The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left

Updated November 3, 2024. —Eds.

It is a sign of the depth of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International—during which nearly all of the European social democratic parties joined the interimperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states—has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions.¹ Although the more Eurocentric sections of Western Marxism have long sought to attenuate the theory of imperialism in various ways, V. I. Lenin’s classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (written in January–June 1916) has nonetheless retained its core position within all discussions of imperialism for over a century, due not only to its accuracy in accounting for the First and Second World Wars, but also to its usefulness in explaining the post-Second World War imperial order.² Far from standing alone, however, Lenin’s overall analysis has been supplemented and updated at various times by dependency theory, the theory of unequal exchange, world-systems theory, and global value chain analysis, taking into account new historical developments. Through all of this, there has been a basic unity to Marxist imperialism theory, informing global revolutionary struggles.

However, today this Marxist theory of imperialism is commonly being rejected in large part, if not in its entirety, by self-proclaimed socialists in the West with a Eurocentric bias. Hence, the gap between the views of imperialism held by the Western left and those of revolutionary movements in the Global South is wider than at any time in the last century. The historical foundations of this split lie in declining U.S. hegemony and the relative weakening of the entire imperialist world order centered on the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan, faced with the economic rise of former colonies and semicolonies in the Global South. The waning of U.S. hegemony has been coupled with the attempt of the United States/NATO since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to create a unipolar world order dominated by Washington. In this extreme polarized context many on the left now deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by the core imperialist countries. Moreover, this has been accompanied more recently by sharp attacks on the anti-imperialist left.

Thus, we are now commonly confronted with such contradictory propositions, emanating from the Western left, as: (1) one nation cannot exploit another; (2) there is no such thing as monopoly capitalism as the economic basis of imperialism; (3) imperialist rivalry and exploitation between nations has been displaced by global class struggles within a fully globalized transnational capitalism; (4) all great powers today are capitalist nations engaged in interimperialist struggle; (5) imperialist nations can be judged primarily on a democratic-authoritarian spectrum, so that not all imperialisms are created equal; (6) imperialism is simply a political policy of aggression of one state against another; (7) humanitarian imperialism designed to protect human rights is justified; (8) the dominant classes in the Global South are no longer anti-imperialist and are either transnationalist or subimperialist in orientation; (9) the “anti-imperialist left” is “Manichean” in its support of the morally “good” Global South against the morally “bad” Global North; (10) economic imperialism has now been “reversed” with the Global East/South now exploiting the Global West/North; (11) China and the United States head rival imperialist blocs; and (12) Lenin was mainly a theorist of interimperialism, not of the imperialism of center and periphery.³

In order to understand the complex theoretical and historical issues involved here, it is important to go back to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, conceiving it not simply in terms of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, but in relation to his whole set of writings on imperialism from 1916–1920. It will then be possible to perceive how the theory of the imperialist world system developed over the last century on the basis of Lenin’s analysis and the early Communist International (Comintern), followed by further theoretical refinements after the Second World War in the work of the main theorists of dependency, unequal exchange, the capitalist world-system, and global value chains. This history will set the stage on which to critique the current denial of imperialism on much of the left.

Lenin’s Overall Theory of Imperialism

It is an indication of the enormous power of Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that those left thinkers contending that imperialism has been transcended nevertheless refer back to Lenin’s classic work. Hence, it is commonly argued today by the Eurocentric left that Lenin did not focus on issues of inequality between colonizing and colonized countries or between center and periphery. Rather, we are told that he saw his work as mainly concerned with horizontal conflict between the great capitalist powers.⁴ Thus, William I. Robinson, a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the executive board of the Global Studies Association of North America (GSA), goes so far as to insist that Lenin’s theory of imperialism had nothing to do with the exploitation of one nation by another.

The idea predominant among leftists is that Lenin advanced a nation-state or territorially-based theory of imperialism. This is fundamentally wrong. He advanced a class-based theory. A nation cannot exploit another nation—that is just absurd reification. Imperialism has always been a violent class relation, not between countries but between global capital and global labour.… Most on the left see the exploiter as an “imperialist nation.” This is a reification insofar as nations are not and have never been macro-agents. A nation cannot exploit or be exploited.⁵

However, far from the exploitation of one nation by another being fundamentally opposed to Marxism, Karl Marx exhibited nothing but scorn for those that he said could not see “how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another.”⁶ Similarly, Lenin explicitly contended in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that the dominant tendency of imperialism was “the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group of the richest and most powerful nations.” Later, he stated that “the exploitation of oppressed nations…and especially the exploitation of colonies by a handful of Great Powers” was the economic taproot of imperialism. Lenin made it absolutely clear that to refer to exploitation in this context meant that an imperialist nation at the center of the capitalist world system “draws surplus-profits from” an oppressed nation in the colonial/semicolonial/dependent world.⁷

Still, according to Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology at New York University and editor of Catalyst, Lenin’s whole conception of economic imperialism as monopoly capitalism was “flawed,” as were Lenin’s notions that imperialism was economic (and not simply political), and that there was an upper stratum of the working class (the labor aristocracy) in the wealthy capitalist countries that benefited from imperialism. In all of these ways, Chibber has suggested, Lenin’s analysis was in error, while the significance of his theory was mainly confined to the realm of intercapitalist competition.⁸

Such grave misconceptions with respect to Lenin’s theory and its contemporary relevance are traceable in part to a tendency of radical academics in the West to study his Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism in abstraction from his other major writings on imperialism. These include six key pieces, written between 1916–1920: “The Socialist Revolution and the Rights of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses)” (written in January–February 1916); “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (written in October 1916); “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East” (November 1919); “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” (for the Second Congress of the Communist International [June 1920]); “Preface to the French and German Editions” of his book on imperialism (July 6, 1920); and “The Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions” (July 26, 1920).⁹ These additional, mostly later, writings by Lenin on the national and colonial questions supplement Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, focusing directly on the issue of the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by the major imperialist powers, primarily the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan (which today, with the addition of Canada, make up the Group of Seven, or G7).¹⁰

“If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism,” Lenin wrote in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, “we should have to say imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.” The rise of monopolistic accumulation had supplanted the era of free competition, creating a sphere of enormous surplus profits in relatively few corporations, which came to dominate the economy.¹¹ In the five characteristics of imperialism that Lenin listed right after this, he emphasized the concentration and centralization of capital on a national and world scale as the primary characteristic of imperialism. The second characteristic was the merging of industrial and banking capital to form financial capital and a financial oligarchy. The third was the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities, that is, the shift of capital to a global field of operation. The fourth, summing up the previous three, was the domination of the world by a relatively small number of international capitalist monopolies. The fifth was the completion of “the territorial division of the world among the great capitalist powers.”¹²

Lenin’s analysis was strongly opposed to that of Karl Kautsky, the main theorist of the German Social Democratic Party, who had argued that imperialism would develop into an “ultra-imperialism,” in which the leading capitalist countries unified through a “federation of the strongest,” a thesis that was to be disproven by the First and Second World Wars. Although the main capitalist states did provide a more collective imperialist front after the Second World War, it was the result of the global hegemony of the United States, which reduced the other leading capitalist states to the status of junior partners. Overall, Kautsky’s view of imperialism as a policy has been shown to be immeasurably weaker than Lenin’s view of it as a system.¹³

As the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE, India) has noted, “the focus of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was on uncovering the character of the [First] world war and its roots in capitalism itself; thus he did not explore in that particular work the impact of imperialism on colonies and semi-colonies.”¹⁴ To arrive at that part of his analysis, it is necessary to look at Lenin’s other, mostly later, writings on imperialism at a time when he was directly confronted with the anti-imperialist struggle in the nations of the periphery, particularly in Asia, in the context of the formation of the Comintern. Following the October Revolution, Soviet Russia was immediately confronted with the military interventions of the imperial powers on the side of the White forces in the Russian Civil War. Winston Churchill, Lenin observed, cheerfully proclaimed that Russia was being invaded in “a campaign of fourteen nations,” primarily the great imperial powers of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, who were united in their opposition to the October Revolution.¹⁵ At the same time, the Russian Revolution inspired major insurgencies in Asia, as in China’s May Fourth movement (1919), the anti-Rowlatt Act agitation in India (1919), and the Great Iraqi Revolution (1920).¹⁶

Lenin, of course, was too adept a political thinker to fail to recognize the implications of these new revolutionary movements. He therefore focused even more on the exploitation of the underdeveloped economies, which had always been the primary historical contradiction underlying his analysis of imperialism as a whole. The exploitation of colonies, semicolonies, and dependencies by the imperial powers was already visible in Lenin’s writings in 1916. In “The Socialist Revolution and the Rights of Nations to Self-Determination,” he argued that a degree of self-determination was possible for some colonized/dependent nations under capitalism, but only if revolutions brought it about. Such revolutions on the outskirts of the system ultimately demanded revolutions in the metropoles. “No nation,” he wrote, referring to an earlier statement by Marx, “can be free if it oppresses other nations.”¹⁷

In “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Lenin stated:

A handful of wealthy countries—there are only four of them, if we mean independent, really gigantic, “modern” wealth: England, France, the United States and Germany—have developed monopoly to vast proportions, they obtain superprofits running into hundreds, if not thousands, of millions, they “ride on the backs” of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in other countries and fight among themselves for the division of the particularly rich, particularly fat and particularly easy spoils. This [exploitation and the spoils it delivers], in fact, is the economic and political essence of imperialism.¹⁸

Lenin not only argued that monopoly capital exploited colonies, semicolonies, and dependencies, obtaining by these means superprofits, but that this, as Frederick Engels had intimated, allowed it to “bribe” a narrow section of the working class (the upper stratum of labor), a proposition known as the labor aristocracy thesis.¹⁹ He was to reiterate this emphatically in his 1920 preface to Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.²⁰ It was this, he argued, that explained the more conservative nature of the British working-class movement, as well as that of all core imperialist countries. The answer here, “if we wish to remain socialists,” he wrote, is “to go down lower and deeper,” below the narrow upper stratum of the working class, “to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against [the] opportunism” of the labor aristocracy and social democracy.²¹

