Havana conference maps plans for a new international economic order

“The climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better.” – Jason Hickel.

Viva La Solidaridad Cubano-Palestina is emblematic of Cuba’s longstanding solidarity with Palestine – which predates this poster made by Marc Rudin in 1989 and still stands today.

Meeting in Havana, Cuba on April 28 to May 1, leading scholars, diplomats and policy-makers from 36 countries mapped plans to present a program of action for establishment of a New International Economic Order that will be presented to the September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

The Havana conference – co-convened by the Progressive International and the Asociación Nacional de Economistas y Contadores de Cuba – marked the 50th anniversary of an earlier version of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a set of proposals to end economic colonialism and dependency adopted by the UN on May 1, 1974.

A keynote speaker at the Havana conference was Jason Hickel. He teaches at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona and is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics. Hickel is best-known, perhaps for his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020), which presents degrowth as an anticapitalist alternative to ecological imperialism and unequal exchange.

I will say more about the Havana congress following Hickel’s address, which I thank the Progressive International for making available. – Richard Fidler

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Climate, Energy and Natural Resources

By Jason Hickel

Thank you to Progressive International for organizing this event, and thank you to our Cuban hosts, who have kept this revolution alive against extraordinary odds. The US blockade against Cuba, like the genocide in Gaza, is a constant reminder of the egregious violence of the imperialist world order and why we must overcome it.

So too is the ecological crisis. Comrades, I do not need to tell you about the severity of the situation we are in. It stares every sane observer in the face. But the dominant analysis of this crisis and what to do about it is woefully inadequate. We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and – like capitalism itself – is strongly characterized by colonial dynamics.

This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.

And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80-90% of the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3 degrees of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilize agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.

Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonization. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.

But so far our ruling classes are failing to do this. In 2015 the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or “well below” 2 degrees, while upholding the principle of equity. To achieve this goal, high-income countries, which have extremely high per capita emissions, must achieve extremely rapid decarbonization.

This is not occurring. In fact, at existing rates, even the best-performing high-income countries will take on average more than 200 years to bring emissions to zero, burning their fair-shares of the Paris-compliant carbon budget many times over. Dealing with the climate crisis is not complicated. We know exactly what needs to be done, but we are not doing it. Why? Because of capitalism.

If I wish to get one point across today, it is this: the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better. Let me briefly describe what I mean.

The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect candidates from time to time. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter. Production is controlled by capital: large corporations, commercial banks, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets… they are the ones who determine what to produce and how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve social and ecological objectives. Rather, it is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. So we get perverse patterns of investment: massive investment in producing things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons, because these things are highly profitable to capital… but we get chronic underinvestment in necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and regenerative agriculture, because these are much less profitable to capital or not profitable at all. This is a critically important point to grasp. In many cases renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels! But they have much lower profit margins, because they are less conducive to monopoly power. So investment keeps flowing to fossil fuels, even while the world burns.

Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods. To do this, simply issue the national currency to mobilize the productive forces for the necessary objectives, on the basis of need not on the basis of profit.

Now, massive public investment like this could drive inflation if it bumps up against the limits of the national productive capacity. To avoid this problem you need to reduce private demands on the productive forces. First, cut the purchasing power of the rich; and second, introduce credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors that we want to get rid of anyway: fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, etc.

What this does is it shifts labour and resources away from servicing the interests of capital accumulation and toward achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives. This is a socialist ecological strategy, and it is the only thing that will save us. Solving the ecological crisis requires achieving democratic control over the means of production. We need to be clear about this fact and begin building now the political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transformation.

Now, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that for the global South, this requires economic sovereignty. You cannot do ecological planning if you do not have sovereign control over your national productive forces! Struggle for national economic liberation is the precondition for ecological transition, and it can be achieved with the steps that my colleagues Ndongo and Fadhel have outlined: industrial policy, regional planning, and progressive delinking from the imperial core.

So that is the horizon. But at the same time we must advance our multilateral bargaining positions. This is what we need to do:

First, we need to push for universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the major limitation of the Paris Agreement in that it focuses squarely on the objective of scaling down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule. The objective here is to do this in a fair and just way: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy for development, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe offramp that prevents any economic instability.

Second, global South negotiators must collaborate to demand much faster decarbonization in the global North, consistent with their fair-shares of the remaining carbon budget.

Third, we must demand substantial resource transfers to the global South. Because the global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, it owes compensation to the global South for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes on them. Our research shows that this is set to be $192 trillion between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion dollars per year. Conveniently, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.

Of course, we should be clear about the fact that Western governments will not do any of this voluntarily. And it is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people.

The alternative is for global South governments to unite and collectively leverage the specific forms of power that they have in the world system. Western economies are totally dependent on production in the South. In fact, around 50% of all materials consumed in the global North are net-appropriated from the South. This is a travesty of justice but it is also a crucial point of leverage. Global South governments can and should form cartels to force the imperialist states to take more radical action toward decarbonization and climate justice.

And, by the way, speaking of South-South solidarity, global South governments should negotiate access to renewable energy technologies by establishing swap lines with China so that these can be obtained outside of the imperialist currencies, and thus limit their exposure to unequal exchange.

Comrades. We stand at a fork in the road. We can stick with the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns… or we can unite and set a new course for human history. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation. The world is waiting. This is the generation. Now is the moment. Hasta la victoria siempre.

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More on the Congress

The 50th Anniversary Congress on the New International Economic Order adopted a “roadmap for a Global South insurgency to remake the world system.” (For a full list of participants, please click here.)

The assembled delegates debated strategies and tactics for winning a New International Economic Order and worked on major, structural reform proposals under five themes:

• Finance, Debt, and the International Monetary System

• Science, Technology, and Innovation

• Climate, Energy, and Natural Resources

• Commodities, Industry, and International Trade

• Governance, Multilateralism, and International Law

Proposals included a debtors club, cartels for critical minerals, coordination on commodity prices, BRICS financing for Southern state capacity, detailed programmes of regional integration including industrial strategy and collective public purchasing for medicines and components, reduction of material-technical dependency on the Global North, regaining national control over foreign exchange earnings, national and regional industrial policy, investment in food and renewable energy sovereignty, a global global, multilayered buffer stock system for essential commodities including food and critical minerals, coordinated exit from ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes), denunciation of bilateral investment treaties, cross-border payment systems where international reserves are deposited, mobilisation of Special Drawing Rights for Southern development, establishing an association of raw material exporters, activate force majeure clauses so that all patents to combat climate change are ended, reparations for historical CO2 emissions from the Global North, and many more.

These proposals will be developed into a renewed and detailed Program of Action overseen by a technical committee of the Progressive International, and will be carried out through online fora and at further in-person conferences, with Algeria, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia all mooted as host nations.

The conference concluded with a presentation by President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez outlining the vision of the Cuban Presidency of the Group of 77 + China for the New International Economic Order.

See also: Proposals for Unilateral Decolonization and Economic Sovereignty, by Ndongo Samba Sylla (with Jason Hickel)

That other 9-11: The coup that ended Chile’s Popular Unity government

By Richard Fidler

This year, on September 11, we mark the 50^th anniversary of the coup in Chile. The violent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government put an end to a turbulent experiment in the parliamentary road to socialism initiated with the presidential election of Salvador Allende just three years earlier. The coup government headed by General Augusto Pinochet launched massive and deadly repression and inaugurated the capitalist world’s first major wave of neoliberal economic “reforms,” many of which remain in force today.

It seems appropriate to look back at the Chilean experience – the first breakthrough for the Left in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – and to think about the lessons to be learned for today’s Left and progressive movements. Allende’s electoral base, the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, was a coalition of his Socialist party with the Communist party and several much smaller parties around a programmatic agreement that promised “revolutionary changes” to “liberate Chile from imperialism, exploitation and poverty.” And it pledged to do this in full respect for and compliance with the country’s parliamentary, legal and other institutions.

For an initial balance sheet, I recommend an important article by Ralph Miliband first published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register. Miliband was a prominent sociologist and author of numerous books on socialism and politics, including Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. His essay, too lengthy to be reproduced here, merits reading in its entirety. But here is a brief excerpt, from its concluding section, on “the question of the state and the exercise of power.”

