Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism[1]
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“The West is in danger,” warned Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
In his dangerously appealing style, Milei blamed “collectivism” – that is, social welfare, taxes and the state – as the “root cause” of the world’s problems, leading to widespread impoverishment.
The only way forward, Milei declared, is through “free enterprise, capitalism and economic freedom.” Milei’s speech marked a return to the orthodoxy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, who pushed forward an ideology of social cannibalism as the basis for their neoliberal agenda.
Since the 1970s, this scorched earth policy has devastated much of the Global South through the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund. It also created factory deserts in the West (what Donald Trump, in his inauguration address in 2017, called the American carnage”).
Therein lies the confounding logic of the far right: on the one side, calling for the billionaire class to dominate society in their interest (which produces the social carnage) and then, on the other side, inflaming the victims of said carnage to fight against policies that would benefit them.
Milei is right in his overall judgment: the West is in danger, but not because of social democratic policies; it is in danger because of its inability to come to terms with its slow demise as the dominating bloc in the world.
From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South Insights (GSI) come two important texts on the changing global landscape: a landmark study, “Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous, Decadent New Stage,” and our 72nd dossier, “The Churning of the World Order” (the dossier is a summary of the study, so I will be referring to them as if they were one text).
Tricontinental believes that this is the most significant theoretical statement that our institute has made in its eight-year history.
In both “Hyper-Imperialism” and “The Churning of the World Order” we make four important points:
First, through a deep analysis of the concepts of the Global North and the Global South, we show that the former acts as a bloc, while the latter is merely a loose grouping.
The Global North is led by the United States, which has created several instruments to extend its authority over the other countries in the bloc (many of which are historic colonial powers and settler-colonial societies).
These platforms include the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (initially set up in 1941 between the U.S. and U.K., the network has now expanded to Fourteen Eyes); the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949), and the Group of Seven (G7, set up in 1974).
Through these and other formations, the United States and its political allies within the Global North are able to exercise authority over their own countries and the countries of the Global South.
In contrast, the countries of the Global South have historically been much more disorganised, with some, looser alliances and linkages around regional and political affiliations.
The Global South has neither a political centre nor an ideologically driven project.
The analysis in the texts is detailed, relying upon public databases and databases built by GSI. The bottom line is that there is one world system that is managed dangerously by an imperialist bloc.
There are no multiple imperialisms, no inter-imperialist conflict.
Mahmud al-Obaidi, Iraq, Untitled, 2008.
Second, the platforms of the Global North exercise power over the world system through a number of vectors (military, financial, economic, social, cultural) and through a range of instruments (NATO, the International Monetary Fund, information systems).
With the gradual decline of the Global North’s control over the international financial system, raw materials, technology and science, this bloc mainly exercises its power through military force and through the management of information.
In these texts, we do not go over the question of information, although we have previously written about it and will take it up again in a study on digital sovereignty.
The focus of these texts is largely on military spending, where we show that the U.S.-led bloc accounts for 74.3 percent of world military spending and that the U.S. spends 12.6 times more than the world average on a per capita basis (Israel, second to the U.S., spends 7.2 times above the per capita world average).
To put this into perspective, China accounts for 10 percent of world military spending and its per capita military spending is 22 times less than that of the United States.
Such enormous spending on the military is not innocent. Not only does it come at the cost of social spending, the Global North’s military power is used to threaten and intimidate countries, and — if they are disobedient — to punish them with hellfire and brimstone.
In 2022 alone, these imperialist nations made 317 deployments of their military forces to countries in the Global South.
The highest number of these deployments (31) were made to Mali, a nation strongly seeking sovereignty, and which was the first of the Sahel states to stage popular-backed coups (2020 and 2021) and eject the French military from its territory (2022).
Between 1776 and 2019, the United States carried out at least 392 interventions worldwide, half of them between 1950 and 2019.
This includes the terrible, illegal war against Iraq in 2003 (at this year’s World Economic Forum, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani asked for Global North troops to leave Iraq).
This vast military spending by the Global North, led by the United States, reflects the militarisation of its foreign policy.
