The Debate Behind the Debate: Is the Exploitation of the Global South by the Global North the Main Contradiction of our Time?

When it comes to debates among Marxist intellectuals, it is often difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some of the more arcane disputes have absolutely no bearing on Marxist practice-- the actual class struggle. 

The so-called “Transformation problem” debated among political economists, for example, is not a problem, unless you accept the assumptions that graduate students in economics departments are told must be attended if Marxism is to be taken seriously. Marxism, however, advances a powerful, effective critique of capitalism without accepting those assumptions or deferring to the manufactured problem. Failure to deduct fluctuating prices from exchange values no more derails the Marxist project than failure to deduct actual thought from brain events or neural processes derails the scientific project of neurophysiology.  

But the outcomes of some “theoretical” debates have real practical consequences. Still others are stalking horses for controversies within our political movements.

A recent dust-up between Vivek Chibber and Vijay Prashad is an example of both, along with a heavy dose of pettifoggery.  

Chibber spurred the debate with an interview posted in Jacobin magazine in mid-December. His thesis-- set out explicitly in the interview’s title-- is: “Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism.” To the query of whether “colonial plunder was essentially responsible for bringing about capitalism,” Chibber responds with characteristic bluntness: “The idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder can’t even get off the ground.” 

In March, Vijay Prashad responded sharply to Chibber in a long piece in Monthly Review. After chastising Chibber for not being serious: “It would have been better if Chibber wanted to initiate a discussion on the issues of the origin of capitalism and the role of colonialism for this origin to have produced something other than a podcast as an incitement to debate…” He regrets that Chibber’s thoughts were not presented “as a major written text with citations.” 

This would appear to be a specious charge, coming from an intellectual whose stature and broad appeal come largely from podcasts, interviews, and popular writing, and not from his academic work.

Further, Prashad unabashedly concedes in his article that “No serious scholar says that colonialism created capitalism.”

With that concession, the contest would appear to be closed-- there really is no disagreement. Anyone innocent of the often-acrimonious debates on the left would wonder why there was a dispute at all.

Why does Chibber feel it necessary to deny that colonial plunder created capitalism? Is “colonialism-created-capitalism” a straw man? If Prashad is right and no serious scholar believes it, who is Chibber’s argument directed towards? Why is Prashad so agitated by Chibber’s intervention?

Is this another instance of seminar-room Marxism? Of résumé padding? Of dispute-for-dispute’s-sake?

In fact, there is a seething backstory to both positions--- a long, contentious ideological battle that erupts frequently on the academic stage.

Chibber takes issue with a left trend prevalent among many Marxists to locate the nexus of exploitation in national inequalities, specifically between the most advanced capitalist countries and the less developed countries. He says:

In the 1960s and ’70s, it had come back in the form of what’s called “Third Worldism,” which was this idea that the Global North collectively exploits the Global South. And you can see how that’s an extension of the view that capitalism in the West came out of the plunder of the Global South. You can just extend it to say that the Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the South…

It’s transforming a class argument into a racial and national argument. And in today’s left, nationalism and racialism are the dominant ideologies. It’s quite striking to me how this trope, this “global white supremacy” has become so current on the Left. And it’s utterly nonsensical. It has literally no connection to reality.

But it’s become fashionable on the Left because it allows you to align radicalism with the current wave of racial identity politics. And the core of this is whatever divisions there might be within the races, pale — no pun intended — in relation to the divisions between the races.

In essence, Chibber believes that he is defending class analysis against a left that has abandoned class, a left viewing global oppression only through the lens of nationalism and racialism. 

Writers like Prashad frame the principal contradiction in today’s world as between the “Global North” and the “Global South,” abstractions constructed from a rough division of the world between the former colonizing states and the post-colonial states.

The appeal of the Global North versus Global South analysis should be readily apparent. Since well before the birth of capitalism, powerful empires have subjected, exploited, oppressed, and enslaved peoples to the benefit of the empires. In the pre-industrial mercantile era, principalities, city-states, kingdoms, and other centers of power continued to extract wealth from those unable to resist. And soon after the maturation of capitalism and the full development of the modern nation-state, the monopoly capitalist corporations of the great powers continued the subjugation, pillage, plunder, and rape of weaker peoples through the colonial system.

There is nothing new or original, however, in affirming that powerful nations, organizations, institutions, groups, individuals, etc. periodically or even systemically exploit their weaker counterparts. There is nothing new or especially insightful about recognizing asymmetries of power in global relations. Certainly, there is nothing specifically Marxist about such a claim.

But Prashad wants to go further. He wants to specifically link nation-states to capitalist exploitation. Where the Marxism of Marx and Engels fundamentally located exploitation in the relationship between those who own the means of production and workers-- two distinct classes-- Prashad sees exploitation as a relationship between nation-states: the original colonizing states and the colonial subjects. And today, he and others argue that exploitation remains fundamentally grounded in the relations of nation-states: the privileged former colonizers and the former colonies. Granting that inequalities are certainly, at least in part, the legacy of colonialism, the fact that national inequalities exist today further demonstrates that this exploitative relationship exists, according to Prashad and others of like mind.