It was noted earlier that a major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization. But in this latter respect, much more needs to be done, not only to realize a set of long-term socialist objectives concerning the socialist exercise of power, but as a means either of avoiding armed confrontation, or of meeting it on the most advantageous and least costly terms if it turns out to be inevitable.

What this means is not simply ‘mobilizing the masses’ or ‘arming the workers’. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses’ and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs ‘mesh’ with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting. But the need is there, and it is imperative that it should be met, in whatever forms are most appropriate.

This is not, to all appearances, how the Allende regime moved. Some of the things that needed doing were done; but such ‘mobilization’ as occurred, and such preparations as were made, very late in the day, for a possible confrontation, lacked direction, coherence, in many cases even encouragement. Had the regime really encouraged the creation of a parallel infra-structure, it might have lived; and, incidentally, it might have had less trouble with its opponents and critics on the left, for instance in the MIR, since its members might not then have found the need so great to engage in actions of their own, which greatly embarrassed the government: they might have been more ready to cooperate with a government in whose revolutionary will they could have had greater confidence. In part at least, ‘ultra-leftism’ is the product of ‘citra-leftism’.

Salvador Allende was a noble figure and he died a heroic death. But hard though it is to say it, that is not the point. What matters, in the end, is not how he died, but whether he could have survived by pursuing different policies; and it is wrong to claim that there was no alternative to the policies that were pursued. In this as in many other realms, and here more than in most, facts only become compelling as one allows them to be so. Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Miliband focused his analysis on the trials and tribulations encountered by the UP government as it sought to pursue, and then retreat from, its reform program in the face of strenuous and mounting opposition by Chile’s capitalists backed by Washington. Writing from afar, he was unable to assess the reactions among the popular forces that constituted the government’s social base. That, however, is the subject matter of a remarkable study of “constituent popular power and the politics of conflict” in Chile from 1970 to 1973 that – in the words of its author Franck Gaudichaud – are “keys to understanding a thousand days that shook the world.”[1] Gaudichaud’s text, adapted from his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Michael Löwy, is a detailed analysis of the forms of “popular power(s)” created in their struggles by the workers, peasants and “pobladores” of the shanty-towns during the UP regime.

This research shows that at the heart of this period of social confrontations and political upheavals, various attempts at what we have proposed to call popular constituent power arose. A notion defined as ‘the creation of social and political experiments of organized counter-power and counter-hegemonies’ leading to ‘new forms of popular collective appropriations’ and ‘a calling into question – total or relative – of relations of production, forms of work organization, social and spatial hierarchies and material or symbolic mechanisms of domination’. It is precisely in the specific (and historically determined) configuration taken by these forms of popular power that the true originality of the Chilean process, its transformative capacity and its historical force are located. This, beyond the unprecedented nature of Allende’s project of transition to socialism or a supposed intangible stability of the democratic institutions of the ‘compromise State’. And it seems to us that there is here a path worth taking, to explore, in the study of other great political crises or Latin American revolutionary processes.

If we examine the various facets of this collective turmoil which mobilized several tens of thousands of employees, pobladores and left-wing activists, we see the emergence of a ‘grammar of protest’ little known to Popular Unity. This idée-force is that of popular power, but in this turbulent sky, one star shone more brightly than others: that of the industrial cordones.[2] Certainly, ‘the theme of the industrial cordones refers to one of the most important and successful experiences of Popular Unity, perhaps approaching one of the most realized utopias of Chilean socialism: that in which the workers built themselves as an historical actor with strong collective economic and political responsibility within the ongoing process. Appearing most of the time on the outskirts of the major cities, these are territorial bodies of class coordination, bringing together the unions of several companies in a specific urban area, with the immediate aim of realizing demands such as the extension of the nationalized sector, workers’ control of production, the self-defense of factories, the increase in wages or even, in the medium term, the establishment of a new institutional architecture, based on municipal and provincial popular councils. The cordones thus draw a new topography of struggles in urban areas, alongside other actors in the social movement. They gradually anchor themselves in a city in struggle and territories appropriated by and for massively mobilized popular classes.

A militant in the Chilean process in the early 1970s was the Peruvian peasant leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died this year at the age of 89. Released from prison in 1970 by Peru’s revolutionary military junta, Blanco made his way to Chile. He authored many articles on the grassroots mobilizations and political conflicts under the UP government. Some were translated and published in English in Intercontinental Press, a socialist newsweekly published in New York City.[3] They provide insightful analyses into the class dynamics of the events, and can be accessed on line. Here is a representative sample:

Chilean Workers Organize Distribution, April 23, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1115.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,35

Right Wing in Popular Unity Consolidates, April 30, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1116.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile, May 7, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1117.pdf#page=8&view=FitV,35

The Sharpening Struggle in Chile, May 28, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1120.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Provocations, Labor Unrest in Chile, June 4, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1121.pdf#page=11&view=FitV,35

Chilean Workers Organize to Meet the Rightist Threat, June 11, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1122.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35

The Workers’ Cordones Challenge the Reformists, June 18, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1123.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

The Role of the Cordones Industriales, November 26, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1142.pdf#page=19&view=FitV,35

Also worth reading:

Allende’s dream, Pinochet’s coup and Chile’s present By Carmen Aguirre.

People in Chile never stopped resisting the dictatorship that began 50 years ago, or seeking to revive the social reforms of the 1970s. A childhood in exile has made it impossible for me to forget that.

This article, published in the Toronto Globe & Mail September 8, is remarkable not least because it is almost unique, amongst the coverage of Chile’s coup in the business media, to remind us of the complicity of Pierre Trudeau’s government in related events before, during and after the Pinochet coup.

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[1] Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970-1973, Mille jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (Presses universitaires de Rennes 2013, free on-line since 2017). In French only, at present.

[2] The Spanish word cordones could be roughly translated in English as “lanyards,” that is, interlaced bodies of workers in different workplaces or geographic units.

[3] As a staff writer for Intercontinental Press in the early 1970s, I met Hugo Blanco for the first time in 1974, in Italy, at the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International.

The war in Ukraine: four reductions we must avoid

By Rafael Bernabe

Rafael Bernabe is a Puerto Rican historian and sociologist who is currently an elected member of the Puerto Rico Senate representing the left-wing Citizens’ Victory Movement (Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, or MVC). The following is a translation of his article La guerra en Ucrania: cuatro reducciones que debemos evitar. First published a year ago, it is all the more relevant today in light of the issues debated in the international Left since then. – Richard Fidler

“Reductionism” is an error that has been widely discussed in the history of Marxism. It is the mistake of reducing a complex process or phenomenon to one of its elements. It is a form of oversimplification or one-sidedness. The political and practical consequences of such one-sidedness can be considerable. In this sense, it seems to us that there are four reductions that we must avoid when analyzing and reacting to the armed conflict unleashed by the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

First reduction. We must not reduce the war to a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism (or despotism, dictatorship, etc.). There should be no doubt about the authoritarian and anti-democratic nature of Vladimir Putin’s government, but that does not mean that we should see NATO or its members as a democratic force. Some of those members (Turkey) are far from being democratic governments, even by the most undemanding criteria. Some of its allies and favored governments are downright undemocratic (Saudi Arabia). On more than one occasion they have supported the overthrow of democratically elected governments and protected those who overthrew them (Greece). NATO is one of the weaponized arms of Western imperialism and, some argue, of US imperialism within the Western imperialist bloc (tensions exist and have existed within that bloc).

The idea that NATO would dissolve after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact was based on the idea that its raison d’être was the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies. but that was part of its objective: the broader objective is the defense of Western imperialist (and capitalist) rule on a global level, against any threat. In recent decades this has included the imposition of the neoliberal order across the planet. This is why the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, far from leading to the demise of NATO, was followed by its eastward expansion. And the frictions caused by this expansion led, as was foreseen since the mid-1990s, to the aggravation of tensions, which is undoubtedly one of the causes of the present conflict between NATO and the Russian Federation. Those who denounce the role of NATO expansion in the preparation of the conflict are right. That is undoubtedly an aspect of the war that we cannot lose sight of. Against this expansionism of NATO and against Western imperialist policy in general, how does the left respond? The general line of this response is well known: building a defense of the living standards and immediate interests of the majority of the population, linking them to an anti-armament, anti-interventionist and internationalist policy, a movement to which it must fight to give an increasingly frankly anti-capitalist meaning.

