[US] John Bellamy Foster, trans. Li Xinyu: New Trends in the Denial of Imperialism by the Eurocentric Left
Since the outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of the Second International (during which nearly all social democratic parties in Europe aligned with their respective nation-states to join the imperialist war), the divergence on the left regarding the question of imperialism has never been more severe. This is a sign of the deepening structural crisis of contemporary capitalism. Although Eurocentrists within the Western Marxist camp have long attempted to weaken the theory of imperialism in various ways, Lenin’s classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism has remained at the core of all discussions on the subject for over a century. This is not only because it accurately explains the two World Wars but also because it provides an essential perspective for understanding the post-WWII global order. Furthermore, Lenin’s analysis was not isolated; it was supplemented and developed under new historical conditions through various theoretical frameworks such as dependency theory, the theory of unequal exchange, world-systems theory, and global value chain analysis. Consequently, the Marxist theory of imperialism has maintained its fundamental unity, providing guidance for global revolutionary struggles.
However, today in the West, those self-proclaimed "socialists" harbored by Eurocentric biases have gone as far as completely abandoning the Marxist theory of imperialism. The divergence between the Western left and the revolutionaries of the "Global South" on the issue of imperialism is greater than at any point in the 20th century. The historical roots of this split lie in the decline of U.S. hegemony and the relative weakening of the entire imperialist world order centered on the United States, European nations, and Japan, contrasted with the economic rise of former colonies and semi-colonies in the "Global South." Against this backdrop of extreme polarization, many on the left deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by the imperialist center, and there have recently even been sharp attacks directed at the anti-imperialist left.
At present, we frequently encounter the following contradictory assertions from the Western left: a nation cannot exploit another nation; monopoly capitalism as the economic base of imperialism does not exist; imperialist competition and exploitation between states have been replaced by class struggle within a thoroughly globalized transnational capitalism; all major powers today are capitalist nations participating in an imperialist struggle; imperialist nations can be judged primarily on their degree of "democracy vs. autocracy," and thus not all imperialisms are equal; imperialism is merely a political policy of one state invading another; "humanitarian imperialism" aimed at protecting human rights is justifiable; the ruling classes of the "Global South" are no longer anti-imperialist but possess transnationalist or sub-imperialist tendencies; the "anti-imperialist left" supports a morally "good" Global South against a morally "evil" Global North, holding a black-and-white binary view; economic imperialism has now been "reversed," and the "Global East/South" is exploiting the "Global West/North"; Lenin primarily studied inter-imperialist relations rather than the theory of center-periphery imperialism; and so on.
To understand the complex theoretical and historical issues involved here, it is necessary to study Lenin's analysis of imperialism—not only Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism but also his entire body of work on imperialism written between 1916 and 1920. Only in this way is it possible to understand how the theoretical system of imperialism developed in the 20th century on the basis of Lenin's analysis and the early Communist International, and how this theory was further refined after World War II. This will provide the foundation for criticizing the current denial of imperialism's existence by many on the left.
I. Lenin’s General Theory of Imperialism
At present, leftists holding Eurocentric positions generally believe that Lenin did not focus on the inequality between colonizing and colonized nations or between center and peripheral nations; instead, they argue his work primarily concerned horizontal conflicts between great capitalist powers. William I. Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, even insists that Lenin’s theory of imperialism has nothing to do with the exploitation of one nation by another.
Marx held in great contempt those who ignored "how in every country, one class enriches itself at the expense of another." Similarly, Lenin explicitly pointed out in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that the dominant trend of imperialism is that "a handful of the richest and most powerful states exploit an increasing number of small and weak nations." Later, he also noted that "the exploitation of oppressed nations—and especially the exploitation of colonies by a handful of 'Great' Powers" is the economic root of imperialism. Lenin was very clear that the exploitation referred to here is the "extraction of super-profits" by imperialist countries at the center of the capitalist world system from the oppressed nations in the colonial, semi-colonial, and dependent world.