Prashad cites counterfactual studies-- identifying where wealth might have gone if events had taken a different course-- as further showing that exploitive relations account for the continuing inequalities between South and North, without mentioning the relations of production-- capitalism-- that actually enable these inequalities. Class relations-- relations privileging exploitative advantages of the foreign and domestic bourgeoisies-- go unmentioned. Do we conclude, by comparison, that the US North exploits the US South based on the existence of persisting inequalities? Or do we say that-- due to uneven, disparate development-- corporate capitalism exploits them both, but differently? I think we agree it’s the latter.

Paradoxically, Prashad says:

This ceaseless drain provides a continuous stream of plunder into the Western-controlled financial systems whose power remains intact despite the great changes taking place with the center of gravity of the world economy shifting to Asia.

This curious statement suggests that the global North is systematically plundering the global South, while the weight of the global economy-- its future and fortunes-- lie in Asia, the economic powerhouse of the Global South. How can he have it both ways? How can Prashad and others celebrate the fact that the core of the South-- the BRICS+ countries-- have together surpassed the economic product of the G7 and also maintain that the North continues to systematically plunder its wealth?

The fact is that capitalist social relations-- struggle between classes over the fruits of labor-- have entirely penetrated both the Global North and Global South. It is monopoly corporations-- social entities that respect no state boundaries-- that “plunder” anywhere and everywhere.

 Rather than uncritically submitting its fate to the direction of international capitalist institutions, their loans, or foreign investment, rather than seek some compensatory justice to the crimes of colonialism, the post-colonial states should consider the insights argued by Paul Baran in his opus at the height of the colonial independence movement:

The principal insights, which must not be obscured by matters of secondary or tertiary importance, are two. The first is that, if what is sought is rapid economic development, comprehensive economic planning is indispensable… The second insight of crucial importance is that no planning worth the name is possible in a society in which the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits (or security or other private advantage) ... (xxviii-xxix, Foreword to 1962 printing) The Political Economy of Growth, Paul A. Baran [emphasis added]

Baran is unabashedly advocating for a socialist escape from the legacy of colonialism and the fate of neocolonialism-- a position that has fallen out of fashion, but remains the only authentically Marxist answer for workers in the so-called global South. As an ideological godfather of many who stress the North/South exploitation divide, it is odd that this conclusion is rarely cited by those who owe their lineage to Baran.

Neither Prashad nor Chibber acknowledge this solution. Prashad, citing Samir Amin, mischaracterizes contemporary imperialism:

In the Marxist tradition, there are a variety of interpretations of the idea of originary accumulation, but what the facts show—and has been established in, for example, the oeuvre of Samir Amin, among others—is that imperialism is not an outgrowth of capitalism, but is foundational to capitalism itself. [emphasis added]

Today’s imperialism is driven by protecting and expanding spheres of influence, energy and rare metal acquisition, market access and expansion, and dominating labor markets. Behind the endless Great Power conflicts, civil wars, and regime changes is inescapably capitalist competition. 

Capitalism is foundational to imperialism itself. And if we lose sight of that fact-- the class perspective-- we will lose sight of who are the perpetrators and who are the victims.

But class alone does not explain exploitation and imperialism, as one might think from reading Chibber. Nationalism and racialism have always been capable tools in misguiding, thwarting, or taming class struggle. Capitalism’s long life and resilience owes much to the insidious, but masterful manipulation of race and nationhood by the capitalist class to deflect attention from the war between the class exploiters and the exploited. Deafness and insensitivity to race and national identity only exacerbates and multiplies the harsh lash of class exploitation.

Debate is most useful when it shines a light on the way forward.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Bogus Anti-imperialism and the Fight for Peace

Where VI Lenin in 1916 wove together a theory of imperialism that placed capitalist exploitation and accumulation at its core, explaining competition between greater and lesser powers and their coalitions and alliances as leading to war, a prominent Marxist, Karl Kautsky, asserted that war or the threat of war would persuade states to coexist, to put aside rivalries and create-- in Kautsky’s words-- “...a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.” 

Lenin believed that competition between great powers will inevitably result in war; Kautsky believed that competition between great powers will inevitably bring a settled peace.

Similarly, today’s advocates of multipolarity argue that the only obstacle to the world imagined by Kautsky is the United States. As the former Cold War leader of the capitalist order, the US is now the meddler, war monger, aggressor, and imperialist standing in the way of a multipolar world that will establish a more tolerant, cooperative, and peaceful world. 

Advocates see the agency for this Kautskyian utopia in the BRICS coalition, established formally in 2009, subsequently adding new members and partners along the way. Its supporters remind us that BRICS+ commands a greater share of global GDP than does the G7 nations or the EU. The original BRICS economies grew by a stunning 356.27% between 1990 and 2019. 

Despite these impressive economic numbers, BRICS’s most zealous proponents posture the alliance as representative of the peripheral “Global South” --as the arm of the ‘have-nots’-- in the struggle against the ‘haves’ of the core-- the US and its Eurasian allies.

While this may make a soothing story, a popular source of hope for peace and social justice, it completely fails the test presented by the realities of this moment. Measured by any rigorous standards of inquiry, multipolarity is a fraud.