In his “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of the Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East,” Lenin underscored how an “insignificant section of the world’s population” had given itself “the right to exploit the majority of the population of the globe.” Under these circumstances, the struggle against imperialism even took priority over the class struggle, though they remained intrinsically connected. “The socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie—no, it will be a struggle of all imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism…. The civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism.”²²

Lenin advanced this position further in the “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions.” He drew a sharp distinction between the “oppressed, dependent and subject nations” and “the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations.” Here he made it clear that “proletarian internationalism demands…that the interests of the proletarian struggle in any one country be subordinated to the struggle on a world-wide scale.” Capitalism, he argued, often sought to disguise the level of international exploitation through its creation of states that were nominally sovereign, but which were actually dependent on the imperial countries “economically, financially, and militarily.”²³

Lenin’s “Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions” reiterated these points and concluded that under current conditions of underdevelopment in the oppressed nations, “any national movement, can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement.” These “national-revolutionary” struggles, despite their predominant class character, needed to be supported, but only as long as these were “genuinely revolutionary” struggles. He strongly rejected the view that such revolutions “must inevitably go through the capitalist stage,” arguing rather that they could, given their anti-imperialist and complex class composition, and with the example of the Soviet Union before them, conceivably develop into genuine movements toward socialism that would achieve many of the tasks of development associated with capitalism on noncapitalist terms.²⁴

Lenin’s “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” when presented to the Second Congress of the Comintern, were followed, with Lenin’s support, by “Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question,” written by the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy, which were adopted along with Lenin’s “Preliminary Draft Theses.” Key to these “Supplementary Theses” was the explicit statement that imperialism had distorted economic development in the colonies, semicolonies, and dependencies. Colonies like India had been deindustrialized, blocking their progress. Superprofits had been extracted from economically “backward countries” and colonies by the imperial powers:

Foreign domination constantly obstructs the free development of social life; therefore the revolution’s first step must be the removal of this foreign domination. The struggle to overthrow foreign domination in the colonies does not therefore mean underwriting the national aims of the national bourgeoisie but much rather smoothing the path to liberation for the proletariat of the colonies…. The real strength, the foundation of the liberation movement, will not allow itself to be forced into the narrow framework of bourgeois-democratic nationalism in the colonies. In the greater part of the colonies there already exist organised revolutionary parties which work in close contact with the working masses.²⁵

Two years later, in the “Theses on the Eastern Question” of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, some of the core notions associated with dependency theory were introduced:

It is this [post-First World War] weakening of imperialist pressure in the colonies, together with the steadily growing rivalry between the different imperialist groupings, that has facilitated the development of indigenous capitalism in the colonial and semicolonial countries, which has expanded and continues to expand beyond the narrow and restrictive limits of imperialist rule by the great powers. Previously, great-power capitalism sought to isolate the backward countries from world economic trade, in order in this way to secure its monopoly status and achieve super-profits from the commercial, industrial, and fiscal exploitation of these countries. The rise of indigenous productive forces in the colonies stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the interests of world imperialism, whose very essence is to take advantage of the variation in the level of development of productive forces in different arenas of the world economy to achieve monopoly super-profits.²⁶

The “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies” in the Comintern’s Sixth Congress, in 1928, represented a high point in imperialism theory in the interwar period. There, it was stated that “The entire economic policy of imperialism in relation to the colonies is determined by its endeavour to preserve and increase their dependence, to deepen their exploitation and, as far as possible, to impede their independent development…. The greater portion of the surplus value extorted from…cheap labour power” in the colonies and semicolonies is exported abroad, resulting in a “bleeding of the national wealth of the colonial countries.”²⁷

The most difficult theoretical and practical problem was the class basis of anti-imperialist revolution in the underdeveloped countries. Lenin had emphasized that the revolt against imperialism would have to carry out the developmental objectives usually associated with the national bourgeoisie, but that the nature of the “national revolutionary” struggle would not necessarily be determined by the national bourgeoisie. Mao Zedong was to make an important contribution to the anti-imperialist struggle and socialist revolution in his “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” in 1926. Here Mao argued that the big, monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie, together with the landlord class, constituted a comprador class-formation that served as an appendage of international capital. The smaller national bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was too weak, and mainly sought to turn itself into a big bourgeoisie. The revolutionary forces thus depended on the petty bourgeoisie, the semi-proletariat, the proletariat, and, ultimately, the peasants.²⁸

All of these and most subsequent developments in the theory of imperialism had their roots in Lenin. As Prabhat Patnaik wrote,

The significance of Lenin’s Imperialism lay in the fact that it totally revolutionised the perception of the revolution. Marx and Engels had already visualised the possibility of colonial and dependent countries having revolutions of their own even before the proletarian revolution in the metropolis, but these two sets of revolutions were seen to be disjoint; and both the trajectory of the revolution in the periphery and its relation to the socialist revolution in the metropolis remained unclear. Lenin’s Imperialism not only linked the two sets of revolutions, but also made the revolution in the peripheral countries a part of the process of mankind’s moving towards socialism. It therefore saw the revolutionary process as an integrated whole.²⁹

Dependency, Unequal Exchange, the Imperialist World System, and Global Value Chains

After the Second World War, the imperialist world system had historically evolved beyond the geopolitical conditions in Lenin’s time. The United States was now the unquestioned hegemonic power in the capitalist world system and immediately launched a Cold War dedicated to “containing” the Soviet Union while repressing revolution everywhere in the world. A revolutionary decolonizing wave, much of it inspired by Marxism, nonetheless swept Asia and Africa following the triumph of the Chinese Revolution in May 1949.

In contrast to Asia and Africa, South and Central America included relatively few official colonies, due to their nineteenth-century anticolonial revolts against Spain and Portugal, leading to the formation of sovereign states. Nevertheless, Latin American states had long been reduced to economic dependencies or neocolonies, first of Britain and then the United States. Hence, the main issue in the region was overcoming the economic, political, and cultural dependency imposed by U.S. imperialism. Latin American Marxist theory, particularly with respect to imperialism, can be said to have had its roots in the work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who wrote in 1929, “We are anti-imperialists because we are Marxists, because we are revolutionaries, because we oppose capitalism with socialism…and because in our struggle against foreign imperialism we are fulfilling our duty of solidarity with the revolutionary masses of Europe.”³⁰ At the time Mariátegui was writing, Augusto César Sandino’s struggle against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua was awakening anti-imperialist consciousness across Latin America. Later, the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, inspired by the anti-imperialism of José Martí, and evolving into a struggle for socialism, brought revolution against imperialism to the fore once again in Latin America, which joined Asia and Africa in this respect.³¹

Due to the revolutionary wave on all three continents of the third world in the early decades of the post-Second World War period, Lenin’s original analysis of imperialism was deepened and broadened, developing into a rich global tradition reflecting many different historical conditions and vernaculars—but always pointing to the need for revolutionary struggle.

A major figure in the development of both imperialism theory and dependency theory after the Second World War was Paul A. Baran, author of The Political Economy of Growth (1957).³² Baran was born in Nikolaev, Ukraine, in the Tsarist Russian Empire in 1910. He studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute of Economics in the Soviet Union and at the University of Berlin, also working as economic assistant to Friedrich Pollock at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Later he emigrated to the United States and studied economics at Harvard University during the Keynesian Revolution. During the Second World War and in the immediate aftermath, he worked with the Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany and Japan. After the war, he worked for the Federal Reserve Board and then obtained a tenured position as professor of economics at Stanford University. Prior to the publication of The Political Economy of Growth, Baran presented a series of lectures at Oxford University, where much of the book was prepared, and was employed by the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta.³³ He was a strong supporter of the Cuban Revolution and exercised an important influence on Che Guevara. In 1966, Baran and Paul M. Sweezy wrote Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Social and Economic Order.³⁴

Reflecting this extremely broad background, Baran embodied in his work not only the imperialism theories of Lenin, the Comintern, and Mao, but also the experiences of Soviet and Indian economic planning. At the same time, he integrated this with the new conditions of the post-Second World War period. He was well-placed therefore to emerge as a foundational thinker in Marxian dependency theory. He argued that imperialism had “immeasurably distorted” and blocked development throughout the underdeveloped world.³⁵ In 1830, the countries in what was to be called the “third world” accounted for 60.9 percent of the world’s industrial potential. By 1953, this had dropped to 6.5 percent.³⁶ Introducing his concept of economic surplus (in its simplest form, “the difference between society’s actual current output and its actual current consumption”), Baran explained that the root problem preventing development in the underdeveloped countries was the siphoning off of the surplus by the major imperialist powers, which then invested the appropriated surplus either in their own economies, or else in the periphery in such a way as to enhance their long-term exploitation of the underdeveloped countries.³⁷ As with Engels and Lenin, Baran argued that an upper layer of workers in the countries of the imperial center indirectly benefited from imperialism, and thus formed a “‘labor aristocracy’ gathering the crumbs from the monopolistic table,” at odds with the bulk of the working class.³⁸

An important component of Baran’s dependency theory was the comparison of Japan with India. Japan represented a singular instance of economic development outside of Europe or European white-settler colonies. The imperialist powers had concentrated their efforts in East Asia in the nineteenth century mainly on subjugating China, and had thus failed to colonize Japan. With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which took place in response to growing military threats and the nascent imposition of unequal treaties by the West, Japan was able to create the internal social basis for rapid industrialization, facilitated by the appropriation of Western technological knowhow. By 1905, Japan’s entry to great power status was signaled by its victory in the Russo-Japanese War. In contrast, India, which had been colonized by the British in the eighteenth century, saw its industry destroyed by the British and was placed in a permanent state of underdevelopment or dependent development.³⁹

