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.

PART I: The Rise of a Complete US-Led Global North Military Bloc

Shifts and Consolidation

The US-Led Military Bloc has had two internal changes in the last three decades:

1. The further expansion of the bloc to include all Eastern Europe countries (only missing Belarus).
2. The challenge to retain the full subordination of the Western European capitalist states, which abandoned any fundamental, and in many cases even the pretence of, independence.

The latter became evident in 2018 by the Western European states’ genuflection to Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal – a significant blow to their economic interests. Further down, we will discuss the history of this process.⁹

The centre of the ‘US-Led Military Bloc’, as we call it, is NATO. It also includes Japan, Australia, Israel, New Zealand, three Global South countries, and the few other European countries who are not NATO members.

The US-Led Military Bloc is the world’s only bloc, a de facto and de jure military alliance with a central command. There is no other bloc of its kind. Its clarity and unity of purpose are sharply evident. The US has abandoned many important anti-nuclear proliferation treaties over the last ten years (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and Open Skies Treaty in 2020).¹⁰ This has allowed military planners to potentially prepare for the placement of intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of obliterating Moscow in minutes.

Military Spending

In the November 2023 issue of Monthly Review, a well-researched paper by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, using only US official economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Office of Management and Budget (OMB), revealed that the actual US economic military spending is over twice that acknowledged by the US government or even the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).¹¹

The actual 2022 US military expenditure was US$ 1,537 billion.¹²

To calculate the world total military expenditure, we have selected SIPRI’s published numbers as our primary source for all countries, except for the US.¹³ For the US alone, we use the figures from Monthly Review. In 2022, SIPRI adjusted the Chinese government reported national defence budget number of $229 billion to $292 billion, a 27.5% increase.¹⁴ Starting in 2021, SIPRI began a new methodology for revising China’s military spending.¹⁵ SIPRI changed their calculations for China’s military spending both for previous years and current years.¹⁶

SIPRI adjusted the US annual military budget reported by the OMB for the year 2022 by 14.5% up from US$ 765.8 to 876.9 billion.¹⁷ This was about half of the percentage increase added to China.

SIPRI’s treatment of China’s military spending is quite different from how it deals with the US, as it adopts a much more circumspect approach to US calculations.

Even if SIPRI doubled the military spending reported by China itself to US$ 458 billion, it would represent 2.6% of its GDP. This is significantly below the actual 6% spent by the US and, even then, China’s military spending would be only 29.8% of that of the US, with a population over four times greater than the US .¹⁸

Additionally, unlike the US, China does not have 902 overseas foreign bases.¹⁹ US bases and interventions create a drain not only on the annual budget but also on long-term economic debt. Additional details can be found in the endnote.²⁰

What emerged from our analysis was a series of clear findings. The first is that the US controls, through NATO and other means, an astounding 74.3% of all military spending worldwide (Figure 2). This amounts to over US$ 2 trillion.²¹

Figure 3 shows that imperialist countries account for 12 of the top 16 military budgets in the world.

Figure 4 shows the 16 highest military per capita spending by Global North countries versus the three largest Global South military spenders. The United States spends 21 times more on its military per person than China does on its military.²² There can be no doubt as to the significance of these findings.

Figure 5 lists all countries that have military budgets exceeding US$ 20 billion, 11 of which are in the Global North compared to six (out of 145) countries in the Global South. For this chart, Republic of Korea is listed under the US-Led Military Bloc.

It is clear that the Global South, in contrast to the Global North, is not a bloc and certainly not a military bloc. The Global South thus faces the extreme monopoly of military spending by the US-Led Military Bloc. This represents a clear and present danger to all countries of the Global South; it presents an imminent danger to the continued existence of humankind and the planet.

In turn, the single most important aspect of state power – that is, military power – the absolute central danger to the working classes of all countries, especially to the darker nations of the world, lies in the US-Led Imperialist Camp. Objectively, there is no such thing as sub-imperialism or non-Western imperialist powers (such concepts are subjective deceptions that cloud over the factual realities).

US and UK Military Bases

In March 2002, Monthly Review published an article with a list and map of countries with known US military bases, arguing that the extent of the US empire could be depicted by its bases.²³ This created a storm in some US military circles. Others have expanded on this work in subsequent years, including David Vine and World Beyond War (which has made an interactive map publicly available). ²⁴

The information about the location of these bases opened a window onto the absolutely pervasive nature of US military hegemony. The location and number of bases is valuable for understanding the shape and trajectory of imperialism by illuminating its frontiers and showing its role in policing them.

There are 902 known US military bases and 145 known UK military bases described below.²⁵

Due to the secrecy of the US military and government, there is a lack of data on US military functions that occur inside these bases and the actions launched from US military forces located there. This makes a full qualitative analysis of US foreign military activities incomplete. Some of the analytical deficiencies include that:

• Listed bases exclude the facilities and locations of the many privatised military functions that the US has created over the last 40 years. Companies such as DynCorp International, Fluor Corporation, AECOM, and KBR, Inc. run operations worldwide, including in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.²⁶
• They do not include ‘unofficial’ projects by the US military like the commandeering of Terminal 1 in Kotoka International Airport in Ghana’s capital city, in which US soldiers do not need passports or visas to enter (only their US military ID) and US military aircrafts are ‘free from boarding and inspection’.²⁷ Terminal 1 is thus a de facto US military base. Ghana has ceded national sovereignty to the US.²⁸
• They exclude essential projects for the US military-industrial-digital communications complex. Many undersea cable terminus locations are controlled by US intelligence-cleared officials only. Control of the undersea cable communications of the world is one of the key US intelligence priorities.²⁹ This is part of the NSA ‘Collect It All’ program to gather all communications of the world and store them in places like the Bluffdale Utah Data Centre (code-named ‘Bumblehive’), the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative data centre.³⁰
• They exclude secret military projects and locations (including host-nation facilities known as ‘lily pads’), although some have been exposed and included.³¹
• There is little information regarding US military movements between locations, the nature of the activities carried out (such as troop movements or targeted assassinations), and the volume of goods, planes, and vessels.
• Not all bases are equal in scale or function, assessing relative importance is near impossible. Sometimes a single building is classified as a base because it is discontiguous from other buildings a kilometre away. Some bases are massive and destructive to everything in their path – like the military facilities in Guam, destroying the natural environment and the lives of people living there. Others are known as small spy network installations.

The result of these limitations is a tendency to report on what is measurable, not what is unknown but strategic.

First, we provide a map using World Beyond War data that shows which countries have bases without showing the exact number in each country. This helps to reduce possible incorrect comparisons. The existence of even one US base within a country means that the country has already ceded some national sovereignty to the US. Second, for completeness, we include below two charts (one for the Global North and one for the Global South) that list countries with known bases as per World Beyond War.

Figure 6 shows the US has at least 902 foreign military bases. They are heavily concentrated in bordering regions or buffer zones around China and seriously undermine the sovereignty of Global South countries.³²

US foreign military bases not only exist in the Global South, but also have a significant presence in the Global North (Figure 7). More than two-thirds of known bases are concentrated in the two countries defeated in World War II: Germany and Japan.