Second reduction. We must not reduce imperialism to Western imperialism or US imperialism. The transformations in Russia and China during the last decades have created two great capitalist powers interested in consolidating their own zones of influence and political, economic and military control and the projection of their interests beyond their borders. The fact that these imperialist projects are weaker than Western imperialism does not change their content or their nature. We are, as Lenin described in his classic study, faced with a world of growing inter-imperialist conflicts. NATO’s eastward expansion clashes with the Russian Federation’s attempt to create its own zone of influence in territories of the former Soviet Union. The preponderance of the United States and its allies in Asia and the Pacific clashes with China’s objective of carving out its sphere of influence in that vast region. Those who argue that Putin or China are reacting to Western imperialism are right: Western imperialism is a dominant and aggressive force. But it must be underlined that the Russian and Chinese governments respond, not as anti-imperialist forces, but with their own plans for control and dominance over the disputed areas. Given this, the left must respond with the position already formulated by Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and the internationalist current a century ago: we refuse to take sides in favor of one imperialism against another.

It should be stressed that, as all imperialisms are aggressive and predatory, when they denounce each other in many cases the complaints are true. During the First World War, German imperialism denounced the despotic character of Tsarism and French imperialism denounced German militarism. After the war, German imperialism denounced the abuses of the Versailles peace and Japanese imperialism denounced the excesses of Western imperialism in Asia. They were all true accusations. But none of them justified supporting German, Russian, or French imperialism during the war, or German rearmament after the war, or Japanese imperialism against Western imperialism, let alone supporting the Japanese invasion of Indochina, Indonesia, or the Philippines. Similarly, our rejection of NATO and Western imperialism cannot lead us to support or tolerate or fail to denounce the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

We have heard speeches refusing to reject the invasion of Ukraine, bringing up Saudi Arabia’s aggression against Yemen, or Israel’s occupation of Palestine. But the crimes of Western imperialism cannot be used to justify Putin’s aggression. In any case, it is necessary to denounce all the aggressions and occupations indicated. It is the only consistent anti-imperialist position.

In short, we have to reject NATO imperialism, but not to support the expansionism of the Russian Federation headed by Putin or the ambitions of Xi Jinping’s government. We do not reject one imperialism to support another. Neither NATO to support Putin nor Putin to support NATO. We reject both. Therefore, while we do not stop denouncing Western imperialism, we unequivocally reject the invasion and occupation of areas of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and demand the immediate withdrawal of Russian military forces.

Third reduction. We must not reduce the war between Ukraine and Russia to an inter-imperialist (by proxy) war or conflict between NATO and the Russian Federation. The interest of Western imperialism in dealing a defeat to its Russian rival does not nullify the fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a violation of its right to self-determination (a right explicitly rejected by Putin in his polemic against Lenin in his speech justifying the invasion [[1]] and that the Ukrainian resistance is a just war against an imperialist aggression that we must support. For the same reason, we must recognize their right to obtain the necessary weapons to resist, wherever they can find them. Nothing prevents us from rejecting the increase in NATO’s arms spending, from demanding the dissolution of NATO and, at the same time, from recognizing the right of the Ukrainian people to obtain arms. To reject or denounce the Russian invasion, but to deny Ukraine’s right to arms (in the name of peace, for example), is to leave it literally defenseless against the invasion we are denouncing.

But here, our consistent anti-imperialist position obliges us to warn the people of Ukraine that their resistance agenda and that of Western imperialism are not identical, but divergent. While receiving weapons, they should have no illusions about this: NATO has an interest in handing Russia a defeat, and it does not and will not hesitate to subordinate the well-being of the Ukrainian people to that goal. We cannot dictate to Ukraine how or for how long to develop resistance, but we can warn Ukraine that letting NATO dictate such terms is not in the interests of its people.

Fourth reduction. This reduction is a variant and usually accompanies the first one we discussed above. We must not reduce the conflict between the Zelensky and Putin governments to a clash between democracy and despotism. As we indicated, there is no doubt about the authoritarian and undemocratic character of Putin’s government. But this does not make Zelensky’s a paragon of democracy. On the contrary, he has perpetuated or initiated frankly anti-democratic, repressive, nationalist and discriminatory, anti-worker and neoliberal measures and tolerated or encouraged the presence and action of frankly neo-fascist groups. Solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance against the Russian invasion does not extend to political support for or confidence in the Zelensky government. Putin has said that Ukraine must be “denazified”. One can partly agree with this idea, but in any case, the change of government in Ukraine is a task that will have to be carried out by the people of Ukraine, not an excuse that justifies the Russian invasion. Similarly, spokesmen for Western imperialism affirm that Russia must be freed from Putin’s despotism, which is true: but that is a task for the Russian people, not for NATO.

Let us recall again the precedent of Japanese imperialism. During the 1930s, the international left supported China in the face of Japanese aggression. China was supported, despite the fact that its government was controlled by the repressive and corrupt Guomindang apparatus, headed by Chiang Kai-Shek (fiercely anti-communist and perpetrator of the 1927 massacre) and that government was supported by western imperialism. Despite all that, the Chinese resistance was a just fight against Japanese imperialism. For the same reason, supporting this resistance, even with weapons provided by Western imperialism, should not imply support for the Guomindang government. Today we must support the Ukrainian resistance, despite its government and the support it receives from an imperialist camp.

Imperialisms, while denouncing each other, help to justify themselves before their peoples. Russian aggression against Ukraine helps legitimize NATO as a shield against Russian aggression. It has facilitated and accelerated its expansion and made it more difficult to build a broad anti-NATO and anti-imperialist movement in Europe. NATO aggressions help legitimize Putin as a defender of Russian sovereignty and make it more difficult to build a movement against his government. All of this makes the work of the anti-imperialists more difficult, but it remains equally urgent. To be effective, you must avoid all four reductions we have indicated.

The first reduction has been assumed by some progressive voices, including that of Paul Mason, in England. This position, in order to reject the Russian invasion, becomes an apology for NATO and Western imperialism. This position will be rightly rejected by all opponents of Western imperialism around the world, for example, in Latin America.

The second reduction is very common in Latin America. This position, in order to reject North American and Western imperialism, sides with or (at best) ignores the aggressions of the Russian Federation and the capitalist and repressive nature of Putin’s government. This position will be rightly rejected by all who suffer the consequences of Putin’s rule in Russia and outside of Russia, to begin with in the Ukraine.

The third reduction is a mistake on the part of the internationalist and anti-imperialist left, which rightly rejects both NATO and Putin. This position, in order to oppose NATO’s imperialist agenda or a prolongation of the war, leaves the Ukrainian resistance in the hands of the Russian invasion. It is a position that will be logically rejected by those in Ukraine resisting Russian aggression and those elsewhere who understand the justice of such resistance.

The fourth reduction often accompanies the first and becomes an apology for evading the reactionary policies of the Zelensky government.

We need a consistent, multilateral, non-reductionist position that can unite progressive forces in the West, in Russia, in Ukraine and throughout the world.

Let’s summarize our alternative:

· Rejection of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and demand for the withdrawal of Russian forces.

· Recognition of Ukraine’s right to arm itself in order to defend itself against invasion.

· Rejection of the expansion and imperialist agenda of NATO and the increase in military spending.

· No political support, and rejection of the regressive policies, of the Ukrainian government.

· Support for initiatives and movements against the war in Russia

This is the only position that allows us to unite progressive forces from the West, Russia and Ukraine and beyond Europe under a common anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist orientation.

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Many of Rafael Bernabe’s writings have been published in English in the US socialist publication Against the Current: https://againstthecurrent.org/rafael-bernabe/

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[1] “Text of Vladimir Putin’s Speech,” https://theprint.in/world/modern-ukraine-entirely-created-by-russia-read-full-text-of-vladimir-putins-speech/843801/.

The imperial system in crisis

Russian armoured vehicles proceeding toward Kherson, Ukraine.

Claudio Katz is an economist, professor at the University of Buenos Aires, and member of Economists of the Left. He is also a research officer with CONICET, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina.

This is a synthesis of a paper he presented at the conference on “Imperialism in the new global situation,” held in the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico DF, June 6, 2022. View a video of the presentation here. Read the original in Spanish here. This translation by Federico Fuentes is reproduced from Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal, where it was first published.