Following Mao, Baran insisted that a comprador class or big bourgeoisie (allied with the large landlords) in the underdeveloped countries was linked directly to international capital and played a parasitic role in relation to their own societies.⁴⁰ “The main task of imperialism in our time,” he wrote, was “to prevent, or, if that is impossible, to slow down and control the economic development of underdeveloped countries.” He explained that, “While there have been vast differences among underdeveloped countries,” in this respect, “the underdeveloped world as a whole has continually shipped a large part of its economic surplus to more advanced countries on account of interest and dividends. The worst of it is, however, that it is very difficult to say what has been the greater evil as far as the economic development of underdeveloped countries is concerned: the removal of their economic surplus by foreign capital or its reinvestment by foreign enterprise.”⁴¹ In nearly all respects, the dependent economy was a mere “appendage to the ‘internal market’ of Western capitalism.”⁴² The only recourse, then, was revolution against imperialism and the setting up of a socialist planned economy. Here Baran pointed to the example of China, which, in dropping “out of the orbit of world capitalism,” had become a source of “encouragement and inspiration to all other colonial and dependent countries.”⁴³

The Political Economy of Growth was published only two years after the 1955 Bandung Conference, which launched the Nonaligned Movement of third-world states, and proved enormously influential.⁴⁴ Although Latin American countries were not part of the Bandung Conference, the new Third World perspective helped engender an explosion of work in Marxism and radical dependency analysis in Latin America, which was inspired much more concretely by the Cuban Revolution. Baran visited Cuba in 1960, along with Leo Huberman and Sweezy, and met Che, who was then president of the National Bank. Che associated himself closely with Baran’s general analysis of underdevelopment. As Che was to declare in 1965, “Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries.”⁴⁵ Some of the leading contributors to dependency analysis in Latin America and the Caribbean included Vânia Bambirra, Theotônio Dos Santos, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Pablo González Casanova, Ruy Mauro Marini, Walter Rodney (whose best-known work focused on the underdevelopment of Africa), Clive Thomas, and Eduardo Galeano.⁴⁶ German-American economist Andre Gunder Frank also had a deep impact beginning with the publication in 1967 of his Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, which highlighted “the development of underdevelopment.”⁴⁷

In Africa, Samir Amin, a young Egyptian-French Marxist economist, introduced a full-scale critique of mainstream development analysis in his 1957 doctoral dissertation (completed at age 26 in the same year as Baran’s book was published), which was later published under the title Accumulation on a World Scale. He subsequently contributed massively to dependency, unequal exchange, and world-systems theory. Much of Amin’s analysis focused on the distinction between, on the one hand, “autocentric” economies at the center of the world capitalist system, geared to their own internal logics and expanded reproduction, and, on the other, the “disarticulated” economies of the periphery, where production was structured in terms of the needs of the imperial economies. The disarticulated nature of peripheral economies under imperialism left a revolutionary “delinking” from the logic of the world imperialist order as the only real alternative. For Amin, however, delinking was not about some absolute separation from the world economy or “autarkic withdrawal.” Rather, it meant delinking from the world labor-value system organized around a dominant center and dominated periphery, and the transition to a more “polycentric” world.⁴⁸

A key contribution to imperialism theory was Greek Marxist economist Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (1969).⁴⁹ Arguing that in the era of neocolonialism the relation between core countries and those in the periphery was one of inequality in exchange such that one country obtained more labor-value than another, due to the global mobility of capital coupled with the global immobility of labor, Emmanuel’s work set off a long debate. This was essentially settled by Amin with his proposition that unequal exchange existed when the difference in wages between Global North and Global South was greater than the difference in their productivities. He went on to argue that the law of value now operated on a world level under globalized monopoly-finance capital.⁵⁰

The ruling-class reality in the underdeveloped world, according to Amin, was one of “compradorization and transnationalization,” requiring new anti-imperialist revolutionary strategies, since there was no longer a national bourgeoisie as such. A revolutionary delinking strategy under these circumstances would depend on “building an anti-comprador social bloc” with the aim of enabling a sovereign project, divorced from the control of the imperialist world-system. With respect to imperialism and class in the advanced capitalist states, Amin suggested that Lenin’s labor aristocracy theory did not go far enough to address how the whole “unequal international division of labor” created broad structures supportive of imperialism within the core imperialist states that could not just be wished away. Here what was needed was the “building of an anti-monopoly bloc.”⁵¹

Much of Marxist dependency theory, beginning in the 1970s, merged into world-system (later world-systems) theory, as pioneered by Oliver Cox, Immanuel Wallerstein, Frank, Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi.⁵² World-system theory overcame some of the limitations of dependency theory by conceiving of nation-states as part of a capitalist world-system. The world-system thus became the main unit of analysis, seen as divided into centers and peripheries (while also providing for semiperipheries and external areas). However, in some versions of world-system theory, notably the work of Arrighi, there was a divergence from the theory of imperialism, reducing international political-economic relations simply to shifting hegemonies, in line with mainstream international political economy.⁵³

Already in the 1960s, radical political economists had come to center on the critique of multinational corporations, viewed as the global form assumed by monopoly capital, and thus the main transmission belts of economic imperialism. Here, the pioneering analysis emanated from Stephen Hymer, who wrote his breakthrough dissertation in 1960 on The International Operations of National Firms: A Study of Direct Foreign Investment, providing a theory of “multinational corporations,” based on industrial organization and monopoly theory, in the very year that the term first appeared. This was followed by treatment of the role of multinational corporations and imperialism in Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital and in Harry Magdoff and Sweezy’s “Notes on the Multinational Corporation” (1969). The world trajectory of such corporations became central to the whole theory of imperialism as in Magdoff’s The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (1969).⁵⁴

In the 1970s and ’80s, much of the evolving research on imperialism shifted from the realm of political economy to that of culture. In line with Joseph Needham’s earlier criticism of “Europocentrism” in the 1960s, Amin in 1989 introduced his very influential critique of Eurocentrism, while Edward Said produced his Orientalism (1978) and his Culture and Imperialism (1993).⁵⁵ With the rise of ecosocialism, the critique of imperialism was also extended to the question of ecological imperialism.⁵⁶

In the twenty-first century, most analysis of economic imperialism has focused on the global labor arbitrage and global value chains. Never before has the extraction of surplus by the Global North from the Global South been demonstrated so thoroughly in empirical studies. This derives from the fact that international exploitation is now more systematic than ever before: ingrained in the value chains of the global system and embodied in the export of manufactured goods from periphery to semiperiphery to the center.⁵⁷ The result has been the growing prominence of theories of “superexploitation” (that is, levels of exploitation in the Global South exceeding the global average and undermining the essential subsistence needs of Southern workers) as developed in the work of thinkers such as Marini, Amin, John Smith, and Intan Suwandi.⁵⁸

Today, we know from the research of Jason Hickel and his colleagues that in 2021 the Global North was able to extract from the Global South 826 billion hours in net appropriated labor. This represents $18.4 trillion measured in Northern wages. Behind this lies the fact that workers in the Global South receive 87–95 percent lower wages for equivalent work at the same skill levels. The same study concluded that the wage gap between the Global North and the Global South was increasing, with wages in the North rising eleven times more than wages in the South between 1995 and 2021.⁵⁹ This research into the contemporary global labor arbitrage is coupled with recent historical work by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik that has now documented the astronomical drain of wealth during the period of British colonialism in India. The estimated value of this drain over the period of 1765–1900, cumulated up to 1947 (in 1947 prices) at 5 percent interest, was $1.925 trillion; cumulated up to 2020, it amounts to $64.82 trillion.⁶⁰

It should be emphasized that the Global North’s contemporary drain of economic surplus from the Global South, via the unequal exchange of labor embodied in exports from the latter, is in addition to the normal net flow of capital from developing to developed countries recorded in national accounts. This includes the balance on merchandise trade (import and exports), net payments to foreign investors and banks, payments for freight and insurance, and a wide array of other payments made to foreign capital such as for royalties and patents. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the net financial resource transfers from developing countries to developed countries in 2017 alone amounted to $496 billion. In neoclassical economics, this is known as the paradox of the reverse flow of capital, or of capital flowing uphill, which it ineffectively tries to explain away by various contingent factors, rather than acknowledging the reality of economic imperialism.⁶¹

With respect to the geopolitical dimension of imperialism, the focus this century has been on the continuing decline of U.S. hegemony. Analysis has concentrated on the attempts of Washington, since 1991, backed by London, Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo, to reverse this. The goal is to establish the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan—with Washington preeminent—as the unipolar global power through a more “naked imperialism.” This counterrevolutionary dynamic eventually led to the present New Cold War.⁶²

Yet, despite all of the developments in imperialism theory over the last century, it is not the theory of imperialism so much as the actual intensification of the Global North’s exploitation of the Global South, coupled with the resistance of the latter, that has stood out. As Sweezy argued in Modern Capitalism and Other Essays in 1972, the sharp point of proletarian resistance decisively shifted in the twentieth century from the Global North to the Global South.⁶³ Nearly all revolutions since 1917 have taken place in the periphery of the world capitalist system and have been revolutions against imperialism. The vast majority of these revolutions have occurred under the auspices of Marxism. All have been subjected to counterrevolutionary actions by the great imperial powers. The United States alone has intervened militarily abroad hundreds of times since the Second World War, primarily in the Global South, resulting in the deaths of millions.⁶⁴ In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the primary contradictions of capitalism have been those of imperialism and class.

