446-49e0-91f9-034f3349e3dd/NatoCountries(MilitaryService).

²⁹For more, see British House of Commons Defence Committee, Lessons of Kosovo: Fourteenth Report of the Defence Select Committee (London: UK Parliament, 24 October 2000) https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmdfence/347/34707.htm.

³⁰Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, War in Heaven. The Arms Race in Outer Space (New York: The New Press, 2007), 31.

³¹‘Press Briefing by NATO Spokesman After the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the Level of Defence Ministers’, NATO Defence Ministers Meetings, 8 June 2006, https://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2006/s060608m.htm.

³²Olaf Scholz, ‘Policy Statement by Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and Member of the German Bundestag, 27 February 2022 in Berlin’, Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, 27 February 2022, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/policy-statement-by-olaf-scholz-chancellor-of-the-federal-republic-of-germany-and-member-of-the-german-bundestag-27-february-2022-in-berlin-2008378.

³³David McHugh, ‘Germany to Ease Government Debt Limits in Major Step Aimed at Boosting Economy, Defense Spending’, AP News, 5 March 2025, https://apnews.com/article/germany-ukraine-debt-brake-economy-military-spending-74be8e96d8515ddddd53a99a69957651.

³⁴Le Monde with AFP, ‘EU Chief Unveils €800 Billion Plan to “Rearm” Europe’, Le Monde, 4 March 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/european-union/article/2025/03/04/eu-chief-reveals-800-billion-plan-to-rearm-europe_6738782_156.html.

³⁵Janan Ganesh, ‘Europe Must Trim Its Welfare State to Build a Warfare State’, Financial Times, 5 March 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989.

³⁶Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, ‘Main Stage I: Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order’, panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference, Munich, 18 February 2023, https://securityconference.org/mediathek/asset/main-stage-i-defending-the-un-charter-and-the-rules-based-international-order-20230218-0917/.

³⁷Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Churning of the Global Order, dossier no. 72, 23 January 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-72-the-churning-of-the-global-order/.

³⁸Audronius Ažubalis, NATO and the Global South, (NATO Parliamentary Assembly, 2024), 13, https://www.nato-pa.int/document/2024-nato-and-global-south-report-azubalis-055-pcnp.

³⁹‘Speech by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the Wilson Center Auditorium Followed by Q&A’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 17 June 2024, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/226742.htm?selectedLocale=en.

⁴⁰‘What is R2P’, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, https://www.globalr2p.org/what-is-r2p/#:~:text=The%20Responsibility%20to%20Protect%20populations,Background%20Briefing%20on%20R2P.

⁴¹Vijay Prashad, ‘In Africa They Say, “France, Get Out!”: The Nineteenth Newsletter (2024)’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 9 May 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/the-sahel-seeks-sovereignty/.

⁴²‘Groupes d’Action Rapides – Surveillance et Intervention au Sahel (GARSI)’ [Rapid Action Groups – Surveillance and Intervention in the Sahel (GARSI)], CIVIPOL, 15 June 2021, https://civipol.fr/fr/projets/groupes-daction-rapides-surveillance-et-intervention-au-sahel-garsi.

⁴³Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases and the Future of African Unity, dossier no. 42, 5 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-42-militarisation-africa/, and Antonella Napolitano, Artificial Intelligence: The New Frontier of the EU’s Border Externalisation Strategy (Copenhagen: EuroMed Rights, July 2023).

⁴⁴‘Cooperation with the African Union’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 27 April 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/fr/natohq/topics_8191.htm?selectedLocale=en.

⁴⁵Hanna Eid, ‘A New World Born from the Ashes of the Old’, Interventions no. 5, Tricontinental Pan Africa, 8 October 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/pan-africa/eid-interventions-5/.

⁴⁶‘NATO Delegation Takes Part in Ninth Round of Military-to-Military Staff Talks with the African Union’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 28 November 2024, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_230897.htm.

⁴⁷‘The 601th Meeting of the AU Peace and Security Council on Early Warning and Horizon Scanning’, African Union, 8 June 2016, https://www.peaceau.org/en/article/the-601th-meeting-of-the-au-peace-and-security-council-on-early-warning-and-horizon-scanning.