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Abstract: Imperialism safeguards the exploitation of workers and the subjugation of the periphery, using mechanisms adapted to the transformations undergone by capitalism. That adaptation is an ongoing process at present. US leadership has been undermined by economic deterioration and failed wars. It also lacks the plasticity its British predecessor had for handing over command.

Russia does not participate in the dominant group, but is driving forward the gestation of a non-hegemonic empire, one quite distinct from tsarism and the USSR. China’s protagonism is not synonymous with imperial expansion. Its defensive strategies coexist with an incomplete capitalist restoration that has incorporated the accumulation of profits at the expense of the periphery. In other regions contested pre-eminence has given new currency to the status of sub-imperialism.

The centrality of coercion to imperialism is diluted by theses that solely focus on hegemony. The current imperial system diverges from the old rivalries between powers and cannot be clarified through economic criteria alone. Geopolitical confrontations disprove the thesis of a global empire sustained by transnationalised classes and states.

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Debates about imperialism have reappeared after a winding detour. During the first half of the past century, this concept was widely utilised to characterise bellicose confrontations between great powers. Subsequently, it was identified with exploitation of the periphery by the economies of the centre, until the rise of neoliberalism lessened the conceptual weight of this term.

At the beginning of the new millennium, focus on imperialism took a back seat, with the notion itself falling into disuse. This disinterest coincided with a weakening of critical viewpoints on contemporary society. But the United States invasion of Iraq eroded this complacency and triggered a resurgence of discussions on the mechanisms of international domination. Denunciations of imperialism regained importance and criticisms of US military aggressiveness multiplied.

These objections subsequently took on the substitute notion of hegemony, which gained importance amid studies on the decline of the United States in the face of China’s rise. Hegemony was emphasised to assess how the dispute between the world’s two major powers was unfolding in the geopolitical, ideological and economic terrain. The coercive feature that distinguishes imperialism from other notions lost its relevance in many reflections on the US-China confrontation.

Just as this replacement notion seemed to prevail — alongside the new centrality given to the notions of multipolarity and hegemonic transition — references to imperialism regained weight due to an unexpected event. This term has reappeared with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a means to highlight Moscow’s expansionism.

Unique features and adaptations

The Western media frequently use the category of imperialism to contrast the tyrannical policies of the Kremlin or Beijing with the respectful actions of Washington or Brussels. This biased use of the term hinders any understanding of the problem. The logic of imperialism is only understandable if we overcome these crude views and explore the relationship of the concept with its basis in capitalism.

This analytical path has been explored by various Marxist thinkers, who study the contemporary dynamics of imperialism on the basis of mutations that have occurred in the capitalist system. In these approaches, imperialism is seen as a notion that incorporates the international mechanisms of domination used by the enriched minorities to exploit the popular majorities.

Imperialism is the main instrument of this subjection, but it operates not within each country but at the level of inter-state relations and in the dynamics of competition, the use of force and military intervention. It is an essential mechanism for the continuity of capitalism and has been present since the first days of the system, mutating in accordance with the changes within this social regime. Imperialism has never constituted a specific stage or epoch of capitalism. It has always embodied the forms adopted by geopolitical-military supremacy in each era of the system.

Because of this historical variability, today’s imperialism differs from its antecedents. Not only is it qualitatively different from pre-capitalist (feudal, tributary or slave) empires, which were based on territorial expansion or control of trade, but it bears little resemblance to the classic imperialism conceptualised by Lenin, when great powers waged war for control of markets and colonies.

Contemporary imperialism also differs from the US-led model of the second half of the 20th century. The world’s leading power introduced novel elements of collective coordination and subjugation of partners to ensure the protection of all dominant classes in the face of popular insurgency and the danger of socialism.

In all these various stages, imperialism guaranteed that advanced economies benefited from the use of the resources of the periphery. The coercive devices used by the great powers ensured that the capitalists of the centre captured the wealth of dependent countries. In this way, imperialism ensured the continuity of underdevelopment in relegated parts of the world.

This perpetuation recreated the mechanisms of transfer of value from dominated economies to their dominant peers. Inequality between the two poles of world capitalism was reproduced through various productive, trade and financial modalities.

Mutations and lack of definition

Twenty-first century imperialism must be evaluated in light of the enormous changes that have occurred in contemporary capitalism. For the past 40 years a new pattern of accumulation has prevailed based on low growth in the West and significant expansion in the East linked together by the globalisation of production. Internationalisation of the manufacturing process, subcontracting and value chains underpin this productive model that has been sustained by the information revolution. This development of digital capitalism has led to mass unemployment and to the generalisation of precariousness, insecurity and labor flexibilisation.

This new model operates through financialisation, which introduced credit autonomy for companies, the securitisation of banks, and family management of mortgages and pensions. The growing weight of the financial sector within the current functioning of the economy has, in turn, multiplied the cases of periodic outbreak of deep crises.

Speculative bubbles — which corrode the banking system and lead to increasingly large-scale government bailouts — have accentuated the imbalances of today’s capitalism. The system has been greatly affected by the tensions caused by overproduction (which propelled globalisation) and the fracturing of purchasing power (which boosted neoliberalism).

The current scheme, moreover, incubates potential catastrophes of greater scope due to the relentless deterioration of the environment generated by competition for greater profits. The recent pandemic was only a warning in terms of the grave scale of these imbalances. The end of the pandemic has led not to the expected “return to normality”, but rather to a scenario of war, inflation and breakdown of global supply chains.

The crisis is beginning to take on new contours and no one knows what direction economic policy will take in the coming period. Alongside renewed state intervention, a dispute over whether to pursue a neo-Keynesian turn or an opposite path of relaunching neoliberalism remains unresolved.

Either of these paths will simply ratify the pre-eminence of the new model of globalised, digital, precarious and financialised capitalism, with its ensuant scale of unmanageable contradictions. This model is as visible as the dramatic magnitude of its imbalances.

Clarity on contemporary capitalism does not extend, however, to the geopolitical or military terrain. Twenty-first century imperialism is marked by an accumulation of uncertainties, lack of definitions and ambivalences that go far beyond its economic foundation. The radical mutations that have taken place in recent decades in this latter sphere have not been extended to other areas. It is this divorce that underpins the enormous complexity of the current imperial framework.

Erosion of imperial leadership

The existence of a dominant bloc led by the United States is the main characteristic of the contemporary imperial system. The world’s largest power is the greatest exponent of the new model and the clear manager of the apparatus of international coercion that secures domination by the wealthy. A diagnosis of existing imperialism passes through an evaluation of the United States, which concentrates all the tensions of this apparatus.

The primary contradiction of present-day imperialism lies in the impotence of its conductor. The colossus of the North has seen its leadership eroded as a consequence of the deep crisis affecting its economy. Washington has lost the preponderance it had in the past and its declining manufacturing competitiveness is not offset by its continued financial domination or its significant technological supremacy.

The United States was able to corroborate its advantages compared to other powers during the 2008 crisis. But the major setbacks in Europe and Japan did not lessen the systemic decline of the US economy, nor did it attenuate China’s sustained rise. The United States has not been able to contain the geographical reconfiguration of world production towards Asia.

This economic erosion is affecting US foreign policy, which has lost its traditional domestic support. The old homogeneity of the Yankee giant has been shattered by the dramatic political rift confronting the country. The United States is corroded by racial tensions and political-cultural fractures that counterpose the “America First” sentiments of the interior with the globalism of the coastal populations.

This deterioration has had an impact on Pentagon operations, which can no longer count on the support they once enjoyed in the past. The privatisation of war is taking place in a context of growing domestic disapproval of foreign military adventures.

The US economy is not simply facing a reversal of its continued supremacy. The international weight of the US state apparatus and the primacy of its finances contrast with the country’s trade and productive decline.

This erosion does not imply that an inexorable and uninterrupted decline will take place. The United States has not managed to restore its old leadership, but it continues to play a dominant role and its imperial future cannot be clarified by applying the historical-determinist criteria postulated by the theory of cyclical rises and declines of empires. The decline of the US economy is synonymous with crisis, but not with terminal collapse at some pre-determined date.

In fact, the power that the United States preserves is based more on its military deployments than on the impact of its economy. For this reason, it is essential to analyse the world’s largest power through the imperial lens.