One of the little remarked aspects of this militarisation is the development of a theory in both the United States and United Kingdom of “defence diplomacy” (as noted in the U.K. Ministry of Defence’s “Strategic Defence Review” of 1998).
In the United States, strategic thinkers use the acronym DIME to reflect on the sources of national power (diplomacy, informational, military and economic).
Last year, the European Union and NATO — the institutions at the heart of the Global North — jointly pledged to “mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.”
In case you did not catch it, that power — mostly military power and military diplomacy — is not to serve humanity, but to serve only their “citizens.”
António Ole, Angola, “The Maculusso Mural,” 2014.
Third, Part IV of our “Hyper-Imperialism” study is called “The West in Decline,” and looks at the evidence for this trend from a perspective that rejects Milei’s “the West is in danger” fear mongering.
The facts show that since the start of the Third Great Depression, the Global North has struggled to maintain its control over the world economy; its instruments — monopolies over technology and raw materials, as well as dominion over foreign direct investment — have fundamentally eroded.
When China surpassed the United States’ share of global industrial output in 2004, the United States lost hegemony in production (by 2022, the former held a 25.7 percent share versus the 9.7 percent held by the latter).
Given that the United States is now dependent on large scale net capital imports, which reached $1 trillion in 2022, the U.S. has little internal capability to provide economic advantages to its Global North or Global South allies.
Owners of capital in the United States have siphoned off their profits from the country’s exchequer creating the economic conditions for the social carnage that afflicts the country.
The old political coalitions rooted around the two parties in the United States are in flux, with no space within the U.S. political system to develop a political project to exercise hegemony over the world economy through legitimacy and consent.
That is why the U.S.-led Global North resorts to force and intimidation, building its massive military apparatus by increasing its own public debt (since there is little domestic consensus to use that borrowing to build the infrastructure and productive base of the country).
The root of the New Cold War imposed by the United States on China is that China has outpaced the United States in net fixed capital formation, whilst the U.S. has seen a gradual decline.
Every year since 1992, China has been a net exporter of capital, this surplus of capital creation has made it possible to finance international projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, now 10 years old.
El Meya, Algeria, “Les Moudjahidates,” 2021.
Fourth, we analyse the emergence of new organisations rooted in the Global South, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), the BRICS10 (2009), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter (2021).
These interregional platforms are in an embryonic stage, but they provide evidence for the growth of a new regionalism and multilateralism. Although these formations do not seek to operate as a bloc to counter the Global North’s bloc, they reflect what we have previously called a “new mood” in the Global South.
The new mood is neither anti-imperialist nor anti-capitalist, but is shaped by four main vectors:
Multilateralism and regionalism centred on the creation of Global South-anchored platforms for cooperation.
New modernisation centred on constructing regional and continental economies that use local currencies in place of the dollar for trade and reserves.
Sovereignty, which would create barriers to Western intervention. This includes military entanglements and digital colonialism, both of which facilitate U.S. intelligence interventions.
Reparations, which would entail collective bargaining to compensate for the West’s century-old debt traps and abuse of the excess carbon budget as well as its much longer-reaching legacy of colonialism.
The analysis in these texts goes deep beneath the surface, providing a historical materialist assessment of our present crises.
Documents produced by the institutions of the Global North, such as the WEF’s “Global Risks” report for 2024, provide a list of the dangers that we face (climate catastrophe, social polarisation, economic downturns) but cannot explain them.
Our approach, we believe, provides a theory to understand these perils as the outcome of the world system managed by the hyper-imperialist bloc.
In thinking about these texts, my mind wandered to the work of the Iraqi poet Buland al-Haydari (1926–1996). When all seemed futile, al-Haydari wrote that “the sun will not rise” and that “at the bottom of the house, already dead, are the steps of my children, reduced to silence.”
But even then, when we “were without power,” there remains hope. His civilisation drowns, but then “you arrived with the paddle,” he sings. “Such is the history of our yesterday, and its taste is bitterness,” he concludes, “such is our slow walk, the procession of our dignity: our only good until the hour when will rise, finally, a free paddle.”
