In order to understand the crisis of the imperialist world system in the twenty-first century, it is crucial to see this in terms of the present as history, that is, as an outgrowth of a centuries-long historical process (Paul M. Sweezy, The Present as History [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953]).
Capitalism arose in Western Europe in the long sixteenth century (1450–1650), as a system of class, nation, and colonial empire—rooted in the economic exploitation of the working class, the conquest and extermination of Indigenous populations, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The European colonial powers, as Karl Marx noted, fought a “commercial war” with “the globe as its battlefield,” which assumed “gigantic dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War” against France. Britain rose to the top of the heap through its Industrial Revolution, emerging as the hegemonic power of the capitalist world economy during the nineteenth-century era of free competition (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 [London: Penguin, 1976], 915).
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, capitalism had shifted from its freely competitive stage to its monopoly or imperialist stage, as described by V. I. Lenin in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. British hegemony waned and a number of great imperial powers—the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan—struggled to gain control over the remaining areas of the globe, with the entire world now divided into center and periphery. A labor aristocracy emerged within the top echelons of the working-class movement in the main imperial states, shifting the overall socialist movement from a struggle for revolutionary change to one of reformist social democracy and weakening the international solidarity of the working class (with the result that in the First World War the various European social-democratic parties aligned with their respective nation-states) (V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism [New York: International Publishers, 1939]).
At the infamous 1884 Berlin Conference, the major European powers, acting as “warring brothers,” carved up Africa among them. In a similar joint action, an eight-nation great power alliance invaded China in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion (or Yihetuan Movement), imposing unequal treaties (part of China’s “century of humiliation,” which had commenced in the early mid-nineteenth century with the British and French invasions during the Opium Wars). Competition between the great powers for dominance in the peripheries was the principal cause of the First World War, out of which arose the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union as the first socialist-led modern state, which quickly industrialized via a planned economy. In the Second World War, the have imperial powers (the United States, Britain, and France)—together with the USSR—fought against the have-not imperial/fascist powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) for world domination. Nazi Germany was defeated principally by the USSR, which lost upwards of twenty-five million lives in the war. In the final stage of the war, the United States mercilessly dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan.
When the smoke had cleared from the Second World War, the United States was the unquestioned hegemonic power of the capitalist world economy and the leading counterrevolutionary force on the globe, with the European powers and Japan reduced to its junior partners. Washington constructed a “rules-based” international order around itself, instituted a national Red Scare in the McCarthy Era, and launched a Cold War against the Soviet Union, which included the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Cold War was aimed at the economic “Containment” of the USSR coupled with innumerable hot wars against revolutions around the globe. Successive waves of revolutions had arisen in the periphery, during and after the two World Wars, marked by the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the Cuban Revolution (1959). Nevertheless, in what is known as “the postwar era,” the United States, together with the other imperial powers, managed to drown most of the world’s national liberation struggles in blood, causing millions of deaths (while the U.S. military suffered a notable defeat in the Vietnam War).
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 introduced a unipolar moment, or era of “naked imperialism,” during which Washington and its European allies proceeded to carry out regime change operations in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere while expanding NATO eastward, with the goal of permanently weakening/destroying Russia as a great power (see John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006]).
None of this, however, served to alter the reality of declining U.S. economic hegemony, beginning in the early 1970s. The Vietnam defeat (which pointed to the vulnerability of empire), economic stagnation, financialization, globalization, deindustrialization, and the rise of China have all weakened U.S. global power over the past century, while the Western European and Japanese powers experienced an even more precipitous economic decline relative to the world as a whole. In 1960, the United States accounted for 40 percent of world GDP in nominal terms; by 1985, this had fallen to 34 percent. It is now 26 percent (15 percent in purchasing power parity [PPP]). In contrast, China, as a result of its “century of humiliation” at the hands of the West, saw its share of world industrial potential sink from about 33.3 percent in 1800 to 2.3 percent at the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, only to experience a meteoric rise, due to its Revolution, to 18 percent of world GDP today (20 percent PPP)—though its per capita GDP remains far below that of the West (Govind Bhutada, “The US Share of Global GDP Over Time,” Visual Capitalist, January 14, 2021; “U.S. GDP as % of World GDP,” Ycharts, ycharts.co; David Christian, Maps of Time [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], 406–9; Paul Bairoch, “The Main Trends in National Economic Disparity Since the Industrial Revolution,” Disparities in Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution, eds. Paul Bairoch and Maurice Lévy-Leboyer [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981], 7–8; Ruhchir Sharma, “China’s Rise Is Reversing,” Financial Times, November 19, 2023).
Although opening up to the world economy in the 1970s and incorporating elements of capitalist social relations, China retained core components of its postrevolutionary economy, including the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC); collective ownership of land in rural areas; a large state sector in the economy; control of its banks, internal finance, and currency; and successive five-year plans offering strategic guidance to the economy. It has continued to pursue its goal of a long-term transition to a well-developed socialist society, in line with “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” In 2013, Beijing introduced the Belt and Road Initiative aimed at South-South cooperation. The launching in 2009 of the BRICS (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa)—expanded several times since and now known as BRICS+—represented another South-South economic shift, in which China has played the crucial role.
The growth of emerging economies in recent decades was bolstered by the globalization of production, with the shift by multinational corporations of factories to the Global South to take advantage of lower unit wage costs and higher profit margins. Nevertheless, the underdeveloped countries as a whole continue to be superexploited by the imperialist world system, at the head of which are the same monopoly capitalist powers as in Lenin’s day: the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. These countries, together with Canada, now constitute the G7. Although retaining its immense globally destructive military power, the West/North is seeing its economic power diminish, a fact made clear in the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, during which the G7 economies entered into a deep recession or depression, while the Chinese economy continued to rise at record rates.
It was these developments, viewed as threatening U.S. global hegemony, that led the United States to launch its Pivot to Asia, aimed at strategically containing China, in 2011. This was held in abeyance, however, in the first years following the 2012 change in Chinese leadership, with the U.S. national security establishment hoping to find a “Chinese Gorbachev” in Xi Jinping. Once it became apparent that China under its new leadership would continue to promote “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the United States launched its New Cold War on China in 2017. As in the previous Cold War with the Soviet Union, the New Cold War is directed not simply at China, designated as the main U.S. rival, but at all revolutionary breaks from, challenges to, and attempts to delink (partially or wholly) from the U.S.-centered imperial “rules-based” order. In this context, the United States/NATO is currently pursuing a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, preparing for a major war with China over Taiwan (internationally recognized as part of China, but under a separate governance), and instituting a tariff war against the entire world, though aimed principally at China.
As noted a year ago by Matthew Read in International Forschungsstelle DDR, “The anti-imperialist struggle from the last century has almost been flipped on its head: whereas anti-imperialism had previously been driven by strong subjective forces that were significantly restrained by their economic realities, today the strengthened economies of some ‘Global South’ states are objectively limiting the scope of imperialism without being driven by explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist governments. This rather paradoxical situation is a symptom of the deep crisis that the communist and working-class movements have been mired in since 1990.” With the objective material bases of anti-imperialism deepening today, the chief question becomes one of the subjective material basis, that is, the revolutionary subject. Without this, the anti-imperialist struggle will fail. Yet, the revolutionary subject is beginning to reemerge in new and powerful ways in response to the unprecedented planetary crisis of our times. What is clear is that the necessary basis of the global anti-imperialist/anticapitalist struggle is to be found in the historical development of a new, wider workers’ internationalism for the twenty-first century (Matthew Read, “The ‘Global South’: Analyses from the Socialist World,” Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR, June 26, 2024, ifddr.org).
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