Despite this, Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University, still argues that Lenin’s entire concept of viewing economic imperialism as monopoly capitalism is "flawed," and that Lenin’s ideas—that imperialism is economic (and not just political) and that an upper stratum of the working class (the labor aristocracy) exists in developed capitalist countries that benefits from imperialism—are also "flawed," with the significance of his theory being limited primarily to the sphere of competition between capitalist states.
Part of the reason for this serious misunderstanding of Lenin's theory and its contemporary significance lies in the tendency of Western radical scholars to study Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in isolation, while ignoring his other documents on imperialism written between 1916 and 1920. These documents supplement Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and focus directly on the exploitation of underdeveloped nations by the major imperialist powers.
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin wrote: "If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." The rise of monopoly accumulation replaced free competition, creating a vast field of super-profits within a relatively small number of firms that gradually dominated the direction of the economy. Immediately following this, Lenin summarized five features of imperialism: (1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital," of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among them; and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.
Lenin’s analysis above stood in direct opposition to that of Karl Kautsky, who believed that imperialism would develop into "ultra-imperialism," where the major capitalist nations would achieve unity through a "union of the strongest"—a thesis refuted by the two World Wars. Although the major capitalist countries formed a collective imperialist front after World War II, this was the result of U.S. global hegemony. Overall, Kautsky's view of imperialism as a "policy" is far less persuasive than Lenin's view of it as a "system."
The Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) in India has pointed out: "The focus of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was to reveal the nature of the (First) World War and its roots within capitalism. Therefore, in this work, Lenin did not explore the impact of imperialism on colonies and semi-colonies." To understand Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, it is necessary to examine Lenin's other works, primarily those written in the context of the founding of the Communist International when he directly faced the anti-imperialist struggles of peripheral nations, particularly in Asia.
Lenin was particularly concerned with the exploitation suffered by underdeveloped economies, which remained the primary historical contradiction he addressed in his overall analysis of imperialism. As early as 1916, Lenin mentioned the exploitation of colonies, semi-colonies, and dependent countries by the imperialist powers in his writings. In The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, he argued that while it was possible for some colonies/dependent nations to achieve a degree of self-determination under capitalism, "the demand of all revolutionary Social-Democrats for the immediate liberation of the colonies is also 'unrealisable' under capitalism without a series of revolutions."
Lenin not only believed that monopoly capital exploited colonies, semi-colonies, and dependent countries to obtain super-profits through these means, but also—as Engels had hinted—that this enabled monopoly capital to "bribe" a small portion of the working class (the upper stratum), a claim known as the "labor aristocracy" [1] thesis. Lenin emphatically reiterated this view in his 1920 preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He argued that it was precisely this that explained the more conservative nature of the British working-class movement and the movements in all the major imperialist countries. He wrote: "If we want to remain socialists, we must go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; any significance and content of the struggle against opportunism lies precisely in this."
In his Report to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East, Lenin emphasized how "a handful of people on the earth" had granted themselves "the right to exploit the majority." In this context, the struggle against imperialism even takes priority over the class struggle, although the two remain inherently linked in essence. "The socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie—no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism." "The civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism."
Lenin further elaborated on this point in the Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions. He argued that one must "clearly distinguish between the oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations"; "proletarian internationalism... demands the subordination of the interests of the proletarian struggle in any one country to the interests of that struggle on a world-wide scale." He believed that capitalism attempted to mask the extent of international exploitation by establishing nominally sovereign states which were, in reality, dependent on imperialist powers "economically, financially, and militarily."
Lenin reiterated these points in the Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions, concluding that under the current underdeveloped conditions of oppressed nations, "any national movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic one." These "national revolutionary" struggles (despite their dominant class character) required support, but only on the condition that they were "genuinely revolutionary." Lenin resolutely opposed the view that a revolution "must inevitably pass through the capitalist stage," arguing instead that given the anti-imperialist nature and complex class composition of these revolutions, and with the example of the Soviet Union set before them, it was conceivable they could develop into genuine socialist movements, fulfilling many developmental tasks associated with capitalism under non-capitalist conditions.
The Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928 represented a peak in the development of the theory of imperialism between the two World Wars. The Theses stated: "The entire economic policy of imperialism in the colonies is determined by its attempt to maintain and strengthen the dependence of the colonies, to increase the exploitation of the colonies, and to hinder the independent development of the colonies as much as possible... A large part of the surplus value extracted from the cheap labor power of the colonies and semi-colonies is transferred abroad, leading to a drain of wealth from the colonial countries."
The most difficult theoretical and practical problem is the class basis of anti-imperialist revolutions in underdeveloped countries. Lenin emphasized that the struggle against imperialism must achieve developmental goals usually associated with the national bourgeoisie, but the nature of the "national revolutionary" struggle is not necessarily determined by the national bourgeoisie. Mao Zedong's 1925 article "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" made a significant contribution to the anti-imperialist struggle and the socialist revolution. In this article, Mao argued that "in economically backward, semi-colonial China, the landlord class and the comprador [2] class are entirely appendages of the international bourgeoisie," while the middle class (referring primarily to the national bourgeoisie) "desires to attain the status of the big bourgeoisie." Therefore, "the industrial proletariat is the leading force in the revolution. All semi-proletarians and the petty bourgeoisie are our closest friends."
II. Dependency, Unequal Exchange, the Imperialist World System, and Global Value Chains
After World War II, the imperialist world system underwent a historical evolution that transcended the geopolitical conditions of Lenin's era. The United States became the undisputed hegemon of the capitalist world system and launched the Cold War, committing itself to containing the Soviet Union while simultaneously suppressing revolutions around the world. However, following the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, a revolutionary wave of decolonization inspired by Marxism swept across Asia and Africa.
Compared to Asia and Africa, South and Central America had relatively few colonies due to the anti-colonial movements against Spanish and Portuguese rule that broke out in the 19th century, which led to the establishment of sovereign states. However, Latin American countries had long since collapsed into economic appendages or neo-colonies of Britain and the United States. Therefore, the primary issue in the region was breaking free from the economic, political, and cultural dependence imposed by U.S. imperialism. Latin American Marxist theory, particularly regarding imperialism, can be said to originate from the works of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Augusto César Sandino's struggle against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua awakened anti-imperialist consciousness throughout Latin America. Later, the Cuban Revolution, inspired by the anti-imperialist thought of José Martí, achieved victory in 1959 and evolved into a struggle for socialism. This once again placed Latin America at the forefront of anti-imperialist revolution, standing alongside Asia and Africa.
Due to the development of the revolutionary waves across the three continents of the Third World after World War II, Lenin's analysis of imperialism was deepened and expanded, reflecting many different historical conditions and local circumstances, while consistently emphasizing the necessity of conducting revolutionary struggle.
An important figure in the development of imperialism theory and dependency theory after World War II was Paul Baran. In his works, Baran presented not only the imperialist theories of Lenin, the Comintern, and Mao Zedong, but also the economic planning experiences of the Soviet Union and India. He also integrated these theories with the new post-war situation. He argued that imperialism "immeasurably distorted" and hindered the development of the entire underdeveloped world. Baran proposed the concept of economic surplus. He argued that the fundamental problem resource-draining the development of underdeveloped countries was that the major imperialist powers siphoned off the surplus and then invested the appropriated surplus into their own economies or into peripheral countries to strengthen the long-term exploitation of the underdeveloped nations. Like Engels and Lenin, Baran also believed that the upper strata of workers in the imperialist core countries benefited indirectly from imperialism, thereby forming a "labor aristocracy" [3] layer that picked up crumbs from the monopolists' table—a layer that remains alienated from the broad working class.