Figure 8 lists the locations of US foreign military bases in Global South countries and territories. The Republic of Korea hosts 62 permanent US military bases.

Figure 9 shows the scale of the US military footprint: 36 million square metres in 49,000 buildings covering 245,000 hectares. Ranked by number of buildings, the three Axis powers are in the top four.

Whilst the sun now happily sets without concern for the British Empire, Figure 10 shows how large the UK network of bases remains, with its focus on West Asia and Africa.

US and UK Military Invasions, Interventions, and ‘Deployments’

NATO countries conduct extensive military deployments and interventions worldwide, supported by their vast network of bases.

Figures 11 and 12 are for the year 2022 only. Imperialist forces deployed 317 military operations in Global South countries and 137 in Global North ally nations, totalling 454 (45 of which are not UN member states). The imperialist nations who carried out the highest number of military deployments include the US (56), the UK (32), France (31), Italy (20), Germany (17), Spain (15), Canada (13), and the Netherlands (13) (Figure 11).³³

Figure 12 shows how Africa and West Asia remain the focal points of Western schemes, with the following five nations suffering the most military deployments in 2022 alone: Mali (31), Iraq (30), Lebanon (18), the Central African Republic (13), and South Sudan (13).³⁴

Looking at the geography of US and UK bases and Global North deployments, it is clear where the frontiers of US policing lie and how Eurasia and regions that buffer it are the battlegrounds of our time.

The US and its Global North allies, especially the UK, have had centuries of interventions as indicated in Figures 13 and 14. Since Congressional Research Services (CRS) is an official US government publication, it serves as a primary source of data on US military intervention. It is used to demonstrate the scale and historical longue durée of US military intervention. However, it must be noted that CRS does not include secret missions and does not aggregate its data to differentiate between various types of US Armed Forces’ overseas interventions. The data is not organised based on the qualitative and quantitative nature or scale of the instances. The listed instances (over 480) vary greatly in size, duration, legal authorisation, and significance.³⁵

The Military Intervention Project (MIP) uses a more comprehensive definition of military intervention that encompasses ‘united instances of international conflict or potential conflict outside of normal peacetime activities in which the purposeful threat, display, or use of military force by official US government channels is explicitly directed toward the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state actor’.³⁶ MIP has not published their database, so exact instances of all the military interventions they identify are not yet publicly available. As such, this report has only accessed summary data from the publication ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’ (2023) and could not produce a map based on MIP.

As seen in Figure 13, as of June 2023, the acknowledged data from the US Congressional Research Service shows that the US Armed Forces have been deployed to 101 countries between 1798 and 2023.³⁷ Figure 14 exposes the UK who has militarily invaded 170 countries and territories between 1169 and 2012.

According to MIP, between 1776 and 2019, the US carried out over 392 military interventions worldwide.³⁸ Half of these operations were undertaken between 1950 and 2019, and 25% of them occurred in the post-Cold War period.³⁹ The pace of US military interventions has clearly accelerated since 1991.

On International Working Women’s Day in 1950, Claudia Jones, a black communist and immigrant woman, addressed a rally of activists in the US. In different circumstances but with the same spirit, we share this report with the aim, to quote Jones, of ‘heightening [our] consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day, against monopoly oppression, against war and fascism’.⁴⁰

PART II: Evolution of Imperialism

The New Stage of Imperialism

The US dollar monopoly and the switch from creditor to debtor nation that began in the 1970s, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, ushered in a period where the United States attempted to create a self-crafted unipolar world order. Unipolarity could not be fully established because states – which the US called ‘rogue states’ – refused to submit to this new system.⁴¹

Over the past fifteen years, the project of US unipolarity has been greatly weakened. The period between the ‘great financial recession’ of 2008 and the February 2022 conflict between NATO and Russia has consolidated a quantitative and qualitative change in global imperialism.

A key historical question flowing from this has been the depth and consequences of inter-imperialist rivalries. This has deep strategic and political implications: will other imperialist powers break with the US on fundamental issues or subordinate their own interests to those of the US?

Today, the facts show these differences are no longer strategic. Imperialism has consolidated a new stage of existence best described as Hyper-Imperialism. Later, we explain why we chose this term.

Some of the features of this new stage include the following:

• China has emerged as the largest and most dynamic economy in the world. The growth of the Global South exceeds that of the Global North. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in Asia is significantly higher than in the G7 countries.
• Despite its remaining economic strengths, the US is facing meagre growth and is declining relative to the rise of the Global South (with China’s growth being a major locomotive). This is evidenced by total GDP, industry, trade, infrastructure, and 5G communications. The US is making aggressive attempts to curtail China’s economic growth and its role in global initiatives such as BRICS10. The US is leading the world into increased protectionism.
• The US has rapidly advanced hybrid warfare, including US sanctions (inflicted on more than one in four countries around the world).⁴² The US seizure of national reserves (from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Afghanistan) has been a rude awakening to many in the Global South.
• The US has now set its sights on the domination of Eurasia, where the West faces Russia and China, two powerful countries with a combined strong economic, technological, military, energy, and food capacity. The complete demilitarisation of the long border between China and Russia and their announced ‘no limits’ partnership is a testament to both countries’ common interests in peace and security.
• There is a clear and present danger that imperialism will continue its militarist path and rely on its military dominance to offset its growing relative economic and political decline. The political and military interests of the imperialists have now become paramount. Short-term economic losses are being taken. ⁴³ The interests of individual capitalists or groups are secondary.
• US dollar hegemony, financialisation, and technological ability allow finance to move trillions of dollars in trades in milliseconds, which has changed the mechanics of capitalist accumulation and its ownership. European and Japanese capitalists invest their capital in the same structures as those of their US class brethren, albeit under the control of the latter.
• The US enhanced its already vast ‘soft power’ infrastructure based on the rise of a new generation of advanced social media and video streaming, under the full control of US monopolies, all of whom are explicitly integrated into the US military industrial digital complex.
• The contradictions between the imperialist countries are now non-antagonistic and secondary. Germany, Japan, France, and all other imperialist powers must subordinate their short-term and medium-term interests to the fundamental interests of the United States. Their work is coordinated in NATO+. Official policy documents state that their strategy on China is to de-risk. Yet, Germany’s Bundestag officials, for example, are leading the calls for the isolation of China, even though that entails a considerable loss of markets for ‘German’ manufacturers.⁴⁴ There is also a simultaneous internal drive to re-militarise Germany.
• New multilateral institutions and alternative development financing models emerging from the Global South are gaining momentum. This is evident by the breadth of support for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the growing interest in joining BRICS, now BRICS10. Nearly 80% of UN member states participate in the BRI, comprising around 64% of the global population with their combined economies representing 52% of the world’s GDP (Purchasing Power Parity) in 2022.⁴⁵ BRICS10 countries now encompass 45.5% of the world population, with 35.6% of the share of the world GDP (PPP). In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10% of the world population, their share of the global GDP (PPP) is 30.4%.⁴⁶
• The Global South is losing confidence in the US and Europe’s economic, political, and moral leadership. China, not the US, facilitated Saudi Arabia and Iran’s breakthrough diplomatic agreement. Russia and China now conduct most of the trade between the two countries in their own currencies. BRICS10 is setting up a working group to explore alternatives to the use of the US dollar, including international payment systems and a possible new reserve currency. On the vote for the UN resolution on a ceasefire in Gaza (A/ES-10/L.25), the Global North was outnumbered, with 14 votes against and 120 in favour.
• For the first time in over 600 years, there is now a credible economic and political alternative to the domination of world affairs by the Europeans and their descendant white-settler colonial states. First, is the socialist grouping led by China. Second, are the growing aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernisation, and multilateralism, emerging from the Global South.