Military failures

Washington has been trying for several decades to regain its leadership through the use of force. The main features of today’s imperialism are concentrated in these incursions. The Pentagon manages a network of contractors who enrich themselves through war by recycling the military-industrial apparatus. They retain the same pre-eminence in periods of wartime détente as they do in periods of high conflict.

The US economic model of rearmament is reproduced via increased exports, high prices and permanent displays of firepower. This visibility requires the multiplication of hybrid wars and all kinds of incursions by para-state formations.

With these deadly instruments, the United States has generated Dantesque scenarios of deaths and refugees. It has resorted to hypocritical justifications for humanitarian intervention and a “war against terrorism” to carry out heinous invasions in the “Greater Middle East”.

These operations included the gestation of the first jihadist gangs, which later took their own path of attacking their US godfather. The marginal terrorism that these groups fostered never reached the terrible scale of state terrorism that the Pentagon oversees. Washington has gone a long way towards completely pulverising some countries.

But the most striking feature of this destructive model has been its resounding failure. In the past twenty years, the project of US recomposition via military action has failed again and again. The “American century” conceived by neoconservative thinkers was a short-lived fantasy that even the Washington establishment abandoned to follow the advice of more pragmatic and realistic advisers.

Pentagon occupations failed to achieve their expected results and the United States was converted into a superpower that loses wars. Bush, Obama, Trump and, most recently, Biden have failed in all their attempts to use the country’s military superiority to induce a revival of the US economy.

This failure has been particularly visible in the Middle East. Washington has used its aggressions to stigmatise the peoples of that region, with images of primitive, authoritarian and violent masses unable to assimilate the wonders of modernity.

This nonsense was spread by the media to cover up for the US attempts to appropriate for itself the world’s largest oil reserves. But, after a tumultuous crusade, the United States was humiliated in Afghanistan, withdrew from Iraq, was unable to subdue Iran, failed in its attempts to create puppet governments in Libya and Syria, and has even had to deal with the boomerang effect of the jihadists that now fight against it.

Inflexible framework

The misfortunes faced by the world’s largest power will not lead it to abandon external interventionism or to withdraw to its own territory. The US ruling class needs to maintain its imperial action in order to sustain the primacy of the dollar, its control over oil, the business dealings of the military- industrial complex, the stability of Wall Street and the profits of technology companies.

For this reason, all White House occupants have tried new variants of the same counter-offensive. No US president can give up on attempts to reconstruct the country’s primacy. All of them have adopted this objective, but never achieved it. They all suffer from the same compulsion to seek out some path towards recovering their weakened leadership.

The United States does not have the plasticity of its British predecessor to hand over global command to a new partner. It does not have the capacity to execute a redeployment that was demonstrated by its transatlantic peer in the previous century. US inflexibility hinders it in adjusting to the current context and accentuates the difficulties it has in exercising leadership of the imperial system.

This rigidity is largely due to the commitments of a power that no longer acts alone. Washington heads a network of international alliances built in the mid-twentieth century to deal with the so-called socialist camp. This network is based on a close association with European alter-imperialism, which carries out its interventions under the aegis of the United States.

The capitalists of the Old Continent defend their own business dealings with autonomous operations in the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe, but act in strict harmony with the Pentagon and under a command articulated through NATO. The great empires of the past (England, France) preserve their influence in the old colonies, but all their moves are subject to Washington’s veto.

The same subordinate partnership is maintained with the co-empires of Israel, Australia and Canada. They share with their referent custody of the global order and carry out actions in line with the demands of their guardian. They tend to defend the same interests on a regional scale that the United States secures globally.

This articulated global system is a feature that today’s imperialism inherited from its post-war precedent. It operates in complete contrast with the model of diversified powers that disputed primacy during the first half of the previous century. The crisis of the hierarchical structure that succeeded this previous model is the critical feature of 21st century imperialism.

A forceful expression of this inconsistency was the fleeting character of the unipolar model that the neoconservative project imagined for a new and prolonged “American century”. Instead of this renaissance, a multipolar context emerged, confirming the loss of US supremacy vis-à-vis numerous actors in world geopolitics. Washington’s desired predominance has been replaced by a greater dispersion of power, which contrasts with the bipolarity that prevailed during the Cold War and with the failed attempt to impose a unipolar model following the USSR’s implosion.

Today’s imperialism operates, therefore, around a dominant bloc led by the United States and managed through NATO in close association with Europe and Washington’s regional partners. But the Pentagon’s failures to exercise its authority have created the current unresolved crisis, which is verified by the emergence of multipolarity.

A non-hegemonic empire in gestation

How can this updated concept of imperialism be applied to powers that are not part of this dominant bloc? This question hovers over the most complex enigmas of the 21st century. It is clear that Russia and China are large rival powers of NATO, which in the existing context are located in a non-hegemonic sphere. Given this differentiated location, can they be said to hold an imperial status?

Clarifying this status has become particularly unavoidable in Russia’s case, following the start of the war in Ukraine. For Western liberals, Moscow’s imperialism is an obvious fact, one rooted in the authoritarian history of a country that shunned the virtues of modernity to opt for the dark backwardness of the East. Using this tired, old script from the Cold War, they counterpose Russian totalitarianism to the wonders of US democracy.

But it is impossible to clarify the contemporary profile of the Eurasian giant with such absurd assumptions. Russia’s potential imperial status must be evaluated in terms of the consolidation of capitalism and the transformation of the old bureaucracy into a new oligarchy of millionaires.

It is evident that the pillars of capitalism have been consolidated in Russia, with the entrenchment of private ownership of the means of production and consequent patterns of profit, competition and exploitation, under a political model at the service of the ruling class. Yeltsin forged a republic of oligarchs and Putin simply curbed the predatory dynamics of that system, without reversing the privileges enjoyed by the newly enriched minority.

Russian capitalism is very vulnerable to the uncontrolled influence maintained by different types of mafias. Informal mechanisms of surplus appropriation also recycle the economic adversities of the old model of compulsive planning. Moreover, the predominant pattern of raw materials exports affects the manufacturing apparatus and reproduces a significant draining of national resources abroad.

On the geopolitical level, Russia is a favourite target of NATO, which has tried to break up the country by means of a large deployment of missiles on its border. But Putin has also stepped up Russian intervention in the post-Soviet sphere and has carried out military actions that go beyond any defensive dynamic and logic of deterrence.

In this context, Russia is not part of the dominant imperialist circuit, but it implements policies of domination in its region that are typical of a non-hegemonic empire in gestation.

Differences with the past

Moscow does not participate within the dominant group of world capitalism. It lacks a significant finance capital sector and has few large international companies. It has specialised in the export of oil and gas, and has consolidated its position as an intermediate economy with few connections with the periphery. It does not obtain significant profits from unequal exchange.

However, with this secondary economic location, Russia exhibits a potentially imperial profile based on its foreign interventions, powerful geopolitical actions and deep tensions with the United States.

This external protagonism has not led to the reconstitution of the old tsarist empire. The differences with that past are as monumental as the qualitative differences with the social regimes of the feudal era.

The asymmetries are equally significant with regards to the USSR. Putin has not reconstituted so-called “Soviet imperialism”, an inconsistent category that is structurally incompatible with the non-capitalist character of the model that existed prior to its implosion in 1989. The USSR was led by a ruling bureaucracy that acted in an oppressive manner, but it did not engage in imperialist actions in its conflicts with Yugoslavia, China or Czechoslovakia.

At present, internal colonialism persists, perpetuating inequalities between regions and the primacy of the Great Russian minority. But this oppressive modality does not achieve the scale of the apartheid in South Africa or Palestine. Moreover, the determinant factor for an imperial status is external expansion, which until the Ukrainian war only appeared to be a tendency when it came to Moscow.

The imperialist project is effectively backed by right-wing sectors that promote the business of war, foreign adventures, nationalism and Islamophobic campaigns. But this course is resisted by an internationalised liberal elite and Putin has, for a while, governed by maintaining a balance between both groups.

It should not be forgotten that Russia is also located at the antipodes of a dependent or semi-colonial status. It is a major international player with a strong protagonism abroad, that has modernised its military structure and upheld its position as the world’s second largest arms exporter.

Instead of helping its neighbours, Moscow reinforces its own dominant project by, for example, sending troops to Kazakhstan to support a neoliberal government that plunders oil revenues, represses strikes and outlaws the Communist Party.