Following Mao Zedong, Baran also maintained that the comprador class or the big bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries is directly linked to international capital and plays a parasitic role in its own society. He wrote: "The main task of imperialism in our time is to prevent the economic development of underdeveloped countries, or if there is no way to prevent it, then to slow down and control it." He explained that "although there are huge differences between underdeveloped countries," in this regard, "underdeveloped countries as a whole continuously channel most of their economic surplus to developed countries in the form of interest and dividends." In almost every respect, dependent economies are merely appendages to the "internal market" of Western capitalism. Therefore, the only way out is to carry out an anti-imperialist revolution and establish a socialist planned economy. Here, Baran took China as an example, noting that China "broke away from the orbit of world capitalism" and became a source of "inspiration and enlightenment for all other colonies and dependent countries in the world."
In Africa, the Egyptian-French Marxist economist Samir Amin made great contributions to dependency theory, unequal exchange theory, and world-systems theory. Much of Amin's analysis focused, on the one hand, on the "auto-centric" economies at the center of the world capitalist system, which adapt to their own internal logic and engage in expanded reproduction; and on the other hand, on the "disarticulated" [4] economies of the peripheral entities, whose production is structured according to the needs of the imperial economies. Under imperialist rule, the disarticulated nature of peripheral economies makes revolutionary "delinking" from the world imperialist order the only option. For Amin, delinking did not mean absolute separation or "autarkic withdrawal" from the world economy; rather, it meant uncoupling from the world system of the law of value, which is organized around a dominant center and a dominated periphery, and transitioning toward a more "polycentric" world.
The Greek-French Marxist economist Arghiri Emmanuel's work, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade, was also an important contribution to the theory of imperialism. Emmanuel argued that in the era of neo-colonialism, the relationship between the center and the periphery is one of unequal exchange. Emmanuel's work sparked a long-standing debate. Amin pointed out that unequal exchange exists when the wage gap between the "Global North" and the "Global South" is greater than the productivity gap. He further noted that under globalized monopoly-finance capital, the law of value operates on a worldwide scale.
In the 1970s, much of Marxist dependency theory began to merge with world-systems theory. World-systems theory overcame certain limitations of dependency theory by viewing the nation-state as part of the capitalist world system. Thus, the world system became the primary unit of analysis, divided into core and periphery (while also including semi-periphery and external areas). However, certain versions of world-systems theory, particularly in the works of Giovanni Arrighi, diverged from the theory of imperialism—he reduced international political-economic relations simply to a transfer of hegemony, which aligns with mainstream views in international political economy.
By the 21st century, most analyses of economic imperialism have focused on global labor arbitrage and global value chains. The extraction of surplus value from the "Global South" by the "Global North" has been fully demonstrated in empirical research. This is because international exploitation is more systematic than ever: it is deeply embedded in global value chains and manifested in the export of finished products from the periphery to the semi-periphery and then to the center. The result is the increasing prominence of the theory of "superexploitation," [5] which posits that the degree of exploitation in the Global South exceeds the global average, harming the basic survival needs of Southern workers.
Regarding the geopolitics of imperialism, the focus of the 21st century has been the continuous decline of U.S. hegemony, with related analyses centering on U.S. efforts since 1991—supported by Britain, Germany, France, and Japan—to reverse this trend. The goal is to establish a U.S.-led global unipolar power based on a triad of the United States, European states, and Japan through a more "naked imperialism." This counter-revolutionary posture eventually led to the current "New Cold War."
Despite the many developments in the theory of imperialism during the 20th century, what truly stands out is not the theory itself, but the actual intensification of the Global North's exploitation of the Global South and the latter's resistance to it. As Paul Sweezy pointed out in Modern Capitalism and Other Essays, the cutting edge of proletarian resistance shifted decisively from the Global North to the Global South in the 20th century. Since 1917, almost all revolutions have occurred on the periphery of the world capitalist system and have been anti-imperialist revolutions. The vast majority of these were conducted under the guidance of Marxism and were suppressed by reactionary forces from the imperialist powers. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the primary contradictions of capitalism are the imperialist contradiction and the class contradiction.