The Growing Denial of Imperialism on the Left

Denial of the reality of imperialism in full or in part has a long history in the Western Eurocentric left beginning with the outright “social imperialism” of the Fabian Society in Britain, and reflected in the social chauvinism of all of the main European social democratic parties at the time of the First World War. However, with the resurgence of the Western left in the post-Second World War period, particularly in the 1960s and ’70s, Western socialists adopted a strongly anti-imperialist stance, backing national liberation struggles around the world. This began to fade with the waning of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the early 1970s.⁶⁵

In 1973, Bill Warren introduced in New Left Review the notion that Marx in the “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (1853) had seen imperialism as a progressive force, a view that, Warren declared, was later mistakenly reversed by Lenin.⁶⁶ Warren’s interpretation of Marx here was at odds with the much more thoroughgoing treatment by theorists in the United States, India, and Japan from the 1960s on, who demonstrated that Marx, beginning in the early 1860s, had recognized the way in which colonialism blocked development in the colonies.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, the notion that Marx, and even Lenin, had adopted the view of Imperialism [as the] Pioneer of Capitalism—the title/subtitle of Warren’s book published posthumously in 1980—became a commonly accepted postulate on the left.⁶⁸

Underlying this analysis was the rejection by the Eurocentric left of the conclusion that countries of the capitalist core exploited those of the periphery, through higher rates of exploitation of workers in dependent countries, and the resulting appropriation of a large part of this enormous surplus by the imperialist countries at the center of the system. It has long been argued by Eurocentric socialists—going against the analysis of figures like Lenin, Baran, and Amin—that a higher rate of productivity in the Global North canceled out the wage differential between North and South to the point that the level of exploitation in the North was actually higher than in the South.⁶⁹ However, this thesis of a higher rate of exploitation in the North has now been definitively disproven as a result of empirical research into unit labor costs and the value captured by the center from labor in the periphery (and semiperiphery) through unequal exchange. Study after study has shown that even when accounting for productivity/skill levels, which are now comparable in export manufacturing in the Global South and in the Global North (since the very same technology, introduced by multinational corporations, is utilized), the rate of exploitation is much higher in the Global South, with its much lower unit labor costs. Indeed, the current trend toward the outright denial of imperialism theory can be attributed in part to an attempt in the face of this growing evidence to avoid the reality of the center’s superexploitation of the periphery by abandoning the whole question of imperialism.

At the root of the criticisms of economic imperialism emanating from Western Eurocentric circles has been the rejection of Engels’s and Lenin’s labor aristocracy thesis. Thus, the whole notion that a section of the working class in the imperialist core of the global economy benefits from imperialism was generally placed out of bounds as politically objectionable. Yet, the existence of a labor aristocracy at some level is difficult to deny on any realistic basis. An indication of this is that study after study has confirmed that the AFL-CIO union leadership in the United States historically has been oriented to business unionism and is closely tied to the military-industrial complex. It thus has been complicit with the established order. AFL-CIO leadership has worked with the CIA throughout the post-Second World War era to repress progressive unions throughout the Global South, backing the most exploitative regimes. There is no doubt that in these and other respects, the upper stratum of labor (or its representatives) has opportunistically opposed the needs of both the majority of workers in the United States and the world proletarian movement as a whole. The labor leadership in Europe associated with social democratic parties has historically exhibited similar propensities. The overwhelming whiteness of the leadership of most unions in Western countries and the racism so apparent in them further helps explain reactionary support for imperialist policies by their governments.⁷⁰

In the face of such historical contradictions, a new approach to imperialist denial on the left was introduced in Arrighi’s Geometry of Imperialism (1978), which, despite its title, sought to use the concept of hegemony (part of imperialism theory) to displace the concept of imperialism as a whole, reducing it to its geopolitical aspects and avoiding the issue of international economic exploitation. For Arrighi, the old theories of imperialism, beginning with Lenin, were “obsolete.” What remained was a world-system consisting of nation-states all jostling for hegemony. In The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Arrighi refrained altogether from referring to the term “imperialism” in relation to the post-Second World War world; while also abandoning the concept of monopoly capital via neoclassical transaction-cost theory.⁷¹

But it was the combined effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent wave of globalization, and Washington’s aggressive drive for a unipolar order that led to much more open denials of imperialism on the left. Ironically, at a time when liberals were celebrating a new naked imperialism, much of the global left jettisoned all critical notions of imperialism theory, even, in some cases, offering support for the new empire ideology.⁷² Here the ideological hegemony exerted by capital over the Western left was on full display.⁷³ In his “Whatever Happened to Imperialism?” in 1990, Prabhat Patnaik suggested that the “deafening silence” on the political economy of imperialism among European and U.S. Marxists in the 1980s and into the ’90s, which constituted a sharp break with the ’60s and ’70s, was not the product of an extensive theoretical debate within Marxism. Rather, it could be attributed to “the very strengthening and consolidation of imperialism.”⁷⁴

An example of the retreat of the Western left on imperialism theory was Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, published by Harvard University Press in 2000, and praised in all of the dominant media in the United States, including the New York Times, Time, and Foreign Affairs. Adopting an explicit flat-world perspective not entirely unlike that which was later promoted by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his 2005 work, The World Is Flat, Hardt and Negri argued that the hierarchical imperialism of old had now been displaced by the “smooth space of the capitalist world market.” It was “no longer possible,” they pronounced, “to demarcate large geographical zones as center and periphery, North and South.” In fact, “imperialism,” they went so far as to assert, “actually creates a straitjacket for capital” by interfering with capitalism’s flat-world propensities. Hardt and Negri were to give their notion of a rules-based, global-constitutional order, modeled on the United States, which was at the same time decentered and deterritorialized, the name “Empire,” to distinguish it from imperialism.⁷⁵

Hardt and Negri’s work helped inspire Marxist geographer David Harvey’s New Imperialism in 2003. Here, Harvey rerouted the theory of imperialism by way of Marx’s concept of “original expropriation” (or “so-called primitive accumulation”), rebranding this “accumulation by dispossession.”⁷⁶ Expropriation, associated with robbery or dispossession, rather than the exploitation internal to the economic process, became the essence of the “new imperialism.” The role of exploitation in Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which linked it directly to monopoly capitalism, was sidelined in Harvey’s analysis, leading to his fantasy of a “‘New Deal’ Imperialism” or renewed Good Neighbor Policy as the solution to international conflict. This view failed to see imperialism as dialectically connected to capitalism and as basic to that system as the search for profits itself.⁷⁷

Although often characterized as a major theorist of imperialism, Harvey explicitly abandoned the core of the theory developed by Lenin, Mao, and the dependency, unequal exchange, and world-system theorists, classifying this entire almost century-long tradition as the outlook of the “traditional left.” Instead, he presented his own perspective as akin to that of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, which, he said, had posed “a decentered configuration of empire that had many new, postmodern qualities.”⁷⁸ To the extent that he still relied on the classical Marxist theory of imperialism, it was based on Rosa Luxemburg’s notion of imperialism as the conquest and expropriation of noncapitalist sectors, particularly in external areas, thus providing new markets to support accumulation, which were then absorbed into the overall capitalist system. Imperialism, in this view, constituted a self-annihilating reality. Although the renewed emphasis on expropriation, in Harvey’s analysis, was important, the introduction of it in such a way that it displaced the role of international exploitation was a backward step.⁷⁹

In 2010, in his The Enigma of Capital, Harvey went further, arguing that an “unprecedented shift” had taken place that had “reversed the long-standing drain of wealth from east, south-east and south Asia to Europe and North America that has been occurring since the eighteenth century—a drain that Adam Smith noted with regret in The Wealth of Nations…. [This] has altered the center of gravity of capitalist development.”⁸⁰ His support for this was a 2008 report by the U.S. National Intelligence Council on Global Trends 2025, which projected a more multipolar world. But while that report anticipated that Asian economies would continue to grow relatively faster than United States and Europe up through 2025, consistent with the decline of U.S. hegemony and increasing multipolarity, it did not point to what Harvey termed a “reversal” in capital flows globally, much less to any reversal of the historic drain of capital from East/South to West/North.⁸¹

The recent estimate, mentioned above, by Hickel and his colleagues, of $18.4 trillion extracted by the Global North from the Global South in the unequal exchange process in 2021—plus the hundreds of billions of dollars in the transfer of financial resources from developing to developed countries every year (amounting, according to UNCTAD, to $977 billion in 2012 alone)—makes it clear that Harvey’s notion of a “reversal” in the historic drain of capital is ill-founded. According to a study by Mateo Crossa, the transfer of value through unequal exchange in the export manufacturing sector from Mexico to the United States in 2022 alone was $128 billion.⁸²

In 2014, Harvey failed to include imperialism in his Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism. In 2017, he announced that “imperialism” should be viewed as “a sort of metaphor, rather than anything real.”⁸³ A year later, he followed this up by stating that he preferred Arrighi’s geometrical world-system approach that “abandons the concept of imperialism (or for that matter the rigid geography of core and periphery set out in world systems theory) in favor of a more open and fluid analysis of shifting hegemonies within the world system.”⁸⁴ In this way, Harvey’s “new imperialism” analysis, which, from the start, was designed to abandon most of the classical Marxist theory of imperialism, was integrated with mainstream geopolitical analysis, excluding notions of center-periphery, North-South, and any coherent conception of economic imperialism.

Canadian historian and sociologist Moishe Postone, best known today for his Time, Labor and Social Domination (1993), presented an analysis in 2006 harshly criticizing anti-imperialist theory and politics. “Many who opposed American policies” in the Middle East and elsewhere, he wrote,

have had recourse to…inadequate and anachronistic “anti-imperialist” conceptual frameworks and political stances. At the heart of this neo-anti-imperialism is a fetishistic understanding of global development—that is, a concretistic understanding of abstract historical processes in political and agentive terms. The abstract and dynamic domination of capital has become fetishized on the global level as that of the United States, or, in some variants, as that of the United States and Israel…. It points to overlapping fetishized understandings of the world and suggests that such understandings have very negative consequences for the constitution of an adequate antihegemonic politics today. This reawakened Manichaeism, which is at odds with other forms of antiglobalization…is not adequate to the contemporary world and, in some cases can even serve as a legitimating ideology for what a hundred years ago would have been termed imperialist rivalries.⁸⁵

But since the United States unquestionably constitutes the hegemonic center of global monopoly-finance capital engaged now in permanent warfare in the Global South, Postone’s claim that an outlook that focuses on this is “fetishistic” ends up in a labyrinth of contradictions from which it cannot escape.⁸⁶ The notion that anti-imperialist politics should be displaced by a antihegemonic and antiglobalization politics is itself open to the charge that it fetishizes an abstract globalization, losing sight of the entire historical reality of imperialism up to the present day.

The most recent developments in the denial of imperialism theory by the Western Eurocentric left, now extended to criticisms of the anti-imperialist left, have closely paralleled changes in the global order associated with declining U.S. hegemony. Following the 2007–2009 Great Financial Crisis and the continuing rise of China, Barack Obama instituted his “Pivot to Asia.” This was followed by the New Cold War on China initiated by the Donald Trump administration, which was carried forward by the Joe Biden administration. Washington resorted to increased use of U.S. financial power to implement massive sanctions on countries seen as outside and in defiance of U.S. power. This was heightened by the onset of the Ukraine-Russia War (or NATO-Russia proxy war) in 2022. As a result, the views of imperialism of various left thinkers were radically reconfigured, leading to a more open abandonment of the traditional critique of imperialism.