The impact of Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has introduced a qualitative shift in the dynamics of Russia, and the final results of this incursion will have a drastic impact on the country’s geopolitical status. The imperial tendencies that only appeared as embryonic possibilities have taken on a new significance.

Certainly, the US was primarily responsible through its attempts to bring Kyiv into NATO’s missile network directed against Moscow and by encouraging the violence of far-right militias in the Donbas. But Putin carried out an inadmissible military action, one that was functional to Western imperialism and that has no justification as a defensive action. The head of the Kremlin showed contempt for Ukrainians, aroused hatred towards the occupier and ignored the widespread aspiration for peaceful solutions. With his incursion, he created a very negative scenario for the emancipatory hopes of the peoples of Europe.

The final outcome of the incursion remains undefined and it is not known whether the effects of sanctions will be felt most in Russia or the West. But the scale of the humanitarian tragedy in terms of deaths and refugees is already huge and is convulsing the entire region. The United States is bent on prolonging the war to push Moscow into the same quagmire that the USSR faced in Afghanistan. That is why it is pushing Kyiv to reject negotiations that could halt hostilities. Washington intends to subordinate Europe to its militaristic agenda through an interminable conflict that would ensure Brussels’ financing of NATO. It no longer aspires to incorporate only Ukraine into that military alliance. It is now also pushing for the entry of Finland and Sweden.

In summary: Russia is a capitalist country that, until the incursion into Ukraine, did not have the general features of an imperial aggressor. But Putin’s path of geopolitical offensive bolsters that profile and tends toward transforming the empire in gestation into a consolidated empire. The failure of this operation could also lead to a premature neutralisation of the nascent empire.

China’s protagonism

China shares with Russia an analogous position within the non-hegemonic conglomerate and faces a similar conflict with the United States. For this reason, the same question arises regarding its current status: is it an imperialist power?

In China’s case, it is worth noting the exceptional development it has achieved in recent decades on the basis of socialist foundations, market complements and capitalist parameters. It has established a model that is connected with globalisation but centred on the local retention of surpluses. This combination has allowed for intense local accumulation intertwined with globalisation through reinvestment circuits and important controls on the movement of capital. The economy has steadily expanded, but without the neoliberalism and financialisation that affected its competitors.

China was also hit by the 2008 crisis, which introduced an insurmountable ceiling to the previous model of financed exports to the United States. This “Chinamerica” link became exhausted, revealing the imbalance generated by a trade surplus resolved through gigantic debts. This imbalance led to the current crisis.

The Chinese leadership initially opted for a shift towards local economic activity. But this decoupling did not generate benefits equivalent to those obtained under the previous globalised scheme. The new course accentuated overinvestment, real estate bubbles and a vicious circle of oversaving and overproduction, which forced China to resume its search for external markets through the ambitious New Silk Road project [also known as Belt and Roads Initiative].

This path is giving rise to tensions with China’s partners and faces the great limitation of an eventual stagnation of the world economy. It is very difficult to sustain a gigantic international infrastructure plan in a scenario of low global growth.

During the pandemic, China once again exhibited its greater level of efficiency compared with the United States and Europe, with its expeditious mechanisms for containing COVID-19. But the virus emerged from within its territory as a result of the imbalances precipitated by globalisation. Urban overcrowding and lack of controls on food industrialisation illustrate the dramatic consequences of capitalist penetration.

China is currently affected by the war that followed the pandemic. Its economy is highly susceptible to food and energy inflation. Moreover, it has to contend with the obstacles that hinder the functioning of global value chains.

A new location

China has not completed its transition to capitalism. This regime is very present in the country but it does not dominate across the entire economy. There is a significant prevalence of private ownership of large companies, which operate within the rules of profit, competition and exploitation, generating acute imbalances of overproduction. But unlike what happened in Eastern Europe and Russia, the new bourgeois class did not achieve control of the state. This prevents it from establishing the pre-eminence of the capitalist norms that prevail in most of the world.

China is defending itself in the geopolitical arena from US harassment. Obama initiated a sequence of aggressions, which Trump redoubled and Biden reinforced. The Pentagon has erected a naval encirclement while accelerating the gestation of a “NATO of the Pacific”, together with Japan, South Korea, Australia and India. It is also moving ahead with the remilitarisation of Taiwan and the attempt to burden Europe with the full cost of the confrontation with Russia in order to concentrate military resources on the struggle with China.

So far Beijing has not deployed actions equivalent to those of its rival. It has strengthened its sovereignty within a limited radius of miles to resist US attempts to internationalise its coastal space. It is shoring up its fisheries, underwater reserves and, above all, the maritime routes it needs to transport its goods.

This defensive reaction is a far cry from Washington’s onslaught in the Pacific Ocean. China has not sent battleships to the coasts of New York or California, and its growing military budget still maintains a significant gap with that of the Pentagon. Beijing prioritises economic exhaustion through a strategy that seeks to “tire out the enemy”. Moreover, it has avoided forming any network of military alliances comparable to NATO.

China does not, therefore, meet the basic conditions of an imperialist power. Its foreign policy differs greatly from such a profile. It does not dispatch troops abroad, maintains only one military base outside its borders (at a key trading crossroads) and does not get involved in foreign conflicts.

The new power has especially avoided the warmongering path followed by Germany and Japan in the 20th century, following guidelines of geopolitical prudence that were inconceivable in the past. It has profited from globalised forms of production that did not exist in the previous century.

China has also avoided the path followed by Russia and has not taken actions similar to those deployed by Moscow in Syria or Ukraine. For this reason, it is not following the imperial path that Russia has hinted at with increasing intensity.

This international moderation does not place China at the opposite pole of the imperial spectrum. The new power is already far removed from the Global South and has entered the universe of the central economies that accumulate profits at the expense of the periphery. It has left behind the spectrum of dependent nations and has positioned itself above the new group of emerging economies.

Chinese capitalists capture surplus value (through the firms they locate abroad) and profit from the supply of raw materials. The country has already achieved the status of creditor economy, in potential conflict with its debtors in the South. It profits from unequal exchange and absorbs surpluses from underdeveloped economies based on a level of productivity far above the average of its customers.

In summary: China has positioned itself within a non-hegemonic bloc that is far removed from the periphery. But it has not completed its capitalist status and has avoided enacting imperialist policies.

Semi-peripheries and sub-imperialism

Another novelty of the current scenario is the presence of important regional players. They exhibit less weight than the major powers, but have displayed sufficient relevance to require some classification within the imperial order. The weight of these players stems from the unexpected rise of intermediate economies that have consolidated their profile through structures of emerging industrialisation.

This irruption has made the old centre-periphery relationship more complex as a result of a double process of value drain from underdeveloped regions and value retention in the rising semi-peripheries. Several members of the Asian pole, India and Turkey exemplify this new condition in a context of growing bifurcation in the traditional universe of dependent countries. This scenario — more tripolar than binary — is gaining relevance in the contemporary international hierarchy.

Internal differentiation in the old periphery is extremely visible across all continents. The great gulf that separates Brazil and Mexico from Haiti and El Salvador in Latin America is reproduced on the same scale in Europe, Asia and Africa. These fractures have significant internal consequences and complement the underlying process of transformation of the old national bourgeoisies into new local bourgeoisies.

A complex variety of geopolitical statuses can be observed in this spectrum of semi-peripheral economies. In some cases, we have the emergence of an empire in gestation (Russia); in others, the traditional dependency persists (Argentina); and, in certain countries, the features of sub-imperialism have emerged.

This last category is not used to identify weaker variants of the imperial status. This lesser role is occupied by several NATO members (such as Belgium or Spain), who fill a simple role of subordination to US command. Nor does sub-empire allude to the current condition of former empires in decline (such as Portugal, Holland or Austria).

As Marini rightly anticipated, contemporary sub-empires operate as regional powers that maintain a contradictory relationship of association, subordination and tension with the US gendarme. This ambiguity coexists with the use of strong military actions in their disputes with regional competitors. Sub-empires operate on a scale far removed from greater world geopolitics, but with regional attacks that recall their ancient roots of long-standing empires.

Turkey is the main exponent of this modality in the Middle East. It displays significant expansionism, exhibits great duality vis-à-vis Washington, resorts to unpredictable moves, promotes external adventures and engages in an intense competitive battle with Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Specificities of the 21st century

On the basis of all the above elements we can deduce the features of contemporary imperialism. This system presents unique, novel and divergent modalities compared to its two precedents of the past century.