Given these shifts, leaders of the US political ruling class at the Centre for New American Security (CNAS) – the Washington-based think tank and the US government’s intellectual core – have defined US geo-strategy as the dual defeat of Russia and China, which would mean that the Global North would gain control of Eurasia. The size, share of natural resources, military power, geographic proximity, and independence from imperialist domination of China and Russia are the key factors in their respective global outlook and strategic partnership.

These objective factors are much more dominant than the ideological ones. The US wants to accomplish their unfinished mission of de-nuclearising Russia. There are maps hanging in Washington that have been drawn to show both countries broken up into small chunks, vassal states of the West, without independence and certainly without nuclear weapons.

As pictured in Figure 15, China, Russia, the DPR Korea, and Iran are the four nuclear (or potentially nuclear) powers that are the centre of the frontline attack from imperialism. China and Russia are the top two targets, the former due to its economic strength and the latter due to its nuclear arsenal. Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Belarus are also immediate targets for regime change.

The world faces a very difficult and dangerous moment. Countries in the Global South are highly diverse and heterogeneous, do not form a bloc, and are not ideologically aligned. They certainly have no military alliances. Some – the Republic of Korea and the Philippines – have become enmeshed in the US military sphere.

What they do have is a shared history. They have suffered hundreds of years of colonial and semi-colonial abuse by the Global North. The whiter nations have spent the last fifty years trying to airbrush from history the terror they unleashed on the world’s darker peoples, including those who live within their own borders.

Western media revels in the vast differences within the Global South. The Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement, despite being weaker, continue to exist. The developments stronger sense of shared identity amongst Global South countries cannot be easily dismissed. The demand for national sovereignty is deeply democratic. It remains a crux matter for improving the lives of the popular classes in the Global South and is also a necessary step towards socialism.

The First World War (WWI) ushered in the Russian Revolution (1917), followed by the creation of the Soviet Union, the world’s first fully functioning workers’ state and a wave of revolutionary national liberation struggles. The Second World War (WWII) ended with the creation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (1948) and the People’s Republic of China (1949), which were followed by another wave of national liberation struggles that included important socialist victories, such as in Viet Nam (1954 and 1975) and Cuba (1959).

We are not living in a comparable period of revolutions today. Yet, there is a clear new mood and an awakening of the spirit to advance the incomplete national liberation projects that began in the two previous periods. The domination of the Western neo-colonial system is being questioned. We are witnessing ‘changes not seen in 100 years’ and entering a new period of history.

Summarily, we can say there are eight main contradictions evident in the world:⁴⁷

• Moribund US-led imperialism vs. emergent China-led socialism.
• Parasitic rent-seeking capital vs. societies’ requirements for environmentally sustainable development, industry, agriculture, and employment.
• US-led imperialism vs. the urgent necessity for national sovereignty of the socialist and capitalist countries within the Global South.
• The ruling classes of the Global North vs. the bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries in the Global South.
• The white supremacist ruling class of the G7 (and the rest of the Global North) vs. the popular classes (workers, peasants, and lower petty bourgeoise) in the darker nations of the Global South.
• The bourgeoisie and upper strata of the Global South capitalist countries vs. the popular classes of the Global South.
• Western imperialism vs. the future of the planet and human life.
• The internal contradiction between the Global North bourgeoisie vs. millions of the working class (poor and increasingly growing sections of the skilled and semi-skilled) in the Global North.

As we have already begun to do with the military, we attempt here to analyse this new stage of imperialism, the internal functioning of the imperialist camp, and to examine the Global South’s composition and connotations to understand the world’s primary contradictions today.

Conquest, Racism, and Genocide: The Common History of the Imperialist Camp

The wealth of the Global North originated from historical theft through violent dispossession over centuries (Figure 16).⁴⁸ Economic stagnation and demands for growth spurred the looting of resources from other regions. This began as early as the military invasions of the Crusades against Arab and Muslim areas of West Asia (1050–1291).

The end of the European Medieval Warm Period (which lasted from about 950AD to 1250AD), and the catastrophe of the Black Death (1346–1353) tilted things in favour of peasants, away from the aristocracy. The peasant rebellions and charters of the forest throughout Europe were a sign that capitalism’s future was far from sealed.

Europe then commenced its trajectory as a world hegemon through its militarised maritime powers, beginning as early as 1415 with Portugal’s invasion and capture of Ceuta, a fortified Moroccan port ­­– a date we use to mark the now over 600 years of Western domination. The first European colonial power, Portugal, used Genovese capital to fund its expeditions, and the rest of Europe followed suit in the 1400s.

The conquests of the darker nations of the world, the subsequent dispossession of peoples from their lands, and the subordination of their labour saw racial ideologies emerge. This ideological layer infiltrated the base and superstructure of both European societies and the peoples they conquered. It is most pronounced in the white settler colonial states, which were racial projects from the very beginning of their existence. Within these white settler colonial states, the US and Israel now represent the most acute, permanent, and deeply ingrained history of racial-religious projects.

Economic analysis shows that the real rise in capitalist investment in the UK began when slavery’s profits and plunder of countries such as India enabled the historic rise in fixed capital investment and was decisive in so-called capitalist primitive accumulation and the financing of the ‘industrial revolution’. In a 2022 study, Utsa Patnaik indicated that the UK extracted US$ 45 trillion (using a compound interest rate formula since it remains unrepaid) from India between 1765 to 1936.⁴⁹ The overwhelming bulk of leading UK institutions profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racial ideological underpinning, in turn, has shaped the later development of both capitalism and imperialism.

Over the centuries, Europe created several further white-settler colonial projects outside its historic core in the Americas and Australasia, including in Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The ‘successful’ ones did not do so by settling on uninhabited land, the myth of terra nullius, but rather through genocide and military conquest in creating majority white populations and states. Germany perpetrated the first twentieth century genocide, murdering approximately 80,000 Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia between 1904 to 1908. Five of these remain today: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel, all projects of Britain – the latter having begun its colonial conquests in the mid-1500s in Ireland. . Britain’s role in the Americas resulted in the creation of the United States of America. The infamous British Balfour Declaration (1917) was central to the formation of Israel at the expense of the then-UK colony Palestine. The Zionist mission needed to create in Israel a barrier to the ‘barbaric hordes’ of Asia. No other nation is as influential in the US as Israel. The US, due to its size and role, remains the dominant force of world terrorism, but Israel has an outsized role in violence and military spending. It has nuclear weapons that the Western media conveniently downplays.

From creation to modern times, the US has been defined as a racial project. In American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1992), David E. Stannard estimated that within the first 150 years of the European conquest of the Americas, as many as 100 million Indigenous people may have died because of the conquest and its aftermath, including disease, warfare, and enslavement.