On its face, the idea that an alleged powerhouse economic bloc is the advocate, the savior for the poorest, most disadvantaged countries is surely paradoxical. No one would take a similar claim seriously if it came from the mouths of foreign ministers of the G7 or the EU.

But the failure of the BRICS fantasy is best shown by examining BRICS and its member states' response to recent monumental world events.  

On the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israeli forces: BRICS and its member states voiced some stern objections, but took no substantial measures to stop it or to punish Israel. In fact, they continued their substantial economic relations with the rogue state, failed to defy the Israeli blockade, and offered no material aid to the Palestinians.

On the aggression against Venezuelan sovereignty: BRICS and some of its member states raised objections, but took no concrete action; some benefitted from the US action, some were set back by it. Security agents from material-poor Cuba heroically gave their lives resisting the invasion.

On the attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran (a BRICS member state) by the US and Israel: BRICS and its member states again voiced objections, but offered little or no material support. As The Wall Street Journal noted “Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.” 

On the escalating aggression against Cuba, suffering acute energy crises under the intensified US blockade: old beneficiaries of Cuban internationalist sacrifices-- including BRICS members and partners-- are offering marginal support for socialist Cuba as it faces possibly its worst existential crisis. 

If BRICS is the guarantor of the interests of the so-called Global South against US and Israeli aggression, if this is the counterforce to imperialism that US and European leftists imagine, then much of the world needs new, more militant friends. The facts contradict the false theory of multipolarity and its embodiment in the BRICS alliance. Rather than exhibiting a new spirit of cooperation, mutual interest, internationalism, and solidarity, the BRICS members seem bent on basing foreign policy on narrow self-interest.

Critics are, however, stepping forward, some with doubts, some with sharp and incisive rebukes of the multipolarity dogma and the BRICS myth. 

Many doubters were repelled by the recent UN Security Council vote crafted by the US and condemning Iran’s retaliation against US allies on the Arabian Peninsula, without calling out the war’s initiators, the US and Israel.

Betwa Sharma, writing in Consortium News, protests that “both Moscow and Beijing abandoned Tehran by abstaining on a March 11 U.N. Security Council resolution that falsely portrayed Iran as the aggressor. China and Russia’s own interests took precedence over a BRICS partner under attack.”

She concludes: 

The war on Iran has exposed the fragility of BRICS as a rising alternative to the U.S.-led global order.

U.S. economic pressure and geopolitical shocks, especially the attack on Iran, have revealed BRICS less as a unified bloc with a common strategic goal, than a collection of countries with overlapping interests that diverge sharply under pressure.

Focusing mainly on Gaza, Patrick Bond recently wrote a detailed, scathing exposé of BRICS hypocrisy.

Bond acknowledges that BRIC member, South Africa, provided 15% of Israel’s coal needs as of 2025. As for another BRICS founding member, “...in addition to wheat and metals, Russia sells coal and – in just the two years since the genocide began in 2023 – made 105 oil transfers comprising 30% of Israel’s total crude and 45% of refined petroleum imported, via Novorossiysk (originating from BRICS-partner Kazakhstan.”

Bond reports on another founding member: "Chinese drones (tens of thousands by now) made by DJI and Autel buzz Gaza and the West Bank, and are used to drop grenades on civilians… and moreover, a Chinese parastatal owns the new Haifa Bayport while another built the ‘union-busting’ Ashdod harbour, which together have facilitated a 5% annual increase in bilateral trade since 2021, confirming Netanyahu’s 2017 term for the two economies, namely, a 'marriage made in heaven.'"

Further: “New Delhi assures a strengthened Israeli-Indian military alliance, the September 2025 Bilateral Investment Treaty, and Modi’s ‘Special Strategic Partnership’ solidaristic visit to the Knesset featuring ‘immense progress’ in ‘defence, security, and more.’”

Bond reveals similar embarrassing economic ties between other BRICS members and Israel, including with Brazil, UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. He concludes by asserting that, in fact, the “BRICS Promote Global-Corporate Power Under the Cover of Multipolarism.” 

Facts, facts, facts… they often make for stubborn, unfriendly encounters with cherished theories and opinions. At least some of our friends on the left are paying attention.

In a moving “j’accuse”, Josué Veloz Serrade writes in his article translated and posted on Black Agenda Report of “un multilaterismo hipócrita”-- a hypocritical multilateralism toward Cuba.