III. The Growing Denial of Imperialism on the Left
Voices that partially or totally deny imperialism have a long history among the Western Left holding Eurocentric positions. However, with the revival of Western Leftist forces after World War II, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, Western socialists adopted a strong anti-imperialist stance in support of national liberation struggles around the world. But with the ebbing of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the early 1970s, this stance gradually faded.
In 1973, Bill Warren, writing in New Left Review, proposed the view that Marx, in "The Future Results of British Rule in India," regarded imperialism as a progressive force. Warren declared that this view was later erroneously subverted by Lenin. Warren's interpretation of Marx here contradicts the more in-depth research on Marx conducted since the 1960s by theorists in the United States, India, and Japan, which proves that Marx had recognized as early as the 1860s that colonialism hindered the development of colonies. Nevertheless, the notion that Marx and even Lenin held the view that "imperialism is the pioneer of capitalism" became a widely accepted assumption among the Left.
Behind this analysis lies the Eurocentric Left's refusal to accept the following conclusion: the capitalist core countries exploit the periphery by increasing the rate of exploitation of workers in dependent countries, and a large portion of the resulting massive surplus is clinicalized by the imperialist countries at the center of the system. For a long time, Eurocentric socialists, running counter to the analyses of Lenin, Baran, and Amin, have argued that the higher productivity of the Global North offsets the wage gap between North and South, to the extent that the degree of exploitation in the Global North is actually higher than in the Global South. But empirical research shows that even taking productivity or skill levels into account (in fact, as the same technology provided by multinational corporations is used, the productivity or skill levels of export manufacturing in the Global South and Global North are currently comparable), the rate of exploitation in the Global South is much higher because its unit labor costs are much lower. In fact, the current trend of completely denying the theory of imperialism can be attributed, in part, to attempts to evade the reality of the core's over-exploitation of the periphery by abandoning the entire issue of imperialism in the face of increasing evidence.
The Western Eurocentric critique of economic imperialism is rooted in their refusal to accept Engels' and Lenin's theory of the "labor aristocracy," as they find the entire notion that a segment of the working class in the imperialist core benefits from imperialism to be politically unpalatable. However, the existence of a "labor aristocracy" is hard to deny; to some extent, the labor elite (or its representatives) has opportunistically opposed the needs of the majority of American workers and the entire world proletarian movement. The overwhelmingly white character of the union leadership in most Western countries and the distinct racism therein further explain why these countries' governments reactionarily support imperialist policies.
Faced with these historical contradictions, Giovanni Arrighi, in his book The Geometry of Imperialism, denied imperialism in a novel way. The book attempted to use the concept of "hegemony" to replace the integral concept of imperialism, reducing it to geopolitical content and evading the question of international economic exploitation. In Arrighi’s view, the old theories of imperialism from Lenin's era had become "obsolete," and the present is a world system composed of nation-states all competing for hegemony.
Under the combined influence of factors such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent wave of globalization, and the active promotion of a unipolar order by the United States, the Left has more openly denied imperialism. Prabhat Patnaik, in his article "Whatever Happened to Imperialism?", pointed out that in the 1980s and 1990s, Marxists in Europe and the United States maintained a "deafening silence" regarding the political economy of imperialism. This marked a clear rupture with the 1960s and 1970s; it was not the result of extensive theoretical debate within Marxism but could instead be attributed to the "tremendous strengthening and consolidation of imperialism."
The book Empire, co-authored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and published in 2000, serves as an exemplar of the Western Left's retreat from the theory of imperialism. The book received unanimous praise from mainstream American newspapers and journals such as The New York Times, Time, and Foreign Affairs. Hardt and Negri adopted a "flat world" perspective, arguing that the old hierarchical imperialism has now been replaced by the "smooth space of the capitalist world market." They declared that "it is no longer possible to partition the world into large geographic zones as center and periphery, North and South," and that "imperialism actually creates a straitjacket for capital" by interfering with capitalism's tendency toward a flat world. Hardt and Negri named their concept—modeled on the United States and characterized as both decentralized and deterritorialized, based on a global constitutional order—as "Empire," to distinguish it from imperialism.