Today’s imperialism is a system structured around the dominant role exercised by the United States, in close connection with its alter-imperial partners in Europe and co-imperial extensions in other hemispheres.

This structure incorporates military actions to guarantee the transfer of value from the periphery to the centre, and faces a structural crisis after successive failures by the Pentagon that led to the current multipolar configuration.

Outside this dominant radius are two great powers. While China is expanding its economy with cautious external strategies, Russia is acting with the embryonic modalities of a new empire. Other sub-imperial formations of a much smaller scale dispute pre-eminence in regional scenarios through autonomous actions, but are also linked into the NATO framework.

This renewed Marxist interpretation upgrades the concept of imperialism, integrating the notion of hegemony in order to better understand contemporary geopolitics. It highlights the crisis of US leadership without postulating its inexorable decline or the inevitable emergence of a substitute power (China) or of several aligned replacements (BRICS).

This focus on the concept of imperialism also highlights the continued importance of military coercion, recalling that it has not lost its primacy in the face of the growing incidence of economics, diplomacy or ideology.

Classical views

Debates within Marxism include polemics between a renewed approach (which we have put forward) and the classical view. The latter view proposes using the same characterisation postulated by Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century.

It considers that the validity of this approach is not restricted to the period in which it was formulated, but rather extends to the present day. In the same way that Marx laid the lasting foundations for a characterisation of capitalism, Lenin postulated a thesis that has outlived the times in which it was formulated.

This approach objects to the existence of various models of imperialism, adapted to the successive changes of capitalism. It understands that a single scheme is sufficient to understand the dynamics of the past century.

From this characterisation, it draws an analogy between the current scenario and that which prevailed during World War I, arguing that the same inter-imperial conflict has reappeared today. It argues that Russia and China compete with their peers in the West, with policies similar to those deployed a hundred years ago by the powers that challenged the dominant forces.

In this light, it sees current conflicts as a competition for the spoils of the periphery. The war in Ukraine is seen as an example of this clash and the battle between Kyiv and Moscow is explained by an appetite for iron, gas or wheat resources in the disputed territory. All countries involved in this battle are seen as equal and denounced as camps in an inter-imperial struggle.

But this reasoning loses sight of the great differences between the current context and the past. At the beginning of the 20th century, a plurality of powers with comparable military forces clashed to assert their superiority. The stratified supremacy that the United States currently exercises over its NATO partners did not exist. This predominance confirms that powers no longer act as autonomous fighters. The United States directs both Europe and its extensions in other continents.

Moreover, an imperial system is now operating in the face of a certain variety of non-hegemonic alliances, which only demonstrate imperial tendencies in gestation. The dominant nucleus attacks and the formations in construction defend themselves. Unlike in the past century, there is no battle between equally offensive counterparts.

Lenin’s criteria

The classic thesis defines imperialism using guidelines that highlight the predominance of finance capital, monopolies and capital exports. With these parameters, it judges the status of Russia and China positively or negatively by the degree to which they fulfill or depart from those requirements.

Those that answer affirmatively and place Russia in the imperialist camp assess that its economy has expanded significantly, with investments abroad, global corporations and exploitation of the periphery. The same interpretation for China’s case emphasises that the world’s second largest economy already more than satisfies all the requirements of an imperial power.

Opposing evaluations point out that Russia has not yet joined the club of dominators because it lacks the powerful finance capital required for such a rise. They also note that it has few monopolies or outstanding companies in the ranking of international corporations. The same opinion for China’s case points out that the powerful Asian economy has not yet excelled in the export of capital or in the dominance of finance capital.

But these economic classifications drawn from characteristics formulated in 1916 are inadequate for evaluating contemporary imperialism. Lenin only described the features of the capitalism of his time, without using this evaluation to define a map of imperial classification. He thought, for example, that Russia belonged to the club of empires although it did not fulfill all the economic conditions required for such participation. The same was true of Japan, which was not a relevant exporter of capital, nor did it harbour preeminent forms of finance capital.

The current forced application of these requirements leads to countless confusions. There are many countries with powerful finance sectors, overseas investments and large monopolies (such as Switzerland), which do not deploy imperialist policies. In contrast, Russia’s own economy operates as if it was a mere semi-periphery in the global ranking, but it engages in the military actions of an empire in gestation. In turn, China meets all the conditions of the classic economic recipe book to be typified as an imperial giant but does not carry out military actions corresponding to that status.

The place of each power in the world economy does not, therefore, clarify its role as an empire. This role is elucidated by evaluating foreign policy, foreign intervention and geopolitical-military actions on the global chessboard. This approach put forward by a renewed Marxism sheds more light on the characteristics of current imperialism than the viewpoint postulated by those who simply update the classical view.

Transnationalism and global empire

Another alternative Marxist approach was put forward in the past decade by the thesis of global empire. This view achieved great popularity during the rise of the World Social Forums, postulating the actuality of a post-imperialist era that had overcome national capitalism and state intermediation. It featured a novel direct counterposition between dominators and dominated resulting from the dissolution of the old centres, the unrestricted mobility of capital and the extinction of the centre-periphery relationship.

In a framework of great euphoria with free trade and banking deregulation, it also underscored the existence of a ruling class amalgamated and intertwined through the transnationalisation of states. It viewed the United States as the incarnation of a globalised empire that transmits its structures and values to the entire planet.

This view has been belied by the current scenario of intense conflicts between major powers. The drastic clash between the United States and China is inexplicable from a point of view that postulates the dissolution of states and consequent disappearance of geopolitical crises between countries differentiated by their national foundations.

The thesis of global empire, moreover, ignores the limits and contradictions of globalisation, forgetting that capital cannot migrate unrestrictedly from one country to another, nor benefit from a free planetary displacement of labour. A continuous sequence of barriers obstructs the constitution of this homogeneous space at a global level.

This approach extrapolated possible, very long-term scenarios to immediate realities by imagining simple and abrupt globalisations. It diluted economy and geopolitics into a single process and ignored the continued protagonism of states, by imagining transnational entanglements between the main ruling classes. It forgot that the functioning of capitalism is based on the legal and coercive structure provided by the different states.

It was even more misguided to liken the pyramidal structure of the contemporary imperial system led by the United States to a global, horizontal empire devoid of national partners. This ignores that the primary power operates as the protector of the global order, but without dissolving its troops into a multinational army. Because of this accumulation of inconsistencies, the vision of a global empire has lost weight in current debates.

Conclusion

Renewed Marxist theory offers the most consistent characterisation of 21st century imperialism. It underlines the pre-eminence of a coercive military apparatus, headed by the United States and cohered through NATO, to ensure domination of the periphery and harass rival non-hegemonic formations such as Russia and China.

Those powers feature only embryonic or limited imperial modalities and carry out primarily defensive actions. The crisis of the imperial system is the critical fact of a period marked by the United States’ recurrent inability to recover its weakened primacy.

Cuba: The single party system confronts the crisis

A critical perspective from a Cuban historian

None of the ostensibly post-capitalist regimes established since 1917 has managed to find a way to sustain mass democratic forms of governance and to build the popular consciousness and capacities needed for the transition to socialist society. Whatever their origins, these regimes have come to rely on monolithic party formations that function essentially as a part of the institutional structure of the state, not independently of it. Cuba is no exception, notwithstanding its heroic history of mobilization against imperialist threats and in internationalist solidarity.

In the following article Cuban historian Alina Bárbara López Hernández explores this dilemma in the context of the social protests that occurred throughout Cuba on July 11. She focuses in particular on the way in which the single-Party system has shielded the government from popular concerns and demands, curtailed public political debate, alienated the youth, and fostered the growth of bureaucratic lethargy that hinders efforts at economic and social reform. Although she does not suggest a solution to this problem, she emphasizes the need to open up a debate on it within Cuba, and to encourage all forms of democratic expression within that process.

Alina Bárbara López Hernández is a professor, writer and historian based in Matanzas. She is the coordinator of the on-line publication La Joven Cuba, in which this article appeared. I have revised the English translation published in International Viewpoint. – Richard Fidler

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The single party system faced with the crisis

by Alina Bárbara López Hernández

A political party that governs alone, does not compete with another organization, and does not have to run in an election to be in power, would seem to have a great advantage. Paradoxically, that privilege is, at the same time, its greatest weakness.