It is in this historical context that Chibber, in a 2022 interview in Jacobin, openly chose to reject all of the fundamental elements of Lenin’s theory of imperialism. He commenced by arguing that “imperialism should be distinguished from capitalism.” Moreover, Lenin’s notion of imperialism as monopoly capitalism, he declared, was “flawed,” as “in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first, there is no system-wide tendency to monopoly.” Here, Chibber’s attack on the very concept of monopoly capital revealed his ignorance of the enormous growth in recent decades in the concentration and centralization of capital associated with successive merger waves, leading to the continuing augmentation of monopoly power, along with the centralization of finance. In 2012, the top two hundred firms (all corporations) in the United States—out of a total of 5.9 million corporations, 2 million partnerships, 17.7 million nonfarm sole proprietorships, and 1.8 million farm sole proprietorships—accounted for about 30 percent of U.S. gross profits, and this share has been rapidly increasing. The revenues of the top five hundred global corporations are now equivalent to some 35–40 percent of total world income.⁸⁷ In 2020, global value chain (GVC) transactions by multinational corporations, accounted for the bulk of world trade. The “GVC intensification” of a country, according to the World Bank, is enhanced to the extent that the country’s exports incorporate imported inputs from other countries. As explained in The World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains, “the [world’s] top contributors to GVC intensification [in 1990–2015] were Germany, the United States, Japan, Italy, and France,” with the United Kingdom not far behind. At the center of the world’s global value chains therefore are the same great imperial powers (home to global monopolistic firms) as in Lenin’s day.⁸⁸

Having once discarded the notion of monopoly capital, Chibber is able to do away with any coherent notion of international exploitation or imperialism. “International flows of capital don’t constitute imperialism,” he writes, “that is just capitalism”—as if imperialism were entirely divorced from the economic laws of motion of capitalism. Lenin’s theory, we are told, was political rather than economic, mainly about “inter-state competition.” Moreover, Lenin’s analysis was fatally “flawed” in other ways as well. Thus, Lenin’s analysis (along with that of later Leninists), we are informed, was linear and stagist, with all countries having to go “through a capitalist stage”—a position, however, that, as we have seen, Lenin explicitly rejected. Worst of all, Lenin’s critique of imperialism included the notion of the labor aristocracy, which, according to Chibber, “has no significance whatsoever for a general analysis of either the North or global capitalism.”⁸⁹

In Chibber’s view, “anti-imperialism” can be defined as any “collective action in your [own] country against your [own] government’s militarism and aggression against other countries.” This constitutes a purely national-political definition, separated from both proletarian internationalism and from any direct resistance to the laws of motion of capitalism itself in its monopoly stage. It follows, according to this definition, that anti-imperialism is a national struggle over aggressive and militaristic policy, rather than opposition to imperialism as a system. Overall, Chibber concludes, there has been a shift from “a Leninist world to a Kautskian world.” Hence, imperialism is to be seen in Kautskian terms as a mere national policy, encompassing the unity of the countries at the center of the system, and logically disconnected from the question of world exploitation.⁹⁰ It is hardly surprising, then, that in Chibber’s 2022 book, The Class Matrix, focusing on class in advanced capitalist society, there is no treatment of imperialism, monopoly capitalism, or even militarism.⁹¹

In a similar vein, Robinson’s chapter “Beyond the Theory of Imperialism” in his 2018 book Into the Tempest states: “The classical image of imperialism as a relation of external domination is now outdated…. The end of the extensive enlargement of capitalism is the end of the imperialist era of world capitalism. The system still conquers space, nature, and human beings…. But it is not imperialism in the old sense either of rival national capitals or conquest by core states of precapitalist regions” that should be the subject of analysis today. Instead, what is needed is a theory of global capitalism that would displace all of this, focusing mainly on shifting “spatial dynamics.”⁹²

More recently, in articles with titles such as “The Unbearable Manicheanism of the ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Left” and “The Travesty of ‘Anti-Imperialism,'” Robinson has sought to replace imperialism with his notion of a fully globalized capitalism ruled by a transnational capitalist class. Targeting figures like Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Institute, Robinson decries any notion of the exploitation by the Global North of the Global South or “former Third World.” One nation, he argues, challenging the Marxist theory of imperialism in general, cannot exploit another nation.⁹³ “By imperialism,” Robinson proclaims, we mean only “the violent outward expansion of capital with all the political, military, and ideological mechanisms that this involves.” Lenin’s theory of imperialism, he maintains, had its “essence” in the “rivalry…of national capitalist classes” and not the struggle over the exploitation of the nations of the periphery of the capitalist world—what Lenin himself, contrary to Robinson, designated as “the economic and political essence of imperialism.”⁹⁴

For Robinson, the conditions of global capitalism have now so altered that there is no relation to the “earlier structure where metropolitan colonial capital simply [!] siphoned out surplus value from the colonies and deposited these back in colonial coffers.” It is true that the United States engages in military interventions in the world, “if we want to call this imperialism,” he says, then “fine,” but we should not confuse this with the traditional Marxist theory of imperialism as international exploitation.⁹⁵

Likewise, Gilbert Achcar, professor of development at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, published an article in The Nation in 2021 titled “How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools.” Here he accused the whole anti-imperialist left of “campism,” that is, allegiance to a particular camp or bloc, insofar as they unequivocally opposed the hybrid imperialism (economic, military, financial, and political) directed by the United States and its allies within the triad against the countries in the Global South. Those socialists who stood firmly united with the peoples of the periphery on principle and against all military interventions and economic sanctions were accused of thereby providing “red-painted apologetics for dictators.” At the same time, Achcar indicated here and elsewhere that it is quite appropriate, in his view, for “progressive anti-imperialists” to support military intervention by the Western imperialist powers in favor of regime change, as he had in the case of the 2011 intervention in Libya, if it is designed to help putatively progressive movements, on the ground.⁹⁶

Western leftists, usually social democrats, have directed harsh criticisms against postrevolutionary Cuba and Venezuela for their supposed moral, political, and economic failings. Such charges are made outside of any meaningful political context, based primarily on uncritical acceptance of propagandistic reports from the U.S. and European media, while largely ignoring the enormous successes of these states. The criticisms invariably downplay the fact that both nations are currently being subjected to the most severe forms of international siege warfare ever developed. Economic blockades and financial sanctions are designed to deny these societies even the most essential food and medicine, coupled with periodic coup attempts—all engineered by the CIA and the White House. Yet, the full extent of the U.S. role is skirted by a left that seems to operate according to the rules of what the Hoover Institution called “democratic imperialism.”⁹⁷

Some critics of the anti-imperialist left today target Amin, arguing that delinking from imperialism cannot happen at all—even in Amin’s sense of the creation of a more “polycentric world” no longer dominated by the imperial metropoles of the global economy. There can be no question that a more multipolar world is emerging today. Nevertheless, Jerry Harris, organizational secretary of the GSA, contended in an interview conducted by Bill Fletcher, a long-time trade unionist and member of the executive board of the GSA, that the move toward a multipolar world is impossible in today’s fully globalized or transnational capitalism, ruled by a transnational capitalist class. In this view, which is identical with that of Robinson, there is no way out of the current world order since there are no longer any real imperialist divisions or autonomous nation-states (except perhaps a few remaining renegade states), and hence there is no possibility of anything outside the totality of global capitalism.⁹⁸ Here the analysis of left transnational capital theorists fails to comprehend that capital, however much it globalizes, is unable to constitute a global state. Hence, there can be no truly global capitalist class or transnational capitalist state. The capital system, as István Mészáros observed, is inherently centrifugal and antagonistic at the global level, inescapably divided into competing nation-states. The nature of this contradiction is manifested today by the vain attempt of the United States to create a unipolar system around itself, even as its hegemony fades, pointing to the deadliest phase of imperialism.⁹⁹

Another theoretical development characteristic of the Western Eurocentric left has been the adoption in stripped-down fashion of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, seen as a mere model of horizontal interimperialist conflict between great powers. Here, China and Russia are portrayed as constituting a single bloc (though representing very different political-economic systems), engaged in an imperialist rivalry with the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan.¹⁰⁰ Middle-level or semiperipheral countries in the Global South enter the picture as “subimperialist” powers—a concept first introduced by Marini in the context of dependency theory but now being used in a very different way.¹⁰¹ Imperialism, in this new view, is no longer associated primarily with the global exploitative role of the great imperial powers, such as the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, which, making up the center of the capitalist world-system, have dominated the centuries-long history of imperialism. Rather, the characterization of imperialist states is extended to semiperipheral and emerging economies, now classified as imperialist or subimperialist, in the spirit of seeing imperialism primarily in horizontal rather than vertical terms.