⁴⁸Sten Rynning, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance (Yale University Press, 2024), 275.

⁴⁹‘London Declaration’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 4 December 2019, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_171584.htm; ‘Brussels Summit Communiqué’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 14 June 2021, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm.

⁵⁰Luis Simón, ‘NATO’s China and Indo-Pacific Conundrum’, NATO Review, 22 November 2023, https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2023/11/22/natos-china-and-indo-pacific-conundrum/index.html.

⁵¹‘Relations with Partners in the Indo-Pacific Region’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 24 October 2024, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_183254.htm, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Churning of the Global Order, dossier no. 72, 23 January 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-72-the-churning-of-the-global-order/.

⁵²‘Shigeru Ishiba on Japan’s New Security Era: The Future of Japan’s Foreign Policy’, Hudson Institute, 25 September 2025, https://www.hudson.org/politics-government/shigeru-ishiba-japans-new-security-era-future-japans-foreign-policy; US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, ‘Chapter 9: Taiwan’, in 2024 Annual Report to Congress (Washington, DC: US Government Publishing Office, November 2024), 443–485, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/Chapter_9–Taiwan.pdf; US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 (Washington, DC: US Senate, 2022), https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Taiwan%20Policy%20Act%20One%20Pager%20FINAL.pdf; Clinton Fernandes, Sub-Imperial Power. Australia in the International Arena (Melbourne University Press, 2022); Clinton Fernandes, Island off the Coast of Asia. Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy (Monash University Press, 2018); Brendon Cannon and Kei Hakata, eds., Indo-Pacific Strategies: Navigating Geopolitics at the Dawn of a New Age (London: Routledge, 2021); Nanae Baldauff, Japan’s Defence Engagement in the Indo-Pacific (Springer Nature, 2024).

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The Architecture of Power: The Dollar, Financialisation, and the Struggle for Sovereignty

Notes

¹ Batista Jr., ‘The BRICS and the Challenge of De-Dollarisation’.

² Marx, Capital, vol. 1.

³ Marx, Capital, 1.

⁴ Patnaik and Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism.

⁵ Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914, 58, 88, quoted in Patnaik and Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism, 126.

⁶ Metri, História e diplomacia monetária.

⁷ Lenin, Imperialism.

⁸ Mazzucchelli, Os dias de sol.

⁹ Tricontinental, Hyper-Imperialism.

¹⁰ Metri, História e diplomacia monetária.

¹¹ Quintas, ‘Os EUA e a geopolítica imperialista do petróleo’.

¹² Metri, ‘A ascensão do dólar e a resistência da libra’.

¹³ Batista Jr., O Brasil não cabe no quintal de ninguém.

¹⁴ Akyüz, ‘Política de resposta à crise financeira global’.

¹⁵ Tavares, ‘A retomada da hegemonia norte-americana’, 157–67.

¹⁶ Tavares, ‘A retomada da hegemonia norte-americana’, 160.

¹⁷ Tavares, ‘A retomada da hegemonia norte-americana’.

¹⁸ Melin, ‘O enquadramento do iene’.

¹⁹ Tavares and Melin, ‘A reafirmação da hegemonia norte-americana’.

²⁰ Gopinath, ‘Geopolitics and Its Impact on Global Trade and the Dollar’.

²¹ Gopinath, ‘Geopolitics and Its Impact on Global Trade and the Dollar’.

²² Atlantic Council, ‘Dollar Dominance Monitor’.

²³ It is important to distinguish central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) from private cryptocurrencies. CBDCs are a form of money in the strict sense: they are issued and guaranteed by national monetary authorities and perform the classical functions of money. Private cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have no state backing; they are speculative assets without a productive basis, whose circulation and valuation remain subordinate to the dollar-based monetary order.

²⁴ Atlantic Council, ‘Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker’.

²⁵ Council on Foreign Relations, ‘Central Bank Currency Swaps Tracker’.

²⁶ Politics Today, ‘Russia and China Settle 99% of Trade in National Currencies’.

²⁷ Metri, História e diplomacia monetária.

²⁸ Banco Central do Brasil, ‘Série Temporal 13621’.

²⁹ Conti, ‘As iniciativas dos BRICS’.

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This publication is issued under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. The human-readable summary of the license is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

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