By 1860, nearly four million black people were slaves in the US alone.⁵⁰ In 2022, over 720,000 black people were incarcerated in US prisons and jails. Black people represented 38% of the prison population despite being only 12% of the US population. The US has nearly 20% of all prisoners in the world despite having only 5% of the world’s population.⁵¹ Over 500 years after slavery began (with the earliest recorded arrival of a slave ship in 1519), the US still puts tens of thousands of black people in solitary confinement, despite this being considered a form of torture by the United Nations.⁵² It was only in 2013 that the state of Mississippi officially ratified the 13th amendment which abolished slavery – first officially noted in the constitution on 6 December 1865.⁵³ We can only understand the ideology of the US ruling class by recognising the racialised character of its class structure.

The 2023 NATO declaration and the unified support for Israeli genocide against the Palestinians is ample proof that imperialism cannot be divorced from historic racial aspects. For over 600 years, European and white-settler states have sought to and succeeded in dominating the whole world.

Since WWII, the US has sought to extend this rule for at least a millennium. Initially, all the states within the imperialist camp were white. With the absolute defeat of Japan in WWII, including using atomic bombs, Japan was assimilated into the imperialist camp, eventually achieving what the South Africans coined ‘honorary white’ status. This was particularly possible because Japan was a previously fascist power that also tied its imperialist expansion to racialised practices.

Imperialism also has racialised patriarchal foundations, which trace back to how the sexual division of labour, the control of women’s reproductive capacities, and the exploitation of women’s unpaid work were reshaped within Western colonisation, as preconditions for the international expansion of capital accumulation.⁵⁴ From then to now, gender-based subordination and violence have been used extensively in warfare and conquest, from the sexual slavery of tens of thousands of ‘comfort women’ during Japan’s military occupation in China and Indonesia, to the current sexual exploitation that unfolds inside the US military bases in the Philippines.⁵⁵

It is not an accident that the United States shows up in seven of the eight categories of historical violence in Figure 16. This process did not begin in the 1890s with the development of modern imperialism. It can be traced back to 1492 with the first European invasion of the Americas.

In October 2023, out of 193 members of the UN, only the United States and Israel voted against ending the illegal embargo and blockade against heroic Cuba. When an initial draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza was drafted on 16 October 2023, not one single white member of the US House of Representatives initially signed it.⁵⁶ There is a throughline from the Portuguese slave traders in West Africa to the Israeli and US genocidaires in Palestine.

History and Definition of ‘Hyper-Imperialism’

Pre-History

The pre-history of modern imperialism began in 1415 with the advent of European maritime expansion. Africa was the first victim, followed by the colonisation of the Americas and the genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples, and then the rapid dependence by Europe (and its settler states) on blood-soaked capital from human slavery, which lasted 400 years.

Britain’s existence as a modern power started with the vampiric dependency on the blood of slaves and colonial labourers. The British were responsible for millions of deaths in the Atlantic slave trade and its colonial conquests. Slave labour in the Americas – as well as the British capture of a good part of Spanish and Portuguese colonies’ surplus – provided the ‘special’ ingredient to so-called primitive or originary accumulation (‘ursprüngliche Akkumulation’, the term used by Marx in Capital).⁵⁷

US imperialism, in addition to starting as a racial project, has a unique path of capitalist development, including the following:

• A highly profitable capitalist form of slavery.
• A state unbridled in its expansion in a large territory, without any holdovers from feudalism.
• The only major imperialist country whose territory was not militarily attacked by other imperialists.
• An imperial power beginning after Europe had already divided the world.
• A self-defined unlimited power through the Monroe Doctrine (1823), as well as concepts such as Manifest Destiny and US exceptionalism.

Since the advent of modern industry, the capitalist world system has consisted of two successive periods of dominance by a single capitalist power – first the UK and then the US. From the late eighteenth century to WWII, Britain was considered the dominant force in international finance. However, this openly collapsed when Britain abandoned the pound’s convertibility to gold and ended the gold/pound standard in 1931. In reality, US dominance was clear from WWI and acknowledged US hegemony began in 1945, with Europe in tatters. At the core of the imperialist system, therefore, is what can be called the Anglo-American Project.

The size of the US economy overtook Britain’s in the 1870s, but US per capita GDP (PPP) did not equal Britain’s until the twentieth century. By 1913, the US economy was twice the size of Britain’s in GDP (PPP).⁵⁸ However, it was not until 1945 (with the US being five times greater than the UK) that US hegemony was fully and formally established. At that point, the US was manufacturing more than half of the products in the world.

History

Vladimir Lenin’s work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), drawing heavily on the work of Rudolf Hilferding’s 1910 book Finance Capital, explained the rise of finance capital during the last period of the nineteenth century – marking the shift from classical liberal capitalism to finance-driven imperialism.⁵⁹ The increase in the organic composition of capital meant that greater and greater outlays of capital were needed to expand production. This went beyond the ability of most individual capitalists engaging in classical competition, leading to domination by oligopolies and monopolies with the reorganisation of the financial system to meet their requirements.

In parallel with this were technological changes. The switch from steam power to electric power in the 1890s saw a leap in the productive forces and of factory production: higher energy efficiency, lower maintenance, decentralisation, a reconfigured factory floor layout, mass production, and a massive increase in the division and socialisation of labour. This type of rapid change in the productive forces happened again later with the invention of the transistor and the rise of computers.

Lenin noted five characteristics of this new stage: the rise of finance capital and the financial oligarchy; the concentration of production and monopolies; the export of capital; the rise of monopolist cartels, which ‘shared’ the world among themselves; and the completion of the territorial division of the whole world amongst the largest capitalist powers, along with the increasing conflict between the imperialist states.

These developments meant that a new, highest, and last stage of capitalism had begun, i.e., the stage of modern imperialism. There cannot be another new stage of capitalism (as a system with no competition would not be capitalism).

Lenin’s book was written on the eve of the Soviet Revolution. Once the Soviet Union was formed, the conflict between labour and capital changed qualitatively and was no longer solely a domestic contradiction within countries but included contradictions between states with a different class basis.

Modern imperialism fully inherits the history of the European project’s domination and exploitation of the world. Lenin defines super-profits, a result of modern imperialism, as ‘a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world’.⁶⁰

Post-WWI, international capitalist divisions again intensified during the Great Depression (1929–1939), as various imperialist powers locked their economies behind tariffs and other barriers. Before the end of WWII, the US-led reorganisation of the global financial system was agreed to in Bretton Woods in July 1944. The convertibility of the main currencies into the US dollar and the US dollar into gold established the supremacy of the new ‘green gold’. To make sure its regulations were implemented and followed, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), later, the World Bank, were established. These two institutions have been key pillars of US domination over the Global South since then.

Post-World War Two

1945 saw the decisive victory by the United States among the capitalist powers, and the US dollar began its domination. The period from 1945 to 1971 was an expansionary phase of US imperialism. The US did suffer significant political losses during this period, including a number of newly formed socialist projects. However, confident of its own productive supremacy, the US began a radical reorganisation of the global capitalist system after WWII. It dismantled tariffs and other protectionist measures that it deemed unnecessary to its own advancement (but retained subsidy measures that advantaged its own capitalist firms). The post-WWII new ‘globalised’ organisation of world capitalism differed significantly in its international structure from the pre-1945 capitalist system. It achieved a more rapid development of the productive forces than the era of the previous colonial empires. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, behind the veneer of free trade, there were always monopolies, as Karl Marx said with respect to Britain. The US further developed this domination through imperialist monopolies guarded by an international military apparatus.