According to Ashley Smith, managing editor of the journal Spectre, writing for Tempest, the United States “is locked into competition,” not only with China and Russia and their allies, but also with “subimperial states such as Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil.”¹⁰² (The idea that the United States is in competition with Israel will no doubt surprise some!) Yet, as Marxist economist Michael Roberts has cogently stated,

I am dubious that sub-imperialism helps us to understand contemporary capitalism. It weakens the delineation between the core imperialist bloc and the periphery of dominated countries. If every country is a “little bit imperialist”…it starts to lose its validity as a useful concept. So-called sub-imperialist countries do not have sustained and huge transfers of value and resources to them from weaker economies. In our own work [Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi] on imperialism and in empirical work by others, this hierarchical structure of value transfer is not revealed. India, China, and Russia actually transfer much larger amounts of value to the imperialist bloc than South America. Take the BRICS, the best candidates for being “sub-imperialist.” There is no evidence of significantly large and long-lasting value transfers to them from weaker/and or neighboring economies.¹⁰³

The interimperialist argument today depends on presenting the People’s Republic of China as an imperialist (and straightforwardly capitalist) power in the same sense as the United States, disregarding the role of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the whole Chinese road to development, as well as processes of unequal exchange. Robinson goes one step further, not only fervently arguing that China is imperialist but also joining the New York Times in impugning the integrity of some of those on the anti-imperialist left, such as Prashad and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, who express solidarity with China as a postrevolutionary developing country aligned with the Global South against imperialism.¹⁰⁴

Yet, such attempts on the Western Eurocentric left to designate China as imperialist can come up with no more basis for this than to note the rapid economic growth of China; its expanding capital exports; its measures to enhance its own regional security (in the face of an encirclement by U.S. military bases and alliances); and its questioning of the imperial rules-based order under the domination of the United States and the West. Pierre Rousset in International Viewpoint declares that “there is no great capitalist power that is not imperialist. China is no exception.” But his endeavor to provide concrete examples of this, with respect to China, dwindles into insignificance when placed against the imperialist world system commanded by the United States and the triad as whole. Thus, we are led to believe that China is imperialist, since it “occupies significant maritime space” in its region; governs Hong Kong (no longer a British colony but returned to China); interferes in other countries via its Belt and Road Initiative aimed at promoting economic development; and has been known on occasion to use debt as a means of political-economic leverage.¹⁰⁵

More difficult still for those seeking to characterize China as imperialist in the classical sense is that rather than seeking to join the U.S.-dominated rules-based imperial order or to replace it with what could be considered a new imperialist order, Chinese foreign policy has been geared to promoting the self-determination of nations, while opposing bloc geopolitics and military interventions. Beijing’s threefold Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative together constitute the leading proposals for world peace in our era.¹⁰⁶ The People’s Republic of China has few military bases abroad, has not carried out any overseas military interventions, and has not engaged in wars at all except in relation to the defense of its own borders.

Contrary to Harvey’s suggestions, China has not been appropriating economic surplus generated in the United States. Rather, the opposite is true. Low unit labor costs of goods produced in the Global South have led to widening gross profit margins for multinationals from the center of the system, whose commodities are produced in China and other developing countries and then exported to be consumed in the Global North, where the final selling price of the goods is many times the export price of the commodities in the producer countries. As Minqi Li has shown, China in 2017 experienced a net labor loss in foreign trade (“calculated as the total labor embodied in [its] exported goods and services minus the total labor embodied in [its] imported goods and services”), which was equal to forty-seven million worker years; while the United States experienced a net labor gain in the same year of sixty-three million worker years.¹⁰⁷ China has developed rapidly in these circumstances of international superexploitation due to its opening up to the world market, the leverage of its powerful state sector, a relatively planned approach to development, and other key factors. At the same time, much of the surplus generated in the export-manufacturing sector of its economy has been drained away, filling the coffers of multinational corporations based in the center of the world economy. At present, per capita income in the United States is 6.5 times that of China. In this fundamental respect, China is still very much a developing country.¹⁰⁸

All of this is not to deny that China has emerged as a great economic power that by virtue of its sheer size and its own internal growth dynamics, threatens U.S. global hegemony, particularly where actual economic production is concerned. Nevertheless, the United States and the triad as a whole, the great imperial powers at the center of the capitalist world system, still retain (even if rapidly diminishing) technological, financial, and military hegemony throughout the globe and continue to rely on the net extraction of economic surplus from the Global South.

In sharp contrast to China, the United States over its history has intervened militarily in 101 countries, some of these multiple times. Since the Second World War, it has carried out hundreds of wars/military interventions/coups on five continents. These interventions have accelerated since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Today, in the context of a New Cold War, Washington is expanding its chain of military alliances explicitly aimed at insuring its military preeminence in every region of the world. The United States has 902 military bases abroad (with some four hundred of these surrounding China itself). The United Kingdom, acting as a junior partner, meanwhile, has 145 foreign military bases.¹⁰⁹

A July 2024 article titled “The ‘Multipolar World’: A Euphemism to Support Multiple Imperialisms,” written by Frederick Thon Ángeles and his colleagues, published in the Democratic Socialists of America journal The Call, charges anti-imperialists who express sympathy for China and the Global South with repeating the errors of the Second International. We are told that, “The left that supports this new ‘multipolar world,’ and even sympathizes with the new imperialist powers (China, Russia) or their allies [such as Cuba and Venezuela], is doing nothing more than repeating the mistakes of the right-wing of social democracy in the era of world wars and imperialism of the first half of the twentieth century.” Those who support a polycentric or multipolar world “distort the revolutionary principles of Marxism in such a way that it distances them [the anti-imperialist left] from the struggle for socialism and opens the way to war and destruction.”¹¹⁰

Here history has been turned completely upside down. None of the social-democratic parties of the Second International who joined with their respective states in a war over the division of the world, particularly over exploitation of the colonies, were sympathetic with “the wretched of the earth.”¹¹¹ Only the Bolsheviks in Russia, as well as the small Spartacus League formed by Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, stood in opposition to the First World War and aligned themselves with the underdeveloped world. To follow Lenin and Luxemburg is not to repeat the mistake of the social democrats of the Second International. Rather, the shoe is on the other foot: to side with the imperialist nations against the underdeveloped countries is to commit an offense against humanity similar to that of the bulk of the social democratic parties of the Second International. Standing with the Global South cannot be seen as distorting “the revolutionary principles of Marxism.” The locus of revolution for more than a century has been the periphery, not the center, of the capitalist world.

To take an anti-imperialist stance naturally does not mean abandoning class struggle in the core capitalist nations themselves—quite the opposite. As Lenin argued, given the inescapable reality of a labor aristocracy constituting the upper stratum of the working-class movement in the imperialist countries, it is necessary to go deeper, to see the struggle precisely in the terms of those who are most oppressed by capitalism and colonialism. It is no accident that the anti-imperialist movement in the United States has always had its deepest roots in the Black radical tradition, exemplified in the early twentieth century by W. E. B. Du Bois, and represented today by the Black Alliance for Peace. Racism and imperialism have always been intrinsically bound together, with the result that any genuine anti-imperialist movement is a movement against racial capitalism.¹¹²

Commemorating Lenin on the centenary of his death, Ruth Wilson Gilmore noted how crucial Lenin’s critique of imperialism has been historically for the Black radical struggle in the United States. “Universal and internationalist in ambition, this [Black radical] movement linked up and shared inspiration and analysis with global anti-imperial liberation movements…. The organized violence of imperialism continues to stalk the earth in the form of its fleshy and ghostly remnants—accumulated underdevelopment—and viscerally in contemporary unequal relations of power that rush value upward, by way of elites, to the ‘economic north,’ wherever the owners might reside.” Indigenous populations everywhere invariably have been on the front line in opposition to colonialism/imperialism. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explained in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, the genocidal colonial wars against the Indigenous peoples of the United States simply merged into U.S. overseas imperialism.¹¹³

Today, the imperialist world system is both intensifying world exploitation and leading us to the brink of global annihilation via a planetary ecological emergency and the growing likelihood of a boundless thermonuclear war. For thinkers on the left in these circumstances to argue that anti-imperialism is the enemy is to vote for imperialism, barbarism, and exterminism. As Mariátegui said, “We are anti-imperialists because we are Marxists, because we are revolutionaries, because we oppose capitalism with socialism”—and because we stand for world humanity as a whole.