Veloz Serrade casts scorn on all of the nations that could respond to Cuba’s abandonment before an existential threat from the US Empire, especially those who preach multipolarity and hail BRICS as the anti-Empire:

In their rhetoric, Russia and China demand an end to unipolarity, the construction of a multipolar world, respect for international law, and, in particular, for the sovereignty of each country. But their real desire, revealed by their actions rather than their words, is the gradual integration into the rules of the very system they claim to contest…

As bitter as it may be to hear, by abandoning Cuba, they are not simply being pragmatic; they are admitting that their real goal is not the transformation of the world order, but the negotiation of a more comfortable place within it…

…they have incorporated the logic of the imperial playing field—its institutions, its markets, its values, its rules, its default ideology—to such an extent that they have become incapable of imagining political action that breaks with that field, even though they proclaim it necessary in their rhetoric…

The Empire supports its allies to the very end because it understands that loyalty to its own is a condition of its own power. But Cuba’s allies do the opposite: they abandon it when the political cost of supporting Cuba outweighs the benefit of not doing so…

Those who today are abandoning Cuba are not only calculating their own narrow interests; they are also, in a way, renouncing their own desire for transformation. The abandonment of Cuba is the renunciation of the possibility of another world… 

Progressive Latin American governments, the BRICS, American and Western European left-wing parties, solidarity organizations that today look the other way: all have found, in one way or another, their niche within the order. They have obtained their share of recognition, their space for comfortable dissent, their permitted or simply tolerated gestures. And in that process, they have ceased to see Cuba as a mirror of what they could be, instead viewing it as an uncomfortable reminder of what they have ceased to be, but above all of what they never were…

Those who today betray Cuba are betraying themselves. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a strategic one. A world order that claims to be multipolar but fails to protect the most vulnerable when the Master tightens the screws is not an alternative order; it is a decentralized extension of unipolarity, a system in which the ritual invocation of multipolarity is a rhetorical exercise in futility… 

Veloz Serrade’s bitter eloquence speaks not only to the fraud of multipolarity and the hypocrisy of BRICS, but to the possible loss of the last outpost of authentic solidarity, internationalism, and anti-imperialism. The hope of a just world may well be extinguished for millions who saw Cuba as a beacon.

Multipolarity is neither anti-imperialist nor a substitute for fighting the imperialist system. Those who are invested in multipolarity and the ‘promise’ of BRICS do grave disservice to the fight for global justice and for peace. The shame of BRICS failure to resist brazen, death-dealing aggression against weaker parties will fall on them as well.

There can be no effective anti-war movement in this time without clarity on the imperialist system. Peace is only attainable if we understand and resist the causes of war, while not deferring or relying on a group of countries committed to protecting or improving their place in that system. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Mark Carney’s “Eulogy” to a Fractured International Order

Mark Carney-- Canada’s premier-- shocked many with his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He spoke bluntly about illusions and realities that were features of the post-World War II international order.

He reminded listeners that until recently, it was accepted among global elites that economic life was conducted under a set of rules, governed by institutions, and protected by military alliances that guaranteed free markets, fair exchange, and integration. Granted, it was constructed and maintained by the US. But it was thought that this constituted a post-war consensus that, despite its hierarchical structure and occasional bullying of the weaker by the stronger, created a formidable framework, offering the best outcomes for all.

Now, Carney tells us that widely-held belief is an illusion. To underscore this point, he treats his audience to a silly Cold War parable about neighborhoods of greengrocers in Peoples’ Czechoslovakia, a clumsy knockoff of the tale of the Emperor without clothes, but crafted to get a chuckle out of the rabidly anti-Communist business people and politicians present.

By pandering to Cold War prejudices, Carney unintentionally reveals the context for the post-war international order. The ruling classes of countries assented to the order because they saw it as a bulwark against Communism. They allowed the US to construct the order under its own terms because the US promised to anchor the fight against the Soviet Union and its allies. Institutions, alliances, military bases, and ideological unity constituted a formidable structure to meet a new post-war balance of forces more favorable to socialism and the many social, political, and economic alternatives offered by the socialist bloc. Economic liberalism was showcased as the moral and rational response to Communism. Fear of Communism was the glue that cemented US rulers and their allies to this new order.

It is important to emphasize that the referenced international order was constructed by ruling groups and not by the people. And it was elite interests behind the construction. Too often commentators blur the distinction by loosely attributing policies or actions to countries, as though state policies or actions represent the will of a uniform, homogeneous population. Whatever else the highly-regarded post-war international order was, it was not a popular, democratic, equality-based system, but a structure to grease the wheels of capitalist commerce.

Before conceding too much to Carney’s challenge to this order, it must be remembered that it was challenged earlier with the demise of the bête noire-- the Soviet Union-- in 1991. As a result of losing the arch enemy, the US and its closest allies responded in the following ways:

1. “naturalizing” the international order, painting it as the natural order of things. Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no Alternative” insists that free markets, profit-seeking, and unrestrained competition constitute the most rational way to organize economic activity. Another Pied Piper of the post-war order is the neo-Hegelian, Francis Fukuyama, who maintained that the post-Soviet world was the result of the synthesis of all that came before it-- marking the “end of history.”

2. Finding another "ugly beast" to replace Communism. The war on drugs, the war on terrorism (and the newly minted war on narcoterrorism), the war on Islamic fundamentalism, and the war on immigrants and criminal gangs became replacements for the war on Communism.

Thanks to these responses to the demise of the long Cold War, a fragile world order was maintained with the US remaining its police officer and chief beneficiary.