That anticipation defines a classic by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), “Someone Who Is Not Like Anyone” (1966):
I’ve had a dream that someone is coming.I’ve dreamt of a red star,and my eyes lids keep twitchingand my shoes keep snapping to attentionand may I go blindif I’m lying.I’ve dreamt of that red starwhen I wasn’t asleep.Someone is coming,someone is comingsomeone better.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Tags: BRICS Global North global South Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter IMF Javier Milei Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Vijay Prashad World Economic Forum
Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage
Our latest study explores how the decline of Global North hegemony has shifted the geopolitical landscape and opened new possibilities for emergent organisations of the Global South.
Research for this document has been conducted collectively for over a year and has received contributions from many scholars and socialist practitioners. This document was compiled with data and charts provided by Global South Insights (GSI), with editing and coordination by Gisela Cernadas, Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, Tica Moreno, and Deborah Veneziale. The data and charts for Part IV of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.
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Introduction
It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfilment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism.1
For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight.
In the face of violent repression, such as Brazil’s Carajás Massacre in 1996, the Landless Workers’ Movement led the reclamation of land for popular agrarian reform through occupation and production, challenging agribusiness behemoths, such as the US multinational Monsanto.2
A ‘soldier who shook the continent’, Hugo Chávez won the popular vote in 1999, a sharp left turn that was followed by others in Latin America. This included a wave of mass mobilisation of millions of workers, peasants, Indigenous, women, and students that defeated the proposed US Free Trade Areas of the Americas in 2005, a direct challenge to nearly 200 years of the US Monroe Doctrine.3
In 2002, Nigerian women gathered at the gates of Shell and Chevron to protest environmental destruction and exploitation in the Niger Delta. Haitians refused the centuries of humiliation in mass demonstrations following the US ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and US occupation in 2004. Millions of Nepalese celebrated the toppling of the monarchy through armed resistance under the leadership of the communists in 2006. When fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in 2010, the Tunisian people revolted against the neo-liberal system that had caused him to take such extreme measures.
In subsequent years, changes – sometimes small and imperceptible, at other times volatile and explosive – unfolded. These involved both popular movements and state actors, in some cases extremely powerful ones. The US was confronted by a rising economic powerhouse in China, growing economies in the Global South (which overtook the Global North’s GDP in PPP terms in 2007), years of domestic capital investment neglect, the financialisation of the economy, and the loss of manufacturing superiority.
The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 signalled internal fracturing of US domestic politics. Internationally, the US failed to achieve soft regime disruption in China and de-nuclearisation or regime change in Russia. After a temporary reduction in military spending with the end of the disastrous war on Iraq (2003–2011), the US shifted to the use and threat of military power as a central pillar of its response to these changes.
Hegemony is historically lost in three stages: production, finance, and military.4
The United States has lost hegemony in production, though it still has some remaining areas of technological hegemony, including those related to the military. It is seeing its financial hegemony challenged, though still in the very early stages and revolving around the status of the US dollar. Even though the economic and political aspects of its decline might be accelerating, it still retains military power – creating a temptation for the US to attempt to overcome the consequences of its economic decline by military or military related means.
The US has defined China as its strategic competitor. The minimum programme of the US is the containment and economic diminishment of China, sufficient to guarantee the US’s own perpetual future economic hegemony.
From its own point of view, US capitalism is rational in its attempts to limit China’s rise. Failure to do so would erode the relative advantage the US has in controlling higher levels of productive forces and the resulting monopoly privileges that control entails. There is almost complete alignment amongst the US state actors to continue to manage decoupling from China (despite the near impossibility of fully re-modernising US productive forces domestically) and to advance military preparations against China.
The February 2022 movement of Russian troops into Ukraine – a result of the continued violations of US assurances on the non-expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the continuing civil war between Kyiv and Donbas – marked an explicit new phase in world military alignment for the US. In a series of rapid-fire moves, the US openly subordinated all the Global North countries and, in so doing, further subordinated the military apparatus of those states. It established itself as the open military hegemon of what is euphemistically called NATO+, which includes all but three members of the former Eastern Bloc. Those who attended the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a member or observer – including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea – are de facto members of NATO+. Only Israel (excused from attendance for political expediency) and a few smaller countries of the Global North did not attend.