Formed in 1949, NATO initially had three objectives: first, to stop the spread of the communist spectre into Western Europe; second, to guarantee the military subordination of all other imperialists to the US; and third to create a military bloc to contain and eventually overthrow the socialist bloc countries. The US also began the domestication of the European elite and elicited their support for the North Atlantic project through economic integration and dependency (symbolised by the Marshall Plan beginning in 1948) and political subordination (such as through institutions like the Bilderberg Meeting, beginning in 1954).⁶¹

The US had three objectives in the colonial world. First, finalise the defeat of European control and remove barriers to US economic interests. Second, prohibit their alignment with the socialist bloc. Third, defeat any communist-inspired or -led revolutionary projects.

Outside a few exceptions, such as Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, the US never had the full aim or desire to rule or manage the full scope of political, economic, and social relations at the local level in what was then called the Third World. Using military power, covert operations, economic inducements, and American ‘soft power’, the US developed a strategy of neo-colonialism: nominal political independence and near-total economic subordination. The first institution responsible for the conscription of Europeans into the US hegemonic project post-WWII, the IBRD, pivoted to its work in the Global South once the Marshall Plan kicked in.

Neo-liberalism

The next phase of imperialism is generally called neo-liberalism. It emerged as a response to the economic stagnation that began in the 1960s (which became acute by the crisis of 1974) and the political threat of left-led Third World Projects.⁶² Neo-liberalism was first experimented with in Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976) by the ‘Chicago Boys’ under Milton Friedman. Both were implemented through bloody coup d’états that killed tens of thousands of people to eradicate support for left projects, with support from the US. The elections of Margaret Thatcher (1979) in UK and Ronald Reagan (1980) in the US paved the way for its global ascendancy.

The US had become, in current terms, a debtor nation by 1981. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 enabled the US to engage in a more naked imperialist projection, especially in the military realm. Salient features of neo-liberalism included the following:

• The world experienced economic globalisation and the financialisation of monopoly capitalism, with ‘Super-Imperialist’ financial monopoly privileges created by the US sustaining the removal of the US dollar from the gold standard.
• The US aggressively extended its intellectual property rights over the whole world and achieved near-perpetual global monopolies. The tangible goods economy was subordinated to the virtualised economy. Large areas of petty production were ruthlessly destroyed.
• The International Monetary Fund and World Bank consistently pursued austerity policies that impoverished and saddled the Global South with large levels of debt. That debt could only be repaid through exporting things that the Global North would pay for in US dollars. Unlike any other bank, the World Bank got to author its creditors economic policy, shrinking the state, and deflating local currency to secure the primacy of the US dollar. Privatisation, enclosures of the public sector, the withdrawal of the state role in the economy and society (especially in the Global South), and increased casualisation of labour were core demands of their policies. This resulted in increased poverty and inequality, such as the intensification of women’s unpaid reproductive work.⁶³
• The disarticulation of factory production and supply chains (helped by huge technology changes and US subsidised oil prices) created not only massive increases in productivity but huge advantages to global capital and its multinational corporations at the expense of the working class. Capital was easily able to move parts of production between various small, weak Global South countries, and late-entrant industrial Global South countries like Brazil and South Africa suffered de-industrialisation. Socialism and China’s large size protected it from this fate.
• There was a shift from production to speculative finance and monopoly-rent seeking capital. A strong deregulation of financial markets all over the world – and a revolution in communication technologies – made possible huge flows of financial speculative capital in real time.
• A new advanced form of monopoly production and circulation became evident in multiple sectors of the economy. Notably, within the rise of digital monopoly capital, a few monopolies and oligopolies, such as Google, dominate the whole world (except for China, Russia, Iran, DPR Korea, Cuba and a few others).
• There was a growth in the coercive state, growing high levels of inequality, and a rise in neo-fascist populism.
• The rise of Western cultural, political, and foreign policy hegemony was possible due to the pervasiveness and economic monopoly status of US technologies, including Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter.⁶⁴

Michael Hudson’s work on Super Imperialism (1972) describes the great defeat of the rest of the world when the US abandoned the gold standard.⁶⁵ Rather than buy gold to maintain their currencies, the US forced other central banks to recycle their dollar surpluses into buying US Treasury bonds. This enabled it to force the rest of the world to pay its debts, including the debts incurred from the war against the people of Viet Nam. The US became a debtor nation but was able to outsource its debt through the instrument of the Dollar-Wall Street complex.

Technology and Soft Power

Accompanying this process were tremendous changes in technology and the development of the productive forces. Semi-conductors, for example, saw a 100-billion-fold increase in transistor density between 1954, when the first single working silicon transistor was created, and in June 2023, with the release of the Apple M2 Ultra chip with 134 billion transistors.⁶⁶

The US tech sector power came into existence, first, due to the importance of technological advancement to the military-industrial complex and, second, to the US dominance in world trade that allowed them to flex their commercial muscles to reinforce the centrality of Silicon Valley. Thus, Silicon Valley is both an enabler of core state military intelligence functions and one of the beneficiaries of it.

The underlying nature of what is called the ‘network effect’ allowed for rapidly established ‘natural’ monopolies and oligopolies in many technology areas. Like phone exchanges of a hundred years ago, once a company like Google passed a threshold of market share in search functions and monetised it, they became an oligopoly. Technologies like cloud computing enabled Amazon to move from being solely a retail industry monopoly to challenging Google and Microsoft in new markets.

The term ‘soft power’ was developed by Joseph Nye in the late 1980s, but it is just a label for the extension of the aspect of Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony to US imperialism. The following ‘industries’ are part of US global hegemony: culture, information, entertainment, non-profits (NGO’s), academia, and think tanks. All of these rely on a common centralised communications industry, which covers undersea optical cables, satellites, telecommunications networks, massive data centres, digital communications firms like Twitter (X), Facebook, and Google.

There have been approximately five stages of communications technologies in the last century:

1. Mass medium radio, the telephone, and ‘talkies’ (1920–1950).
2. Television and the rise of Madison Avenue advertising (1950–1970).
3. Digital revolution, the widescale growth of the Internet (which actually began as a US military project in 1969) (1980–2000).
4. Mobile and first-generation social media (2000­–2005).
5. Pervasive mobile, smart devices, and OTT streaming video monopolies, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, CGI, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and soon, AI influenced media (2005–present).

Each of these five generations of technologies were commercialised and then ‘weaponised’ under the watchful eye of US military and intelligence agencies. Hollywood is infamous for these ties. The fifth generation of technologies represent a quantitative and qualitative leap in capacity. US tech and media companies, proxies for US hegemony, now effectively control the bulk of voices that the youth of the Global South hear. While X may be declining and was mainly a space for the chattering classes, Facebook and Instagram and streaming services like Netflix penetrate the lives of billions of the working class.