But the real challenge to the post-war global order came with the twenty-first-century economic crises, especially the deep downturn of 2007-2009. Like the great powers in the Great Depression, the major players sought both individual solutions and solutions that would push the problems onto their neighbors and “allies.” In the wake of the so-called Great Recession, I wrote of “centrifugal forces” breaking apart existing alliances, coalitions, agreements, and institutions. Crisis-induced economic stress threatened to fracture formations like the EU, changed the relationship between US capital and Peoples’ China, fostered an international retreat toward economic nationalism, and intensified rivalries.

That process continues to shape our world today. The European war-- between Russia, Ukraine, and its puppeteers-- reflects that process. The radical rearrangement of the Middle East and Central and South America reflect that process. The 2007-2009 disruption of the post-war economic order changed China from a tasty morsel for Western capital into a powerful rival, thanks to China’s successful navigation of the severe global turbulence. Today’s rise of nationalist, protectionist political movements and parties is certainly related to the failure of the existing world order to survive the twenty-first-century crises intact.

Predictably new economic, political, and military alliances and coalitions are springing up in response to the shattering of the old order. Ruling classes are seeking to promote their national interests at an especially volatile, uncertain moment by realigning, by seeking more favorable terms through courting opposing great powers, or by establishing and dominating spheres of interest.

That is the message that Mark Carney sought to convey with his address at Davos:

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints…

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

While these remarks shocked many for their candor and implied a break with his government’s long-standing intimate relationship to the US ruling class, they simply reflected capital in Canada’s search for a more advantageous affair with a more appreciative suitor.

Similarly, some EU states are opting for warmer relations with Russia, while others are looking East, threatening to exit their abusive marriage with the US. The fragility of these new affairs, their basis in the immediate interests of ruling classes and in the capturing of markets and investments should not escape Communists and progressives. Russia’s rulers can pull Assad’s chestnuts out of the fire and pivot swiftly and throw those same chestnuts under the bus, while maintaining solid relations with both Israel and Iran. That illustrates the opportunism of capitalists seeking to restore order out of disorder.

Attempts to establish a new order to be centered around new arrangements, new alliances, new coalitions, and new rules should not be taken for a repudiation of the imperialist system, unless those attempts also repudiate capitalism. Re-centering the global capitalist order around a rival power or rival powers in no way guarantees a more just or equitable world for working people.

This an especially unpleasant conclusion for those who have invested deeply in the BRICS and BRICS+ formation-- an unlikely, heterogeneous, ideologically diverse, and largely capitalist grouping of states loosely organized around various grievances against the existing order. They offer no trade or investment strategies directed specifically at working people, not to mention any rejection of the exploitative imperialist system.

While Carney’s exposure of the “rupture” in the international order may have led some to believe that it signaled a positive reform of global economic relations, it did not sway the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada. In a response to Carney’s address, they stated:

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos has been noted for its blunt talk about a “rupture” with the “old order” of U.S. hegemony. This has been seen as a breath of fresh air for some in Canada who are rightly concerned with escalating threats to our sovereignty and the U.S.’s descent into war and reaction. However, Carney’s newly articulated vision does not mark a fundamental shift towards policies that will make lives better for working people, nor does it signal a Canadian foreign policy of peace and respect for the sovereignty of all countries.

Carney’s speech confirms the sharpening contradictions within the global capitalist system and the decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony. He identifies a “rupture” in the post-WWII order, correctly noting that U.S. imperialism is moving away from leadership through dominating international institutions and toward unilateral coercion, even directed against its own allies. But we must not forget who he was addressing: the main bankers and representatives of global finance capital. His message is a strategic one for their benefit.

Indeed, the old order-- a system of predatory monopoly capitalism, maintained by finance capital-- may undergo restructuring and realignment, but it remains a system of predatory monopoly capitalism maintained by finance capitalism. A facelift should not be taken for a revolution.




Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

A Tale of Colliding World Views

In December, documents were released asserting two radically different political perspectives. 

They could not be more different.

On December 4, under the President of the United States’ Seal, the White House published the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, expressing the government's current evaluation of the global challenges facing it. 

The next day, December 5, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) publicly announced its forthcoming 22nd Congress, followed by the publication of its Theses of the Central Committee-- the product of long preparatory discussions by the KKE’s members-- constituting an assessment of the state of the world and the Party’s approach to it. 

A comparison of the two documents presents a violent clash of class outlooks.

The US National Security Strategy

The US ruling class-- in its current incarnation-- intends to maintain or re-establish US economic domination and grease the wheels for US corporations to succeed internationally. In this regard, the Trump administration is no different than earlier administrations, except-- perhaps-- being more transparent in this goal.

More specifically, extracting policy from the section on the Western Hemisphere, the strategy includes:

1. Militarizing the seas and the oceans. Previous administrations portrayed military force as an instrument of guaranteeing free “access” to trade. This administration, under the “America First” ideology explicitly uses military force to promote US economic success, foregoing the charade of promoting free trade for all.

2. Accessing strategic resources. In the document’s laundered language, the goal is “to identify strategic points and resources… with a view to their protection and joint development with regional partners.” More candidly, US policy makers in this administration project power to privilege US corporations in resource-rich countries like Bolivia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

3. Making it hard for other countries to compete. “The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.” The strategy endorsed by the document uses economic leverage to deny success to others.