Hardt and Negri's work provided inspiration for the Marxist geographer David Harvey’s book The New Imperialism. In this book, Harvey replanned the theory of imperialism through Marx’s concept of "primitive accumulation," naming it "accumulation by dispossession." Here, acts of "accumulation" based on robbery or plunder, rather than exploitation within the economic process, became the essence of "new imperialism." In Lenin's theory of imperialism, exploitation is directly related to monopoly capitalism, whereas in Harvey’s analysis, this role of exploitation is marginalized. This led him to fantasize about a "'new' imperialism" or a re-implementation of the "Good Neighbor Policy" [6] as a solution to international conflicts. This perspective fails to see the dialectical relationship between imperialism and capitalism, nor does it see that imperialism is as foundational to the capitalist system as the pursuit of profit itself.
In 2010, in his book The Enigma of Capital, Harvey went a step further, stating that an "unprecedented shift" had occurred, which "reversed the long-term trend of wealth flowing from East, Southeast, and South Asia to Europe and North America since the 18th century... [this] changed the center of gravity of capitalist development." The report Global Trends 2025, released by the U.S. National Intelligence Council in 2008, provided support for his view, predicting that the world would become more multipolar. However, while the report expected the growth rates of Asian economies to continue to be higher than those of the United States and European countries through 2025, it did not point to a "reversal" of global capital flows as Harvey claimed, let alone a historic reversal of capital flowing from the "Global East/South" to the "Global West/North."
In fact, the United States is undoubtedly the hegemonic center of global monopoly-finance capital and is engaged in a long-term struggle with the "Global South." Moishe Postone argued that focusing on this point is a form of "fetishism" that ultimately falls into a labyrinth of contradictions. This view—that anti-imperialist politics should be replaced by anti-hegemonic and anti-globalization politics—is itself vulnerable to the criticism that it treats abstract globalization as a fetish while ignoring the entire history of imperialism.
The latest denial of the theory of imperialism by the Western Left holding Eurocentric positions has extended to a critique of anti-imperialist leftists, a development closely related to changes in the global order brought about by the decline of U.S. hegemony. Following the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the continuous rise of China, Obama proposed the "Pivot to Asia" strategy. Subsequently, the Trump administration launched a "New Cold War" against China, which the Biden administration has continued to advance. The U.S. government has increasingly utilized its financial power to impose massive sanctions on countries deemed to be outside of and defiant toward U.S. power. The escalation of the Ukraine crisis in 2022 further intensified this trend. Consequently, the views of various Left thinkers on imperialism have undergone a fundamental shift, more openly abandoning the traditional critique of imperialism.
It is precisely against this historical backcloth that Vivek Chibber, in a 2022 interview with Jacobin magazine, overtly rejected all basic tenets of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, proposing that "imperialism should be distinguished from capitalism." Furthermore, he declared that Lenin’s concept of imperialism as monopoly capitalism was "flawed" because "in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there was no systemic trend toward monopoly." Here, Chibber’s attack on the very concept of monopoly capital exposes his ignorance of the intensification of capital concentration and centralization in recent decades—an intensification linked to successive waves of mergers that have led to the continuous strengthening of monopoly power and the centralization of wealth. Once the concept of monopoly capital is discarded, Chibber also discards any concept of international exploitation or imperialism. He argues that Lenin’s theory was political rather than economic, mainly involving "inter-state competition," and that Lenin’s concept of the "labor aristocracy" [7] "does not have any meaning for a general analysis of the 'Global North' or global capitalism."