Let’s take the case of India. During the first ten months of 2023, there were 510 million unique internet viewers in India, who spent a total of 371 billion (B) hours with 2.9 trillion views. 105B of these hours were spent on social media, 74B on entertainment, 10.5B on news, 10B on retail, and 12.8B on other (mainly finance). During the month of October 2023, those ages 18–24 years old spent on average 940 minutes on Instagram, 708 on YouTube, 387 on Facebook, and 117 on X. For all ages the time spent on Facebook, Instagram, and X has more than doubled since January 2020. During October 2023, the following OTT video streaming led in millions(M) of viewers: 170M – Disney, 99M – MX Player (Indian firm reportedly under talks with Amazon), 92M ­– JioCinema (Reliance, Paramount, and James Murdoch), and others like ZEE5, Netflix, and Sony. Despite the rise of Bollywood, Hollywood is still present in India.⁶⁷

Globally, Western media has used four types of censorship with social media: Shadow banning or ghosting (secret suppression of viewers), white and blacklists (prioritising desirable content; deprecating or eliminating unwanted content), private non-visible algorithmic manipulation, and now even direct removal and suppression of content and/or users.

An estimated 73% of internet traffic is conducted by so-called ‘bad bots’, including state-controlled fake user accounts by the United States and Israel in particular.⁶⁸ More than half of this traffic uses evasion techniques to mimic human behaviour. These techniques are systematically deployed for a range of US soft-power campaigns, including for elections and popular sentiment.

The Financial Times, noting ‘America’s cultural supremacy’, worries on behalf of the empire thus: ‘To retain immense cultural reach is a wonderful cushion for a post-peak superpower. The trick is to not fall asleep on it’.⁶⁹

However, the level of detailed control of every single phone call, message, and key stroke by US intelligence results in very high stakes for the Global South. Digital sovereignty requires serious attention and cannot be dismissed.

Fictitious Capital

Karl Marx critically analysed the rise of fictitious capital in Volume III of Capital.⁷⁰ The latest report from the Bank for International Settlements reports that the total notional value of outstanding derivatives (the three types of which are interest rate, foreign exchange, and equity) reached US$ 715 trillion at the end of June 2023, up 16% in six months, over four times the world GDP (PPP), and over seven times the world GDP in current exchange rate (CER) terms.⁷¹ The gross market value of these derivatives was nearly US$ 20 trillion.

Hedge funds such as Bridgewater Associates and private equity firms such as BlackRock engage in this hyper-speculation. One analogy used to help explain derivatives is that if you stand between two mirrors at a slight angle to each other, you can see a long series of images of yourself. You remain real, but the images are ephemeral.

Whilst the capital is fictitious, the results are not. The expropriation of the natural goods and companies of the Global South now happens at a scale of trillions of US dollars at a speed of milliseconds.⁷²

2008–2022: A Transition

The defeat of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a new feeling of eternal confidence in imperialism from US capital. Now they could expropriate the markets of the former Soviet Union and have the sense of accomplishing Manifest Destiny. The idea of the ‘end of history’ and the emergence of the sentiment of unilateralism dominated the thinking of the Council of Foreign Relations and other strategic US institutions.

Confronted with a decline in the rate of capital creation in their economies, and as financialisation and intellectual property rights enhanced the prevalence of monopolies, a larger proportion of capital avoided productive investments and increasingly sought short-term gains, becoming even more speculative.

The 2007–2008 financial crisis – what we call the start of the Third Great Depression – meant that previous tools to fight stagnation proved increasingly ineffective. China’s imperviousness to this crisis added to the alarm of the Global North. The following 14 years saw a transition period marking the end of the neo-liberalism phase. From the early 2000s until 2022, major shifts began to take place. Some accelerated the consolidation of capital – others signalled the beginning of an existential crisis of capital:

1. The most important single change was the rise of China as the largest economy in the world when measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).
2. The Global South moved from 40% of world GDP to 60% when measured in PPP.
3. The Third Great Depression led to a further drop in GDP growth rates. By 2022, 10-year average per capita growth rates in Europe were less than 1% and in the US 1.5%.
4. European and Japanese capital were ‘de-nationalised’, accelerated by the rapid changes to the capital markets. They are now fully integrated, dependent on, and subordinate to the US on fundamental issues.
5. China consolidated itself as a socialist project and the Western hope for a new ‘Chinese Gorbachev’ completely failed.
6. NATO countries increased the number of their global military interventions but were confronted by a series of defeats such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even, to an extent, Syria.
7. The US decision to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and use Ukraine as a proxy at the centre of the move to control Russia resulted in an important military conflict between nuclear powers.
8. The US, facing relative economic and political hegemony, began to massively expand the use of sanctions, lawfare, tariffs, and seizure of foreign currency reserves.
9. To attempt to stop China’s technological advance, the US began using tariffs and protectionism. It began a full-fledged soft power attack on China and started a New Cold War.
10. Major voices in the US ruling class openly talk of the possibility of using its military hegemony to block China. Since they have also ‘lost’ Russia, at least with Vladimir Putin in power, the US is focused on planning how to complete their historic mission to subordinate Eurasia once and for all. This would ultimately entail the de-nuclearisation and potential dismemberment of both Russia and China.

Periodisation of Imperialism

Imperialism has changed over the last 100 years. We can roughly describe a few key periods as follows:

• 1890–1916: The rise of modern imperialism.
• 1917–1939: The birth of the Soviet Union, the decline of British hegemony, continued extreme inter-imperialist rivalry, the rise of fascism, the spread of socialist ideas across the world, and the Great Depression.
• 1940–1945: The worldwide battle against fascism, and German and Japanese Aggression.
• 1945–2008: The establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the era of US hegemony within the imperialist camp, the advance of national liberation struggles in the Global South and end of direct colonialism, the rising importance of socialist projects like Cuba and Viet Nam, dramatic changes in the productive forces, and numerous wars in which the US murdered tens of millions. This period could be subdivided into two parts: the so-called golden era of US imperialism during the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1970s and the turn to stagnation and neo-liberalism.
• 2008–2023: The false hope of US unilateralism was replaced with an awareness that a powerful non-white socialist project would, within a lifetime, overcome the US economically. In 1918, on the 73^rd day of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Vladimir Lenin left his office at the Smolny Institute (Petrograd) and danced in the snow. He celebrated the fact that the Soviet experiment had outlasted the Paris Commune. On 18 November 2023, the People’s Republic of China marked 27,077 days of existence, exceeding the duration of the Soviet socialist project. As noted by President Xi Jinping, we are entering a period not seen in 100 years.

In summary, these changes show a transition to what is best described as a new stage of imperialism: Hyper-Imperialism.

PART III: The World Defined

The Global North Defined

The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc at present composed of 49 countries, as pictured in Figure 17. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. This US-led bloc is the imperialist camp in today’s world.

As pictured in Figure 18, the Global North is fundamentally a North Atlantic project, with two outlying countries – Australia and Japan.

Inspired by Samir Amin’s concept of the Triad but expanding and modifying it to suit the realities of the present, the organisation of the Global North bloc can be best understood as layers of four concentric rings.⁷³ The position of each country within each ring depends on its rapport with the United States and how close its intelligence services are to those of the US, which is explained below.