Notes

1. ↩ Opposition to the First World War included the Italian Socialist Party and the Socialist Party of America, along with V. I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Spartacus League. On the relation of the Second International’s dissolution to current controversies, see Zhun Xu, “The Ideology of Late Imperialism: The Return of the Geopolitics of the Second International,” Monthly Review 72, no. 10 (March 2021): 1–20.
2. ↩ V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939). By employing The Highest Stage in his subtitle, Lenin did not deny the existence of forms of imperialism prior to this historical stage. Rather, he was highlighting the fact that in the final years of the nineteenth century, a whole new monopoly or imperialist stage of capitalism had arisen, representing a qualitative transformation of capitalist production. He employed the term imperialism to refer simultaneously both to a generic phenomenon present over the entire history of capitalism and as a historically specific stage. See Lenin, Imperialism, 81–82. Lenin’s book was first subtitled The Latest Stage of Capitalism and later changed to The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in line with what seems to have been his intention all along. Both subtitles, Latest and Highest, left room for the historical emergence of more degenerate transitional phases of capitalism during its long decline and fall—a decay that Lenin believed had already begun. Although Victor Kiernan argued that reference to the Highest Stage could be seen as “implying” that this was the “final stage,” it was also open to a more historically contingent interpretation. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), image of original cover, 192–93; Victor Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 39.
3. ↩ Representative works that advance one or more of these views include: William I. Robinson interviewed by Frederico Fuentes, “Capitalist Globalization, Transnational Class Exploitation and the Global Police State,” Links, October 19, 2023; William I. Robinson, “The Unbearable Manicheanism of the ‘Anti-Imperialist Left,” The Philosophical Salon, August 7, 2023; William I. Robinson, “The Travesty of ‘Anti-Imperialism,'” Journal of World-Systems Research 29, no. 2 (2023), 587–601; William I. Robinson, Into the Tempest (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018), 99–121; Vivek Chibber interviewed by Alexander Brentler, “To Fight Imperialism Abroad, Build Class Struggle at Home,” Jacobin, October 16, 2022; Gilbert Achcar, “How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools,” The Nation, April 6, 2021; Jerry Harris interviewed by Bill Fletcher, “Why Doesn’t the World Make Sense Any More?, ” Znetwork.org, May 1, 2024; Jerry Harris, “Multi-Polarity: A New Realignment?”, Against the Current, July–August 2024; Ashley Smith, “As US-China Tensions Mount We Must Resist the Push Toward Interimperialist War,” Truthout, May 4, 2023; David Harvey, “A Commentary on A Theory of Imperialism,” in Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 169, 171; Ho-fung Hung, Clash of Empires: From “Chimerica” to the “New Cold War” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Ho-fung Hung, “Rereading Lenin’s Imperialism at the Time of US-China Rivalry,” Spectre, December 10, 2021, spectrejournal.com.
4. ↩ Hung, “Rereading Lenin’s Imperialism at the Time of US-China Rivalry”; Hung, Clash of Empires, 62, 65.
5. ↩ Robinson, “Capitalist Globalization, Transnational Exploitation and the Global Police State.”
6. ↩ Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade,” in Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 223.
7. ↩ V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, 107–8, 124; V. I. Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Collected Works, vol. 23, 106–7.
8. ↩ Chibber, “To Fight Imperialism Abroad, Build Class Struggle at Home.”
9. ↩ Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”; V. I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses),” Collected Works, vol. 22, 143–56; V. I. Lenin, “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of the Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East,” Collected Works, vol. 30, 151–62; V. I. Lenin, “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” Collected Works, vol. 31, 144–51; V. I. Lenin, “Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions,” Collected Works, vol. 31, 240–45. A useful pamphlet published in China includes the second, fourth, and fifth of these essays: V. I. Lenin, Lenin on the National and Colonial Questions: Three Articles (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975). Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, as Prabhat Patnaik explains, has to be read alongside the above writings “for any overall appreciation of his theory of imperialism” (Prabhat Patnaik, Whatever Happened to Imperialism and Other Essays [New Delhi: Tulika, 1995], 80).
10. ↩ For a brief analysis that takes into account this part of Lenin’s overall theory and emphasizes its relation to the development of dependency theory, see Claudio Katz, Dependency Theory After Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Latin American Critical Thought (Boston: Brill, 2022), 26–29.
11. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 88; Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” 105.
12. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 89–90. A common economistic error advanced primarily by Western Marxist theorists has been to suggest, without any real backing, that Lenin saw imperialism as a product of the export of capital, or that it had its cause in economic crisis theory of some sort, either underconsumption or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In contrast, Lenin himself, in fact, argued that imperialism was the monopoly stage of capitalism and was thus as basic to the system as the search for profits. It thus needed no special economic explanation. As Oskar Lange wrote, “The pursuit of surplus monopoly profits [by monopoly capital] suffices to explain the imperialist nature of present-day capitalism. Consequently, special theories of imperialism, which resort to artificial constructions, such as Rosa Luxemburg’s theory…are quite unnecessary” (Oskar Lange, quoted in Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978], 279). For a critique of the narrow economistic view of Lenin’s work on imperialism, see Prabhat Patnaik, Whatever Happened to Imperialism and Other Essays, 80–101.
13. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 88–89, 94–95; Karl Kautsky, “Ultra-Imperialism,” New Left Review 1/59 (January–February 1970): 41–46; Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), vii.
14. ↩ Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), “On the History of Imperialism Theory,” Monthly Review 59, no. 7 (December 2007): 50.
15. ↩ Lenin, “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of the Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East,” 151, 158.
16. ↩ RUPE, “On the History of Imperialism Theory,” 43.
17. ↩ Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses),” 149; Tom Lewis, “Marxism and Nationalism, Part 1” International Socialist Review 14 (October–November, 2000), isreview.org.
18. ↩ Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” 115.
19. ↩ See Eric Hobsbawm, “Lenin and the ‘Aristocracy of Labor,’” Monthly Review 21, no. 11 (April 1970): 47–56.
20. ↩ Lenin, Imperialism, 13–14.
21. ↩ Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” 120.
22. ↩ Lenin, “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of the Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East,” 151, 158–60.
23. ↩ Lenin, “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” 145, 148, 150.
24. ↩ Lenin, “Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions,” 240–45; V. I. Lenin, “Comments to the Second Congress of the Communist International on the National and Colonial Question,” Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Fourth Session, July 25, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org.
25. ↩ M. N. Roy, “Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, July 25, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive; RUPE, “On the History of Imperialism Theory,” 44.
26. ↩ “Theses on the Eastern Question,” Resolutions 1922, Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922.
27. ↩ “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies,” Sixth Congress of the Communist International, 1928, revolutionarydemocracy.org.
28. ↩ Mao Zedong, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” March 1926, Marxists Internet Archive; RUPE, “On the History of Imperialism Theory,” 46–50.
29. ↩ Prabhat Patnaik, “The Theoretical Significance of Lenin’s Imperialism,” People’s Democracy, January 21, 2024.
30. ↩ José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anti-Imperialist Viewpoint,” First Latin American Communist Conference, June 1929, Marxists Internet Archive; José Carlos Mariátegui, An Anthology, Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
31. ↩ See José Martí, Our America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).
32. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth.
33. ↩ On Baran’s life and work, see John Bellamy Foster, introduction to Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence, 1949–1964, Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 13–48.
34. ↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Social and Economic Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
35. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 162.
36. ↩ David Christian, Maps of Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 406–9, 435; Paul Bairoch, “The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities since the Industrial Revolution,” in Bairoch and Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, eds., Disparities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 7–8.
37. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 22–43.
38. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 119.
39. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 140–61; Jon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 17–18.
40. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth,170, 195–98, 205, 214–58.
41. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 184, 197.
42. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 174.
43. ↩ Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 10.
44. ↩ Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New York: New Press, 2007), 31–50. Parts of this and the next few paragraphs draw on John Bellamy Foster, “The Imperialist World System: Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth After Fifty Years,” Monthly Review 59, no. 1 (May 2007): 1–16.
45. ↩ Che Guevara, “Speech at the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria,” February 24, 1965, Marxists Internet Archive; “Statement on Paul A. Baran,” Monthly Review 16, no. 11 (March 1965): 107–8.
46. ↩ See especially Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981; originally published 1972); K. T. Fann and Donald Hodges, eds., Readings in U.S. Imperialism (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1971); Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022, original edition, 1973).
47. ↩ Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
48. ↩ Samir Amin, Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990), vii, xii, 62–66; Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); “Samir Amin (Born 1931),” in A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer, eds. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2000), 1.
49. ↩ Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Emmanuel is also known for his 1972 article, “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism.” Settler colonialism was originally a Marxist concept, developed in line with Marx, Baran, Maxime Rodinson, and others. Arghiri Emmanuel, “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Settler Colonialism,” New Left Review 1/73 (May–June 1972): 35–57; Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler-State? (New York: Monad Press, 1973). On Marx and settler colonialism, see Editors, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 75, no. 8 (January 2024). For Baran’s treatment of white-settler colonialism, see Baran, The Political Economy of Growth.
50. ↩ Samir Amin, “Self-Reliance and the New Economic Order,” Monthly Review 29, no. 3 (July–August 1977): 6; Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 215–217; Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
51. ↩ Amin, Delinking, 33, 90–91, 157–58; Samir Amin, The Long Revolution of the Global South (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 401–2; Aijaz Ahmad, introduction to Samir Amin, Only People Make Their Own History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 27–28.
52. ↩ See especially Oliver Cox, Capitalism as a System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (Orlando, Florida: Academic Press Inc., 1974), 2–13, 347–57; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982).
53. ↩ Giovanni Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism (London: Verso, 1983), 171–73.
54. ↩ Stephen Herbert Hymer, The International Operation of National Firms (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976); Stephen Herbert Hymer, The Multinational Corporation: A Radical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, “Notes on The Multinational Corporation, Part I,” Monthly Review 21, no. 5 (October 1969): 1–13; Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, “Notes on The Multinational Corporation, Part II,” Monthly Review (November 1969): 1–13.
55. ↩ Joseph Needham, Within Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989, 2009); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). The question of Eurocentrism in Marxist theory was broached in Mariátegui, “Anti-Imperialist Viewpoint,” in 1929.
56. ↩ See, for example, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” in Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003), 186–201.
57. ↩ John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Intan Suwandi, John Bellamy Foster, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism,” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1–24; Intan Suwandi, Value Chains (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 1–24; Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos, and Felix Barbour, “Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy,” Nature Communications 15 (2024); Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi, “Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2019,” Global Environmental Change 72 (March 2022): 1–13; Zak Cope, Divided World Divided Class (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2015); Mateo Crossa, “Unequal Value Transfer from Mexico to the United States,” Monthly Review 75, no. 5 (October 2023): 42–53; Michael Roberts, “Further Thoughts on the Economics of Imperialism,” The Next Recession, April 23, 2024; John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
58. ↩ Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency, 130–36; Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 219–23.