In Chibber’s view, "anti-imperialism" can be defined as any "collective action in one's own country against one's own government's militarism and aggression toward other countries." This constitutes a purely national-political definition, divorced from both proletarian internationalism and any direct resistance to the laws of motion of capitalism itself in its monopoly stage. Chibber concluded that, overall, we have moved from a "Leninist world to a Kautskyite world." According to Kautsky’s view, imperialism is merely a state policy; it encompasses the alliance of various countries at the center of the system and, logically, has no connection to the problem of world exploitation.
Similarly, William I. Robinson, in his 2018 book Into the Tempest, argued: "The classic image of imperialism as a relationship of external domination is now outdated... The end of the extensive expansion of capitalism is the end of the imperialist era of world capitalism." In articles such as "The Unbearable Binaries of the 'Anti-Imperialist' Left," he also attempted to replace imperialism with "a fully globalized capitalism ruled by a transnational capitalist class," and attacked any notion of the "Global North" exploiting the "Global South" or the "former Third World," arguing that one country cannot exploit another. This is a challenge to the Marxist theory of imperialism. Robinson declared that "imperialism" only refers to "the violent outward expansion of capital, and all the political, military, and ideological mechanisms involved therein." He believes that the essence of Lenin’s theory of imperialism is "competition between national bourgeoisies" rather than the exploitation of countries on the periphery of the capitalist world.
Likewise, Gilbert Achcar published an article in The Nation in 2021 titled "How to Avoid the Stomach-Churning Anti-Imperialism," accusing the entire anti-imperialist Left of "campism"—that is, allegiance to a particular camp or bloc—because they clearly oppose the hybrid imperialism of the United States and its Triad [8] allies directed against the Global South. Those socialists who firmly stand on principle with the people of peripheral countries and oppose all military interventions and economic sanctions are accused of "apologizing for dictators." Meanwhile, Achcar suggested that if the purpose of intervention is to help so-called progressive movements locally, then "progressive anti-imperialists" should support military interventions by Western imperialist powers to achieve regime change.
Today, those who criticize the anti-imperialist Left point their finger at Samir Amin, arguing that "de-linking" [9] from imperialism is simply impossible, even in a more polycentric world no longer dominated by the imperialist centers of the global economy. Without a doubt, the world today is moving toward multipolarity. However, Jerry Harris, secretary of the Global Studies Association of North America, argued in an interview that today’s world—fully globalized or ruled by a transnational capitalist class—cannot move toward multipolarity. This view aligns with Robinson’s, suggesting that there is no possibility of breaking through the current world order because real imperialist bloc divisions no longer exist, and with the exception of a few countries, there are almost no independent, autonomous nation-states. Therefore, no other possibilities exist outside the global capitalist system. Here, the analysis of Left transnational capital theorists fails to understand: no matter how much capital globalizes, it cannot constitute a global state. Consequently, there can be no true global bourgeoisie or transnational capitalist state.
Another theoretical characteristic of Western Leftists holding Eurocentric positions is their simplified application of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, treating it solely as a model of horizontal imperialist conflict between Great Powers. Here, China and Russia are portrayed as being in the same camp (despite representing vastly different political and economic systems) competing against the imperialist forces composed of the United States, European countries, and Japan. Intermediate-level or semi-peripheral countries in the "Global South" are portrayed as "sub-imperialist" states. The concept of "sub-imperialism" was first proposed by the Brazilian scholar Ruy Mauro Marini in the context of dependency theory, but it is now being used in a completely different way. This new perspective, following the logic of viewing imperialism primarily from a horizontal rather than a vertical perspective, extends the characteristics of imperialist countries to semi-peripheral countries and emerging economies, categorizing them as imperialist or sub-imperialist states.