GN Ring 1: Six Core US-Led Anglo-American Imperialist Countries

Ring 1 (listed in Figure 19) represents the inner core of imperialism. The white English-speaking victors of  WWII, the Five Eyes (US, UK in 1946, Canada in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956) established themselves as the Praetorian Guard of what can be called the Anglo-American Project. It is composed of the UK and the white settler states it spawned. Israel, treated by the US as the sixth eye, is unofficially part of the inner core. The cohesion of countries in this ring remains; an example is the trilateral security alliance AUKUS, created in September 2021.

A fundamental key to understanding the Global North is the special relationship between the United States and Israel. They are white settler states, founded on and justified by white supremacy and religious zealotry, and are the core of Ring 1 of the Global North. The US was established by white, religious extremists who, in 1690, conceived and established their colonial settlements as ‘plantations of religion’.⁷⁴ They believed that only they, the white Puritans, could realise God’s plan in the ‘American wilderness’. Their genocide against the native Americans and enslavement of Africans were viewed as the inevitable and obvious outcome of their racial and religious superiority.

Israel was the creation of British and US imperialism and was organised by the leaders of the Zionist movement. It was described by the military expert for The Guardian, Herbert Sidebotham, during WWI as follows: ‘The only possible colonists of Palestine are the Jews… at once a protection against the alien East and a mediator between it and us, a civilisation distinct from ours yet imbued with our political ideas’.⁷⁵ For the imperialists, ‘freedom from discrimination’ was only the pretext for the formation of the Judaic and white supremacist state of Israel.

As indicated earlier, between 1776, the year of independence from the British, and 2019, the US has spent 228 of 245 years in war/conflict, and only 17 years in ‘peace’.

During its history, the United Kingdom’s forces (or forces with a British mandate) have invaded, had some control over, or fought conflicts in 171 of the world’s 193 countries that are currently UN member states, or nine out of ten of all countries. ⁷⁶

In its 72 years of existence, Israel has ‘officially’ started 16 military conflicts with the Palestinians and other Arab nations. One-fourth of them were under the rule of Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999; 2009–2023). Of course, not included in these ‘official’ statistics are the multiple incursions by Zionist settlers and their army brethren against Palestinians.

Israeli white racialism and religious demagogy have morphed from ideological justifications into material forces that have contributed to the qualitative change in imperialism today. This is exemplified by, among other things, the per capita military spend of the US, which is 12.6 times that of the world’s average, with Israel’s 7.2 times, the two largest in the Global North. In the first month following 7 October 2023, Israel killed more civilians than all the civilian deaths in the Ukraine since 2022 and detonated more tons of explosives than the combined weight of the two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁷⁷

The US Congressional Research Service reported that: ‘Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II… Israel is the first international operator of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Department of Defence’s fifth-generation stealth aircraft, considered to be the most technologically advanced fighter jet ever made’.⁷⁸ Adjusting for inflation, US aid to Israel from 1951 to 2022 totalled US$ 317.9 billion.⁷⁹

Nonetheless, it is the US — not Israel — who is driving the agenda in the region following 7 October 2023. Blinken’s ‘shuttle diplomacy’ sets the rules and tones for Israel’s military operations and the ‘proportionate’ actions against the Palestinian resistance and regional powers. The US provides the necessary political and military support for Israel to eliminate the Palestinian resistance ‘permanently’, deter Iran and its allies, and push forward normalisation with Arab neighbouring countries. All these US interventions seek to lay the ground for building the planned India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which is not only an economic corridor but essentially an ideological and political plan to block China’s increasing integration and influence in the region. Therefore, Israel constitutes a ‘central junction’ for the US-programmed IMEC, which is outlined within the framework of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment (PGI), a Global North world plan, aiming essentially at countering China’s BRI and any form of Global South long-lasting cooperation.

GN Ring 2: Nine Core European Imperialist Powers

As listed in Figure 20, the countries in Ring 2 are the closest to the US-led inner core, namely Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Ring 2 is defined by each country’s proximity and affinity, and the trustworthiness of their intelligence functions to those of the United States.

‘Politics is a concentrated expression of economics’, Lenin explained.⁸⁰ The military function is the essential expression of this political concentration. Post-WWII, and with the advent of the Internet and social media, the control of communications and all its related functions has become a qualitatively new strategic intelligence asset of the state and has further advanced the US’s dominant hegemonic control of vast portions of the world.

Thanks to the work of Wikileaks and the bravery of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, the world was given its first public view into the secret world of intelligence relations among the imperialist forces.⁸¹

Instructively, the US prioritised its level of trust beyond the Five Eyes and the hidden special relationship with Israel. Subsequently, secretly but formally, the US created the Nine Eyes, which added Denmark, Norway, France, and the Netherlands. The Europeans were unwilling to have it be known, even privately, that Israel was a formal member. In addition, Israel did not fully trust many European powers with intelligence, so all parties allowed the US to continue having its special relationship with Israel.

Fifty years after WWII, the United States continued to exclude the former fascist powers of Germany, Italy, and Spain from the Five and Nine Eyes. Following the end of WWII, the US built an international system that was premised on the subordination and integration of the former fascist powers and the rest of Europe. This process of subordination and integration was evident in the military apparatus constructed by the United States, with NATO as one of the lynchpins. Establishing a system of US military bases in the defeated powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – allowed Washington to set aside any talk of a sovereign military or diplomatic project for the defeated.

In 2001, five other countries (Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden) were added to the Nine Eyes to become the Fourteen Eyes.⁸² Between 2005–2009, the US became increasingly alarmed about Russia and China. The unofficial ‘Pivot to Asia’ had begun; the official launch was delayed until Barak Obama took office in 2012.⁸³

GN Ring 3: Japan and Fourteen Lesser European Imperialist Powers

Ring 3 (listed in Figure 21), though made up of 15 countries, has a special focus on Japan, which has become a decisive front-line asset in the effort to curtail and suppress China and Russia. However, we have added here other secondary Western European powers, who, although loyal to the United States, are less strategic than others. A few of them, like Portugal, Finland, and Iceland, are part of NATO. Portugal is the only former fascist colonial power not in Ring 2 due to its small importance to US military intelligence (they are not in the Fourteen Eyes) and its smaller GDP.

Therefore, the third ring of the imperialist camp includes Japan and another 14 European countries (Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta, Iceland, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Monaco).

In the past several centuries, countries in the first three rings of the imperialist camp, other than Ireland, have caused massive human disasters. The United Kingdom, the US, and the Netherlands appropriated wealth through the African slave trade. Europeans implemented colonialism worldwide; the entirety of the Americas, nearly all of Africa, and more than half of Asia were dominated by colonisers. Anglo-Saxon white immigrants forcibly expelled or murdered Indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. There were several imperialist attempts to break up China, including the First Opium War, when Hong Kong was ceded in 1842, and then Taiwan at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. In 1884–1885, European colonisers arbitrarily partitioned Africa at the Berlin Conference. This violent methodology of the partitioning has continued unabated until today, as evidenced by the 2011 partition of Sudan and by the ongoing destruction of the country and its people. In 1919, they dismantled the Austro-Hungarian and German empires through the Treaty of Versailles, transferred rights of some areas of China (Shandong) to Japan, handed German colonies in Africa to victorious European powers, and re-established a world order led by Anglo-American forces. As a result of internal crises and imperialist rivalries, fascist states arose within this camp, triggering WWII and leading to the death of at least 50 million Soviet and Chinese people. In the final stages of WWII, the US used atomic bombs on civilians. To this day, the US still refuses to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons and has unilaterally withdrawn from key nuclear and missile treaties.