59. ↩ Hickel, Lemos, and Barbour, “Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy”; Phie Jacobs, “Rich Countries Drain ‘Shocking’ Amount of Labor from the Global South,” Science, August 6, 2024.
60. ↩ Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “The Drain of Wealth: Colonialism Before the First World War,” Monthly Review 72, no. 9 (February 2021): 15.
61. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), “Topsy-Turvy World: Net Transfer of Resources from Poor to Rich Countries,” Policy Brief no. 78 (May 2020); Harry Magdoff, “International Economic Distress and the Third World,” Monthly Review 33, no. 11 (April 1982) 8–13; Robert Lucas, “Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?,” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (May 1990): 92–96.
62. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006); John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, Deborah Veneziale, and Vijay Prashad, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022); John Bellamy Foster, “The New Cold War on China,” Monthly Review 73, no. 3 (July–August 2021): 1–20.
63. ↩ Paul M. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 147–65.
64. ↩ U.S. Congressional Research Services, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023, June 7, 2023; David Michael Smith, Endless Holocausts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023).
65. ↩ Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960).
66. ↩ Bill Warren, “Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialization,” New Left Review 181 (1973): 4, 43, 48, 82, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 81–87.
67. ↩ Horace B. Davis, Nationalism and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 59–73; Kenzo Mohri, “Marx and ‘Underdevelopment,’” Monthly Review 30, no. 11 (April 1979): 32–43; Sunti Kumar Ghosh, “Marx on India,” Monthly Review 35, no. 8 (January 1984): 39–53.
68. ↩ Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1980): 97–98. The misguided notion that Lenin too saw imperialism as the pioneer of development can be found in Albert Szymanski, The Logic of Imperialism (New York: Praeger, 1983), 40.
69. ↩ For example, Geoffrey Kay, then a lecturer in economics at the University of London, wrote that based on its higher productivity (and emphasis on relative surplus value), “the rate of exploitation in the advanced countries is, generally speaking, higher than that in the underdeveloped world.” Geoffrey Kay, The Economic Theory of the Working Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 52. See also Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1975), 354; Charles Bettelheim, “Appendix I: Theoretical Comments,” in Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, 302–4; Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (London: Polity, 2009), 179–81; and Joseph Choonara, Unraveling Capitalism (London: Bookmarks, 2009), 34–35. For a general refutation of such views see Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century.
70. ↩ Jeff Schuhrke, Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (London: Verso, 2024); Kim Scipes, The AFL-CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2011); Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
71. ↩ Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism, 171–73; Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994). For a critique of transactions cost theory in this context see John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 11 (April 2011): 27–31.
72. ↩ For a critique of humanitarian imperialism, see Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
73. ↩ On the nature of the left’s submission to the ideological hegemony of capital where imperialism is concerned, see Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, and How It Can Be Reborn (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024), 75–77, 188–89, 209–10, 227.
74. ↩ Prabhat Patnaik, “Whatever Happened to Imperialism?,” Monthly Review 42, no. 6 (November 1990): 4.
75. ↩ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 178, 234, 332–35; John Bellamy Foster, “Imperialism and ‘Empire,’” Monthly Review 53, no. 7 (December 2001): 1–9; Atilio A. Boron, “‘Empire’ and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (London: Zed, 2005); Losurdo, Western Marxism, 184, 209–11, 230, 255. The flat world hypothesis was extended by Friedman, who misleadingly claimed that this was also in accord with Marx and Engels. Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005).
76. ↩ David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–82. On Marx’s preference for the phrase “original expropriation” over “so-called primitive [original] accumulation” of classical-liberal political economy, see Ian Angus, “The Meaning of ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation,’” Monthly Review 74, no. 11 (April 2023): 54–58.
77. ↩ Harvey, The New Imperialism, 209.
78. ↩ Harvey, The New Imperialism, 6–7, 137–40, 137–49; David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006), 427–45; Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968).
79. ↩ Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation was based on the notion that capitalism could not exist as a self-contained system and needed to conquer “third markets” in order to reproduce itself. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 6–7,137–40, 137–49, 299; Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 427–45; Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. On the differences between Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s theories of imperialism, see Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present, 263–73.
80. ↩ David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 34–35; David Harvey, “A Commentary on A Theory of Imperialism,” 169–71.
81. ↩ U.S. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, November 2008): 4.
82. ↩ Hickel, Lemos, and Barbour, “Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy,” 15–17; Crossa, “Unequal Value Transfer from Mexico to the United States,” 50; UNCTAD, “The Topsy-Turvy World.”
83. ↩ David Harvey quoted in Salar Mohandesi, “The Specificity of Imperialism,” Viewpoint, February 1, 2018.
84. ↩ David Harvey, “Realities on the Ground: David Harvey Replies to John Smith,” Review of African Political Economy, February 5, 2018, roape.net.
85. ↩ Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 96–97; Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
86. ↩ Postone’s argument singled out Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein for criticism, focusing on their accounts of the role of the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East.
87. ↩ Foster, McChesney, and Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism.”
88. ↩ World Bank, World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2020), 15, 19, 26; Benjamin Selwyn and Dara Leyden, “World Development under Monopoly Capitalism,” Monthly Review 73, no. 6 (November 2021): 21–24.
89. ↩ Chibber, “To Fight Imperialism Abroad, Build Class Struggle at Home.”
90. ↩ Chibber, “To Fight Imperialism Abroad, Build Class Struggle at Home.” Chibber’s analysis follows Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism, which separated the concept of imperialism from that of world exploitation. See Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism (London: Routledge, 1990), 130.
91. ↩ Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2022).
92. ↩ Robinson, Into the Tempest, 99–121. On the empirical weaknesses of the transnational capital thesis, see Samir Amin, “Transnational Capitalism or Collective Imperialism?,” Pambazuka News, March 23, 2011; Ha-Joon Chang, Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 74–87; Ernesto Screpanti, Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 57–58.
93. ↩ Robinson, “The Unbearable Manicheanism of the ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Left,”; Robinson, “Capitalist Globalization, Transnational Class Exploitation, and the Global Police State”; Robinson, “The Travesty of ‘Anti-Imperialism,'” 592.
94. ↩ William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 126; Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” 115.
95. ↩ Robinson, “Capitalist Globalization, Transnational Class Exploitation, and the Global Police State.”
96. ↩ Gilbert Achcar, “How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools,” The Nation, April 6, 2021; Roger D. Harris, “Anti-Anti-Imperialism: Gilbert Achcar’s Leftist Imperialism with Caveats,” Mint Press, June 1, 2021; Gilbert Achcar, “Reflections of an Anti-Imperialist After Ten Years of Debate,” New Politics, September 2021, newpol.org; Gilbert Achcar, “Libya: A Legitimate and Necessary Debate from an Anti-Imperialist Perspective,” Le Monde diplomatique, March 28, 2011, mondediplocom.
97. ↩ Gabriel Hetland, “Why Is Venezuela Spiraling Out of Control?” NACLA, April 15, 2017, nacla.org; Jordan Woll, “Jacobin Magazine Attacks Venezuela, Cuba, and TeleSur,” Liberation News, June 12, 2017, liberationnews.org. In a recent article in Sidecar, an online publication, associated with New Left Review, Gabriel Hetland not only repeats the extremely distorted criticisms of Venezuela’s 2024 election by the imperial media system, but makes it clear that the main concern is “that social-democratic policies” will be seen as “untenable in the twenty-first century.” Any support of Venezuela thus needs to be abandoned for the sake of social-democratic politics—even though extreme U.S. sanctions and coup attempts are acknowledged. Gabriel Hetland, “Fraud Foretold?,” Sidecar, August 21, 2024. For an alternative view see Drago Bosnic, “Venezuelan Presidential Election from a Serbian Observer’s Perspective—Interview,” BRICS Portal, August 26, 2024. On “democratic imperialism” see Stanley Kurtz, “Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint,” Hoover Institution, April 1, 2003.
98. ↩ Harris, “Why Doesn’t the World Make Sense Any More?”; Alessandro Borin, Michelle Mancini, and Daria Taglioni, “Measuring Countries and Sectors in GVC,” World Bank Blogs, November 22, 2021, worldbank.org
99. ↩ István Mészáros, “The Uncontrollability of Global Capital,” Monthly Review 49, no. 9 (February 1998): 32; István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 28–29. Robinson leaves the realm of reality altogether in his theory of the “emergent transnational capitalist state.” Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, 65–69.
100. ↩ Hung, “Rereading Lenin’s Imperialism at the Time of U.S.-China Rivalry”; Hung, Clash of Empires, 62, 65.
101. ↩ Ruy Mauro Marini, “Brazilian Sub-Imperialism,” Monthly Review 23, no. 9 (February 1972): 14–24.
102. ↩ Ilya Matveev, “We Live in a World of Growing Interimperialist Rivalries,” Jacobin, May 2024; Ashley Smith, “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today,” Tempest, May 24, 2024.
103. ↩ Michael Roberts, “50 Years of Dependency Theory,” The Next Recession, November 4, 2023; Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, “The Economics of Modern Imperialism,” Historical Materialism 29, no. 4 (2021): 23–69; Andrea Ricci, “Unequal Exchange in the Age of Globalization,” Review of Radical Political Economics 51, no. 2 (2019).
104. ↩ Writing on “The Travesty of ‘Anti-Imperialism'” in The Journal of World-Systems Research, Robinson repeats calumnies against Prashad leveled by establishment media organs, including The Daily Beast and New Lines Magazine (and more recently, since Robinson’s article was first published, by the New York Times), involving sizable financial donations to the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, where Prashad is executive director. The donations in question come from Roy Singham, chair of Tricontinental’s international advisory board and a notable figure with a long history of anti-racial-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and socialist activism in the United States and around the world, who made a fortune in software development. Relying on New Cold War, McCarthyite-style attacks from the corporate media, Singham for his sympathies for socialism with Chinese characteristics, as well as his financial support of Tricontinental and other left organizations around the world, Robinson claims that Prashad “appears to be politically compromised” due to Tricontinental’s acceptance of donations from Singham. It is true that viewed from the imperialist standpoint, such donations are illegitimate insofar as they conflict with the objectives of Washington’s New Cold War. However, Robinson’s accusation that Prashad is thereby “politically compromised” makes no sense from an anti-imperialist standpoint, where acceptance of such funding is entirely in accord with a fundamental critique of the imperialist world system. Robinson, “The Travesty of ‘Anti-Imperialism,'” 592; “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul,” New York Times, August 10, 2023; Vijay Prashad, “My Friends Prabir and Amit and in Jail in India for their Work in the Media,” Counterpunch, October 4, 2023.
105. ↩ Pierre Rousset, “China: A New Imperialism Emerges,” International Viewpoint, November 18, 2021.
106. ↩ See Editors, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 75, no. 6 (November 2023).
107. ↩ Minqi Li, “China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?,” Monthly Review 73, no. 3 (July–August 2021): 57. An error in the original text referred to the calculations of China’s net labor loss to include “not only the net labor transfer that results from China’s unfavorable labor terms of trade, but also the labor embodied in China’s ‘trade surpluses'” (Li, “China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?,” 56). On the methodology, see Minqi Li, China in the 21st Century (London: Pluto, 2015): 200–2. See also Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 165–74; Suwandi, Jonna, and Foster, “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism.”
108. ↩ “Comparing United States and China by Economy,” Statistics Times, August 29, 2024.
109. ↩ “Hyper-Imperialism: A Decadent New Stage,” Tricontinental Institute, January 23, 2024; U.S. Congressional Research Service, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023, June 7, 2023; John Pilger, “There Is a War Coming Shrouded in Propaganda,” John Pilger (blog), May 1, 2023, braveneweurope.com.
110. ↩ Frederick Thon, Manuel Rodríguez Banchs, and Jorge Lefevre Tavárez, “The ‘Multipolar World’: A Euphemism for Multiple Imperialisms,” The Call, July 6, 2024, socialistcall.com.
111. ↩ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
112. ↩ “Principles of Unity,” Black Alliance for Peace, blackallianceforpeace.com. For Du Bois’s anti-imperialist essays during the First World War and after, notable as critiques of racial capitalism and imperialism, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1999): Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights,” Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (July–August 2020): 8–20.
113. ↩ Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “On the Centenary of Lenin’s Death,” Verso (blog), January 25, 2024; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 162–77.