Not having to negotiate power, taking it for granted that it will not be disputed, leads politically to a harmful attitude that assumes any hint of social pressure is unacceptable. When it occurs, the consequent reaction shows absolute ineptitude shielded with recklessness.

This authoritarian perspective is also strengthened by the teleological, mechanistic and anti-Marxist approach to history which assumes that the socialist revolution, once victorious, cannot retreat. This over-optimism closes off the possibility of any process of successful improvement or reform.

The collapse of the socialist camp shattered many constitutions that declared it irreversible. It is not the text in a legal treatise that counts, but the involvement of the people who find in that system the embodiment of their aspirations and who can modify it with that objective in mind.

The pressure of the majorities from below is what has made political systems evolve from ancient times until today. In the one-party model of bureaucratic socialism, the real and spontaneous participation of the citizenry in political activity is not allowed. This discriminatory condition explains why, faced with the July 11 social outburst, the Party reacted with brutality, in an authoritarian way rather than politically.

The lesson of thirty years ago was not learned in Cuba. In 2002, more than ten years after the disintegration of the USSR, a constitutional article declared socialism was irreversible, while the 2019 Constitution established that the Party is the “superior leading force of society and the State (...).” From that vantage point, the Party should have been in a better position to see that the conditions for a social explosion existed in Cuba. But not only was it not, but it has also demonstrated its incapacity to interpret the true causes of the conflict and to act accordingly.

The real causes of 11-J

The internal contradictions of social processes are the fundamental and determining factors. This principle of materialist dialectics is not applied by the Party in spite of its declared Marxist affiliation. Therefore, in the face of the social unrest, it has preferred to stick to a narrative that explains what happened based solely on external factors, real but not decisive: the pressures of the US blockade on Cuba, a soft coup, a fourth generation war.

Up to now, there has not been a deep and self-critical analysis by the Party concerning itself and its responsibility for the crisis. If there were, they would have admitted that none of the key proposals that in recent times created hope for changes to transform socialism from above came to anything. They were:

1. A reform process announced in 2007, fourteen years ago now, which promised – clarifying that it would do so “without haste” – “structural and conceptual changes” that we are still awaiting in the Cuban economy. And I say “in the economy” because the reform process never included the political dimension.

2. A Constitution approved in 2019 that, despite the debate it generated and the expectations it raised by including the concept of a Socialist Rule of Law, excluded any approach aimed at the transformation of the political system.

3. Three Party Congresses: the 6th, 7th and 8th, which in less than 15 years actually engaged less and less with the idea of reforming the model. In the last one, a little more than three months ago, a bucket of cold water was basically poured over the people, by perpetuating the thesis of stagnation and failing to address the serious social and political problems that had generated concern, not only among the youth but also in society as a whole.

A socialist system that cannot be influenced from below is a pipedream, and ours is trapped in a flagrant contradiction: we have approved a Constitution that is not viable. One part of it tends to sustain a situation of infringement of freedoms – especially in its Article 5 which declares the superiority of the single Party – while another part recognizes these rights and freedoms under a Socialist Rule of Law.

No exclusively economic reformist process is feasible because, when the citizenry is not actively involved in controlling the direction, results and speed of the transformations, changes run the risk of being dismantled or curtailed. Cuba has been no exception. The bureaucracy has become a “class for itself” within society and hinders changes and reforms that, although it accepts them on paper, it has delayed in practice.

A great unresolved conflict, wherever bureaucratic socialism is established, is that of converting state property into true social property. This aspiration has been utopian due to the lack of democratization, the lack of citizen participation in economic decisions, and the fact that the unions are no longer organizations that defend the interests of the workers.

The arrogant attitude of the Party is typical of a political model that failed. In February 1989, the Soviet magazine Sputnik devoted an issue to the stagnation that characterized the period of Leonid Brezhnev, and it asked these questions:

“Should the Party leadership become a special organ of power, which is above all other organs? If the Central Committee is a special organ of power, how do we control it? Can its decisions be protested as unconstitutional? Who is responsible in the event of failure of a decreed measure? If this superior organ in fact directs the country, then shouldn’t it be elected by all the people?”

In this political model the Party is selective, a “vanguard,” and not a popular party open to all, so that if it declares itself as a force superior to society it also sets itself above the people. For this not to be so, the people should be able to elect those who head the Party, and this is not allowed. If it is over and above everybody, and it is not “an electoral party,” it is out of the people’s control. That’s the political model that must be changed.

The younger sectors have no memory of the initial and most successful social policy stages in the revolutionary process. To them, the revolutionary narrative, the evident transformations and the benefits of the first decades have little impact.

They have known the last thirty years, with its legacy of poverty, a sustained increase in inequality, failed life prospects and the anticipation of emigration at ever-younger ages. The arrival of the Internet has coordinated them as a generation, allowing them to contrast opinions, build virtual spaces for participation that the political model denies them, and to generate actions.

So we must recognize that the main contradictions that led to the 11th July outburst are eminently political. The demands were not only for food and medicine or against the power cuts. These may have been the catalyst, but the “freedom” slogans that swept the island indicate the demand of the citizens to be recognized in a political process that has ignored them up to now.

Bread, circuses… and Senate

The party was totally disoriented by the 11th July events. This was shown by:

• the brutal scenes of repression against the demonstrators;
• the declarations calling for violence by the newly appointed first secretary of the Party – later toned down;
• an urgent meeting of the Political Bureau the day after the events – of which nothing has been revealed;
• and the usual organized acts of revolutionary reaffirmation almost a week later.

However, although it never acknowledges or apologizes, the Party knows that it made a very costly mistake.

Voices have been raised from sectors of the left and some prestigious figures and organizations, demanding respect for the political rights of peaceful demonstration and for freedom of expression in Cuba. Several governments, and the European Union as a bloc, have criticized the violent repression, surely unconstitutional.

Palliative measures are now beginning to be taken to alleviate the tragic shortages: an increase in the amount of rice, a staple in the standard food basket, effective this month until December; free distribution of products donated to Cuba (grains, pasta, sugar, and in some cases oil and meat products); a price reduction in some services of Etecsa, the communications monopoly.

In addition, long-standing requests that would have served to mitigate the crisis much earlier have now been approved: imports of food and medicines without restrictions and free of customs charges; credit sales in stores. Others may be announced in the coming days.

There is no doubt that the situation will be somewhat alleviated, but the Party must be very aware that none of these decisions will solve the Cuban dilemma which is, as I have already stated, of a political nature.

Perhaps they believe that by applying these palliatives they are discovering a new politics. They are wrong. Thousands of years ago, the Latin poet Juvenal, in his Satire X, immortalized a phrase that designated the practice of the rulers of his time: “Bread and circuses.”[1] It was the plan of Roman politicians to win over the urban plebs in exchange for wheat and entertainments so that they would lose their critical spirit, feeling satisfied by the false generosity of the rulers.

In Cuba we need bread and circuses, we are a suffering people, but – above all – we need to govern from below. We need to be the Senate, since our Senate has disappeared from the political scene. There is not a single statement from any member of the National Assembly of People’s Power, as such, in spite of the seriousness of the violent acts against a part of the people they are supposed to represent.

They have violated the legislative schedule saying it is impossible to meet in the middle of a pandemic. However, under the same conditions, the Party held its 8th congress and, after July 11, massive activities were organised in support of the government in all the provinces.

There has not yet been an official pronouncement from the Party leadership analyzing the facts, offering exact figures of the cities and towns involved, participants in the protests, people arrested and prosecuted. It was of no use to the single Party to have analyzed in the Political Bureau, a few days before the 8th Congress, a report entitled: “Study of the socio-political climate of Cuban society.” They understood nothing of that climate, or those who wrote the report did not portray reality.

Single Party bureaucratic socialism creates a kind of political demiurge that escapes the rule of law, since it places itself above it, accentuates political extremism and separates itself from the citizenry. So far all models with these characteristics, far from leading to a socialist society, have disguised a state capitalism with features of corruption and elitism.

It is time to debate this and organize ourselves to change it. It is possible now. As the president of the People’s Supreme Court declared to the international press, in Cuba the Constitution guarantees the right to peaceful demonstration.

July 30, 2021

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[1] “Panem et circenses,” Juvenal suggests, are the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom. https://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_juvenal_satire_x.html. – RF.