Today, international imperialism views China as an imperialist country in the same sense as the United States, disregarding the role of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and China's development path. However, the basis on which Eurocentric Western Leftists attempt to treat China as imperialist is nothing more than China’s rapid economic growth, the continuous expansion of its capital exports, its measures to strengthen regional security (in the face of encirclement by U.S. military bases and alliances), and its questioning of the imperial order dominated by the U.S. and the West. Yet, China’s foreign policy does not seek to join the U.S.-led imperialist order, nor does it seek to replace it with a so-called new imperialist order; rather, it is committed to promoting national self-determination while opposing bloc geopolitics and military intervention. The Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative proposed by the Chinese government together constitute the primary proposals for world peace today. China has no military bases abroad, has conducted no overseas military interventions, and, except for defending its own territory, has not participated in any wars.
China has not misappropriated the economic surplus generated by the United States; in fact, the reality is quite the opposite. The lower unit labor costs of goods produced in "Global South" countries have led to the continuous expansion of gross profit margins for multinational corporations (MNCs) originating from the center of the world system. Goods produced by these MNCs in China and other developing nations are exported for consumption in "Global North" countries, where the final retail price of these goods is several times the export price from the producing nation. In an environment of international super-exploitation, China has developed rapidly by leveraging its openness to the world market, its powerful state-owned sector, a relatively planned mode of development, and other key factors. Meanwhile, most of the surplus generated by its export manufacturing sector has been siphoned off to enrich the coffers of MNCs located at the center of the world economy, and China remains, to a large extent, a developing country. As the imperialist powers at the center of the capitalist world system, the U.S., European nations, and Japan still maintain technological, financial, and military hegemony on a global scale (even if this hegemony is rapidly weakening) and continue to rely on the net extraction of economic surplus from the "Global South."
By sharp contrast with China, the United States has historically engaged in military interventions in 101 countries. Since World War II, the U.S. has conducted hundreds of wars or military operations across five continents. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, these interventions have accelerated. Today, in the context of a "New Cold War," the U.S. government is expanding its military alliances with the aim of ensuring its military superiority across the globe. The U.S. maintains as many as 902 military bases overseas.
In July 2024, the American magazine The Call published an article titled "'Multipolarity': A Euphemism for Supporting Multiple Imperialisms," accusing anti-imperialists who sympathize with China and the "Global South" of repeating the errors of the Second International. Here, history is completely inverted. The social democratic parties of the Second International joined their respective states in participating in wars to carve up the world—specifically in the scramble for and exploitation of colonies; not one of these parties sympathized with the "wretched of the earth" [10]. Only the Russian Bolsheviks, along with the Spartacist League formed by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, opposed World War I and stood with the underdeveloped nations. To follow Lenin and Luxemburg is not to repeat the mistakes of the Second International social democrats. On the contrary, to side with imperialist nations against underdeveloped nations is to commit a crime against humanity similar to that of the majority of the Second International's social democrats. Standing with the countries of the "Global South" does not distort the "revolutionary principles of Marxism." For more than a century, the center of revolution has been the periphery of the capitalist world, not its center.
Taking an anti-imperialist stance does not mean abandoning the class struggle within the core capitalist countries—it is quite the opposite. Given the reality that the upper strata of the working class in imperialist nations constitute a labor aristocracy, it is necessary to view this struggle from the perspective of those most deeply oppressed by capitalism and colonialism. It is no accident that the anti-imperialist movement in the United States has always been deeply rooted in the Black radical tradition—represented by W.E.B. Du Bois in the early 20th century and today by the Black Alliance for Peace. Racism and imperialism have always been intrinsically linked; therefore, any genuine anti-imperialist movement is a movement against racial capitalism.
Today, the imperialist world system is not only intensifying global exploitation but is also pushing us to the brink of global destruction through a global ecological crisis and the increasing possibility of large-scale thermonuclear war. Under these circumstances, for leftist thinkers to believe that anti-imperialism is the enemy is equivalent to supporting imperialism, barbarism, and exterminationism. As Mariátegui said, "We are anti-imperialists because we are Marxists, because we are revolutionaries, because we oppose socialism to capitalism"—and because we stand on the side of all humanity.