Beginning in October 2023, Israel began a campaign of displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and genocide of Palestinians with the full and shameless support of the United States government. The developments in Ukraine followed by the recent escalations in Gaza are significant markers reflecting that there has been a qualitative change within the imperialist system. The US has now completed its economic, political, and military subordination of all the other imperialist countries. This has consolidated an integrated, militarily focused imperialist bloc. It aims to maintain a grip on the Global South as a whole and has turned its attention to dominating Eurasia, the last area of the world that has escaped its control.
It is not a matter of exaggeration to say that the Global North has declared a state of open hostility and war on any section of the Global South that does not comply with the policies of the Global North. This is seen in the joint declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation published on 9 January 2023:
We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.5
The Palestinian people in Gaza are certainly feeling the palpable barbarity of NATO+ and the forced ‘mass consensus’ of which the Global North is capable. As Palestinian liberation leader Leila Khaled put it recently:
We know that they speak about terrorism, but they are the heroes of terrorism. The imperialist force everywhere in the world, in Iraq, in Syria, in different countries… are preparing to attack China. All of what they say about terrorism turns to be about them. People have the right to resist with all means to it, including the armed struggle. This is in the Charter of the United Nations. So, they are violating the rights of people for resistance because it’s their right to restore their freedom. And this is, and I say it always, a fundamental law: where there is repression, there is resistance. People will not live under occupation and repression. History taught us that when people resist, they can keep their dignity and their land.6
***
Imperialism has begun its transformation to a new stage: Hyper-Imperialism.7
This is imperialism conducted in an exaggerated and kinetic way, whilst also subject to the constraints that the declining empire has foisted on itself. The spasmodic quality of its exertion is felt by the millions of Congolese, Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemeni living under US militarism, whose heads instinctively jerk for cover at sudden sounds.
Yet, this is not the full-blooded march across the globe that the Cold War initiated, fought in proxy battles that were followed by economic imperialism through the World Bank and other development institutions. It is the imperialism of a drowning billionaire who firmly believes he ought to be back on his yacht. It flexes the muscles of power that are still strong – the military. However, absent productive power and knowing that financial power is at a tipping point, the full suite of imperial technologies of control that the US once had is no longer at its disposal. It, therefore, channels its efforts through the mechanisms it has most at hand: culture (the control of truth) and war.
The tactics of Hyper-Imperialism are shaped partly by the modernisation of hybrid warfare, which includes lawfare, hyper-sanctions, seizure of national reserves and assets, and other manners of non-military warfare. New technological tools of surveillance and targeted communication characterising the digital age are deployed to wage imperialist control of the battle of ideas. This has involved implementing more perverse and covert methods against the truth, such as the political imprisonment of WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange, who exposed numerous crimes against the Global South.8
The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc composed of 49 countries. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. In the military arena, Turkey (as a NATO member), the Republic of Korea and the Philippines (de facto militarised colonies of the US) are included in our definition of the ‘US-led Military Bloc’, even though they are part of the Global South.
Over the last twenty years, the Global North has endured a significant relative economic decline, along with a political, social, and moral decline. Its false ‘moral’ claims of civil rights and ‘press freedom’ are now complete mockeries as they seek to make illegal the public (including online) support for Palestinian rights. This full-on support for the humiliation and destruction of the darker peoples of the world is reminiscent of past centuries, exposing what can be described as collective ‘white fragility’.
The Global South countries comprise former colonies and semi-colonies, a few non-European independent states, and current and former socialist projects. The struggles for national liberation, independence, development, and total economic and political sovereignty still need to be completed for most of the Global South.
Despite the limitations of the terminology, we will use the term ‘Global North’ and occasionally ‘the West’ (an often-used hollow phrase) interchangeably with the more accurate term of the ‘US-Led Imperialist Camp’. We will analyse the Global North in four ‘Rings’. The rest of the world is currently known as the ‘Global South’, much of it was previously called the ‘Third World’. We will analyse the Global South in six ‘Groupings’ that are determined by the relative degree to which a country is a target of regime change and the role its government plays in publicly advancing international, anti-imperialist stances (both in Figure 1). The Global North is engaged in much higher levels of generalised conflict with the rest of the world, the Global South.
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