4. Helping US corporations to dominate. “[W]e will reform our own system to expedite approvals and licensing—again, to make ourselves the partner of first choice. The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by [other] countries…” Specifically and adamantly, “[e]very U.S. Government official that interacts with… countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

5. Accepting that “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.” Of course, this policy only reiterates what every US administration for more than a hundred years has sought since the intervention in Cuba and the Philippines: a free hand for US economic exploitation.

While these goals are extracted from Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, they are barely disguised as policy for the rest of the world. However, they represent considerable continuity with the foreign policy of earlier administrations, though shorn of any pretense to global fairness.

Commentators have been surprised with the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere over the often-bitter hostility towards the People’s Republic of China. Surely, that simply acknowledges the formidable economic and military power of the PRC. US policy makers of Trump’s world have been forced to recognize that-- no matter how much they would like otherwise-- the US is in no position to bully the PRC. Therefore, they accept that they can only adjust or modify their economic relationship. Competing with the PRC-- the US’s most formidable rival-- consists, instead, in bullying those who do business with their rival.

The administration is explicit on how to “compete” for the allegiance of their Chinese rivals’ economic collaborators: “China’s state-led and state-backed companies excel in building physical and digital infrastructure, and China has recycled perhaps $1.3 trillion of its trade surpluses into loans to its trading partners. America and its allies have not yet formulated, much less executed, a joint plan for the so-called ‘Global South,’ but together possess tremendous resources. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others hold net foreign assets of $7 trillion. International financial institutions, including the multilateral development banks, possess combined assets of $1.5 trillion. While mission creep has undermined some of these institutions’ effectiveness, this administration is dedicated to using its leadership position to implement reforms that ensure they serve American interests.” [my emphasis] Thus, the document reveals the carrot to the US stick.

Almost in passing, by merely observing the European Union’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the Trump administration demonstrates that it considers the EU to be another rival, albeit a rival retaining some important historical ties-- neither a protectorate, nor currently a competitor of great concern.

The US National Security Strategy paper offers the latest insight into the thinking now directing the still-greatest power in the imperialist system. It is a blue print for the security of US business interests and not of the security and well-being of the people.

The KKE Theses of the Central Committee 

How does the Greek Communist Party view the current state of the world?

The KKE is one of the few Marxist organizations relatively untarnished by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It conceded little to the mass retreat from Leninist principles. It refused to flirt with the widespread ideological marriage of markets and socialism. It held fast to the centrality of class in the analysis of the contemporary world. Where much of today’s left rails against an ever-changing, seemingly unrelated basket of grievances, the KKE defends the classical Marxist understanding that the central, determinative contradiction remains the contradiction between capital and labor, nationally and internationally.

Certainly, that should make Greek Communist thinking of interest to all those who question the strategic aims of the leaders of the most powerful state in the capitalist system.

KKE sees a class-divided world moving toward relative and absolute impoverishment of working people, long-term unemployment, and an unfavorable balance of power between capital and labor. Technological innovation is skewed dramatically in support of the interests of capital. Pursuit of profit continues to dangerously degrade the environment. 

As a result of the weakness of labor in confronting capital, the capitalist system is suffering from an overaccumulation of capital. Hyper-exploitation has produced a mass of capital, seeking-- with greater and greater difficulty-- to find (safe) profitable investment opportunities (one might well view the orgy of investment in AI as an attempt to create such an opportunity). 

KKE understands the recessionary pressures experienced in Europe, Japan, and Asia as the effects of this crisis of the return on investment. Efforts to manage this crisis-- Keynesian or otherwise-- have failed. Specifically, the liberal project of green technology (e.g., the Green New Deal) and the Central Bank project (e.g., interest-rate manipulation, qualitative easing) were unsuccessful in restoring a solid foundation for the rate of profit.

Further, the capitalist powers have invested in the war economy, both in response to inter-imperialist contradictions and to absorb capital.

Militarism serves to destroy and devalue capital through the never-ending conflicts arising from imperialist rivalries. They caution that this military buildup increases sharply the risk of even larger wars, possibly world wars.

The KKE stresses competition between existing nations-- great powers, alliances, and emerging blocs--- fueling the existing wars, flashpoints, and severe clashes endangering our world. They contend that:

The USA, which still holds the leading position, is trying to halt the shift in the balance of power in China’s favour. International financial institutions have already downgraded the US credit rating. This trend is reflected in the decline of the US share and the significant increase of China’s share in Gross World Product (global GDP) between 2000 and 2025, in the significant difference in growth rates between the USA and China, the large US trade deficit in bilateral trade with China and the EU, and the sharp rise in US public debt. 

Within the global imperialist system, both the PRC and Russia present challenges to US hegemony, and US nationalist, protectionist policies are also “... sharpening contradictions within the Euro-Atlantic camp and causing a deterioration in relations between the USA and the EU, Canada and Australia. They are exacerbating intra-bourgeois contradictions within the USA, which are also reflected in developments within the bourgeois political system. They are increasing the likelihood of the decline of the dollar as an international currency. They have a negative impact on international trade and reinforce the downward trend in the international capitalist economy.”

Of the major powers, the KKE sees the European Union as losing ground “relative to the USA and China”, which is feeding the existing turn to the right in many Eurozone countries.

The war in Ukraine is the result of today’s Great Power rivalries-- it is an imperialist war. The KKE asserts:

In the three-and-a-half years of this war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives, mainly young people of the working class and the poor popular strata. Approximately twenty-five million people have fled their homes. Homes and public infrastructure have been destroyed on a massive scale. Amidst the ruins, capitalist states and monopolies are competing for the “reconstruction” of Ukraine, viewing it as an “investment opportunity.” This will cost hundreds of billions of euros, a burden that the people will be made to bear… The outbreak of contradictions and realignments within imperialist alliances as imperialist conflict and competition unfold is neither paradoxical nor unprecedented, but a typical feature of imperialist wars. It can lead to former adversaries becoming allies, and former allies becoming adversaries.

Similarly, the KKE views the war in the Middle East as an imperialist war: 

The Israeli war machine supported by the USA and the EU, launched a massive operation in the Gaza Strip, using the Hamas attack as a pretext. This operation resulted in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of innocent people, including unarmed civilians, young children, women and elderly people….The imperialist nature of the war in the Middle East and the bourgeois character of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not invalidate the just struggle of the Palestinian people and other peoples in the region, who resist and fight against foreign occupation and other imperialist plans. Through this struggle, they can create the conditions necessary to free themselves once and for all from the system of exploitation and war.

For those who may be interested, the current assessment bears remarkable consistency and continuity with the Theses for the 20th Congress developed nearly a decade ago.

Serious-minded people seeking an understanding of the perilous, contentious, and confusing world in which we are living should welcome the revealing contrast between the two perspectives outlined here. One outlook only recognizes the interests of a minority of advantage-seeking, privileged individuals and soulless corporations, while the other recognizes the common fate and pressing needs of the majority of the world’s people who are found within a well-defined social class.

One doesn’t have to agree with all of the conclusions shared by the Greek Communists, but one must acknowledge that they are drawn from an effort to create a world far distant from the one arrogantly defended in the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Moreover, the KKE unabashedly supports a class line-- on the working peoples’ side of the barricades. It argues that exploitation is the crucial social relation that decides whether employment, equality, living standards, health care, education, security, or peace are won or lost. Moreover, KKE unequivocally sides with the exploited.

Finding our way free from the Trumpian world and those conditions that produced it will require a clear and deep analysis. The KKE Theses provide a solid foundation of both clarity and depth. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

“Settling Accounts” on the Question of Imperialism

Writing in 1908-- six years before the first great inter-imperialist war and eight years before writing his landmark text on imperialism-- Lenin reminded us of the many ideological roadblocks that Marxism had to overcome before consolidating its position in the working-class movement.

First, Marx had to “settle accounts” with the Young Hegelians, then with Proudhonism, Bakuninism, and so on until scientific socialism became the dominant left factor in the workers’ movement in the late 1800s. 

Subsequently, the danger to ideological unity came from left and right-- largely right-- revisions of the revolutionary kernel that Marx and Engels had left us. “And the second half-century of the existence of Marxism began (in the nineties) with the struggle of a trend hostile to Marxism within Marxism itself.”

Today, all of those misguiding tendencies have become unsettled both outside and inside the Marxist movement. Ironically, as interest in Communism has become more acceptable with young people in reaction’s heartland-- the US-- confusion over once-settled matters grows more widely; the legacy of those hard-fought ideological struggles becomes lost to the dim past. 

It is a formidable task to rebuild the Marxist tradition that dominated the anti-capitalist workers’ movement in the twentieth century, but one necessitated by the inequality, the chaos, and the destruction wrought by unbridled capitalism and its champions.

Essential to that project is ideological clarity.

One critical issue facing the left today is the nature and behavior of contemporary capitalism on the international level-- what Lenin characterized as imperialism.

Over the recent period, I have offered several interventions on the question, primarily to shed light on the two most recent and dangerous wars-- the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Understanding these wars is impossible without understanding imperialism today and understanding contemporary imperialism is not possible without subjecting that understanding to the practical test of explaining these two brutal wars.

My most recent intervention on this question has been challenged by Rainer Shea via Rainer’s Newsletter posted on Substack and X. His article, The KKE/Trotskyist effort to redefine imperialism, and how it undermines the global workers struggle, is largely a defensive rehash of the position taken by Carlos Garrido and addressed in my article. While it offers little new, it does provide an opportunity to clarify further.

Shea faults my article for failing “to find alleged examples of Russia or China engaging in imperialist actions.” But that is not what I promised to do, since I chose instead to clarify imperialism, to reject multipolarity as anti-imperialism, and to suggest that action in defense of Palestinians was a good litmus test of anti-imperialism.

I have consistently argued that imperialism is a system and capitalist-oriented nation-states participate in that system in various ways, as perpetrators, victims, and many times, both. What fundamentally determines imperialism is the maturation of capitalism into monopoly capitalism, along with the merging of bank capital with industrial capital. Marxists like Eugen Varga in the Soviet Union elaborated on these developments in the 1920s and 1930s. US Marxists like Anna Rochester and Victor Perlo carefully and thoroughly tracked the merging of industrial and bank capital through intermarriage, membership on interlocking boards of directors, stock purchases, mergers, etc. They tracked the various groups in the US organized around affinitive financial institutions, industries, and monopolies. 

The hyperaccumulation of capital generated by both industrial and financial monopoly corporations necessitates the export of capital, as well as risky financial schemes that promise new investment horizons or, almost inevitably, great crashes. 

The agents of this process are predatory monopoly corporations-- both industrial and financial-- and their action inevitably leads to spheres of interest (what Lenin calls “the division of the world among the international trusts”). It is the most powerful nation states that enforce this division of the entire world to the advantage of the favored monopoly corporations through occupation, force, threat, or other schemes.

This, in essence, is Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It is an explanation of how a global capitalist system operates under specific, evolving conditions. It is not a criterion for which nation-state is or is not imperialist or anti-imperialist. Imperialism is capitalism beyond its infancy operating on the international stage and not merely a club of exclusive members. That is why today, as in Lenin’s time, it will not disappear as long as capitalism exists. 

Lenin can shed further light on the flawed “new imperialism” embraced by Shea and Garrido. Writing late in 1916 in Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Lenin scorns Kautsky’s claim that, with an anticipated weakened England (the overwhelmingly dominant global capitalist power of the time, like the US today), ‘there is nothing to fight about’.

On the contrary, not only have the capitalists something to fight about now, but they cannot help fighting if they want to preserve capitalism, for without a forcible redivision of colonies the new imperialist countries cannot obtain the privileges enjoyed by the older (and weaker) imperialist powers. [Lenin’s emphasis]

Lenin was right and Kautsky was wrong. After World War I, England continued to descend as the dominant power in the imperialist system, to be supplanted by the US within decades. And the US behaved with an even more overbearing global swagger than its predecessor.

Is there any compelling reason-- contra Lenin--- to believe that “In this era, one of our foremost missions is to defeat U.S. dominance in particular, which would thereby cause the imperial system as a whole to unravel” [my emphasis], as Shea contends? Like Kautsky, Shea believes that with the US knocked off the system’s pedestal, there would be nothing to fight about…

Our best efforts to defeat imperialism is not to applaud rivals to US domination, but to fight capitalism at home, the engine of both US domination abroad and the imperialist system. 

Both Garrido and Shea-- in their determination to cast Russia and the PRC as bulwarks against imperialism-- distract from the fight against capitalism. While we all --that is, all peace-loving people-- must stand against US aggression against Russia, the PRC, or any other country; we should not confuse that stance with the struggle against imperialism which is, in its essence, a fight against capitalism.

For those of us who profess Marxism, socialism, or Communism, nothing is gained by detaching imperialism from capitalism; nothing is gained by imagining that there can be a capitalist world without imperialism, if only the US were brought to its knees. 

Exploitation of labor and the appropriation of profit are still the engine of the capitalist mode of production, including in its current stage: imperialism. We are not, as Garrido contends, in a new stage, with imperialism based upon “debt and interest.” The workers in the so-called “Global South” are primarily exploited by their bourgeoisie and/or multi-national corporations (Lenin’s cartels), not by banks issuing credit cards or mortgages or by greedy insurance companies. The national debt and costly interest payments that plague less developed nations are akin to the personal debt of workers insofar as their subjugation will not be resolved by reforming banks or international institutions. The idea that debt, onerous interest payments, or labor exploitation will disappear under any restructuring of the global capitalist order is naïve, at best. Does anyone believe that debt, interest, or exploitation would dissolve if banks were reformed on the national level? If Goldman Sachs were dissolved?

It was a dream of post-World War II social democrats and many “popular-fronters” to construct a global trade architecture that would be “fair” to large and small, powerful and weak. They imagined institutions that would guarantee a fair playing field, while retaining capitalist exchange relations. Of course, those institutions have failed as they did with the earlier post-World War I project, the League of Nations. In both cases, the big and powerful came to dominate the institutions and continued to dominate the small and the weak. Why would anyone-- including Garrido-- expect a different result if the US would vacate its current position of dominance? Does history teach us nothing? 

Garrido has fallen under the sway of bourgeois economists like Michael Hudson, who dream of a debt jubilee under existing national and international conditions, thought to be attainable with the dethroning of the US as imperialism’s hegemon. Such memories of an ancient practice are distractions from today’s most urgent struggles.

It would be unconscionable to leave this question without noting Shea’s gratuitous slander of the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Shea’s identification of KKE with Trotskyism shows that he has little understanding of either. 

While the KKE is certainly more than capable of defending its position on issues that are critical for the left without my help, I must remind tweet-Communists of the long, principled, and illustrious history of Greek Communism, the Party’s role in defeating German, Italian, and Greek fascism, its sacrifices for national liberation and socialism, its ideological steadfastness, and-- most recently-- its determined effort to build Communist unity.

One can be critical of KKE without associating it with Trotskyism, without resorting to an anti-Communist slur. It diminishes the discussion and diminishes a participant with little or no experience or knowledge of the Communist movement.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com