Since the end of WWII, Japan has become a strategic US ally. With the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida accepted the dominance of the US military over his country. During the Cold War, Japan played a significant role in containing the Soviet Union and China on the Eastern front, and this role continues today. Japan is the second country with the most US military bases as of July 2023 (98), only after Germany (171). To date, none of the German bases are in the former German Democratic Republic.

Although not officially a NATO member, since 2014, Japan has cooperated with NATO on an individual basis – most recently agreeing to the Individually Tailored Partnership Program in July 2023 – and has participated in the past two NATO summits. Japan also regularly participates in meetings held at NATO Headquarters in Brussels between NATO Allies and the four partners in the Indo-Pacific region at the level of ambassadors. This practical incorporation can be explained by the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, which states that ‘cooperation with partners in this region is key to addressing the increasingly complex global security environment, including Russia’s war on Ukraine, the shift in the global balance of power and the rise of China, and the security situation on the Korean Peninsula’.

In addition, Japan is the only G7 member not part of NATO. In 2022, China was labelled by the Japanese government as ‘the greatest strategic challenge ever to securing the peace and stability of Japan’ and announced plans to double official military spending to 2% of the GDP (on par with NATO countries) by 2027, overturning Japan’s post-WWII cap, which had official limited military spending to 1% of GDP.⁸⁴

GN Ring 4: Nineteen European Former Eastern Bloc Integrated into NATO

Ring 4 is composed of the European members of the former Eastern Bloc and the Eastern European members of the former Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon, which lasted from 1949 to 1991). They are a new category within imperialist camp and thus not included by Samir Amin in his seminal work on the Triad.

Ring 4 (listed in Figure 22) of the imperialist camp includes Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Albania, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Montenegro (except Belarus). Five countries were formal republics of the Soviet Union.

These countries were not previously part of the imperialist camp. To expand its hegemony, the US has targeted this region militarily, politically, and culturally. Serbia, part of the former Yugoslavia, was subjected to a 78-day NATO bombing in 1999. Despite not being a NATO member to this day, Serbia was compelled to participate in joint military exercises with NATO countries in June 2023.

Romania’s entrance to NATO did not involve a referendum. Instead, the ruling government modified the constitution, allowing senators to make the decision without consultation from the Romanian people.

US and western European expansion were done mainly through economic subordination and NATO’s eastern expansion. Fourteen are NATO members, whilst four (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) attended the NATO Vilnius meeting in June 2023. Some of these countries are governed by pro-NATO right-wing regimes (examples include Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia), and actively playing the role of frontline troops against Russia.

The Global South Defined

Outside the 49 countries of the Global North imperialist camp, making up the vast majority of the world’s population, are 145 countries that constitute the Global South (Figure 23).

The use of the term ‘Global South’ has primarily been a loose, imprecise reference. The actions over the last four years of the now fully aligned and integrated US-led Military Bloc have, however, created a large group of countries that are the ‘Rest of the World’. The ‘Rest of the World’ are thus aligned initially by ‘negative unity’, i.e., all its members are excluded. Consequently, they have become a negation of the imperialist camp. These countries include Russia and Belarus, which are not developing countries but are heavily targeted for regime change and subjugation.

The Global South includes mainly so-called ‘less developed’ or ‘developing’ countries, geographically associated with countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. It implicitly refers to countries that have been historically marginalised in the global economic system and are all grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. These countries were often called the Third World.

The Global South lacks cohesion, an agreed on collective identity, and unified organisation and action. Unlike the integrated Global North bloc, the Global South is not a unified group or bloc. These 145 countries each have distinct ideologies and political agendas, with differences in proximity and orientation towards each other and Global North countries. Various disputes exist among some of them, ranging from territorial disputes (take the case of Eritrea and Ethiopia) to intra-regional political power struggles (take the historical case of Saudi Arabia and Iran).

Much of the Global South pursues sovereignty, peace, and development, yet these countries rarely reach a global consensus on any issue. Often, this points to differences in the degree of proximity of any given country to the inner core of the Global North. As such, we arrange these countries in ‘groupings’ based on some common attributes rather than in an integrated, layered ring, or distinct blocs.

However, this does not mean that the Global South is – as some Western perspectives would have it – a fabricated concept devoid of substance. The Global South (Figure24) is former colonies or semi-colonies of the Global North imperialist camp, having suffered centuries of oppression and humiliation under imperialism. A handful of these countries share, to varying degrees of commitment or realisation, a socialist political orientation. Objectively, China’s current 2022 per capita income (U$12,850) makes it a developing country.⁸⁵ It is also because of this common historical background that Xi Jinping in his BRICS Business Forum 2023 speech (read by Wang Wentao) stated: ‘As a developing country and a member of the Global South, China breathes the same breath with other developing countries and pursues a shared future with them’.⁸⁶

The genealogical roots of the Global South can be traced to the Third World Project that attempted to shift the international balance of forces in favour of the interests of the newly politically independent but economically indentured countries in the mid-20^th century. This included efforts of the Bandung Conference (1955), Non-Alignment Movement (1961), Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (1966), and the pursuit of a New International Economic Order (1974) through the formation of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (1964) by developing countries.⁸⁷

These countries hold historical and contemporary marginalisation in the global economic and political order in common. One of the most poignant but devastating examples of this commonality is the environmental and ecological damage that the Global North has visited upon Global South countries. Resource extraction and financial speculation on land and crops has led to deforestation, habitat destruction, soil degradation, and water pollution. This has created significant loss of biodiversity and large swathes of uncultivatable agricultural land – destroying local ecosystems and species and resulting in widespread hunger.

In addition, Global North multinational corporations are responsible for air, water, and soil pollution through nefarious methods; neo-liberalism ensures that there are no regulations to prevent these practices. Prohibited in the Global North but widespread in the Global South, agrochemicals and the generation of hazardous and other waste materials have increased health risks, especially to Indigenous people, women, children, and elders.⁸⁸ Manufacturing, mining, energy, and transportation companies continuously emit greenhouse gases, the greatest contributor to climate change, putting the Global South in imminent danger of catastrophe. Direct Foreign Investment by Global North multinational corporations have decimated the environment, destroyed agricultural lands, and increased the precarity of all working peoples. At the same time, the Global North uses the climate crisis to push more land grabbing and privatisation of biodiverse resources through the financialisation of nature.⁸⁹

All these 145 countries are now enduring the immense pressure of imperialist over-expansion. Some of the common challenges these countries continue to face include but are not limited to historical underdevelopment, primary sector dependence, limited industrialisation, external debt, trade imbalances, technological gaps, infrastructural deficit, and disproportionate environmental crisis.

Disillusioned by the challenges mentioned above, growing sections of the new bourgeoisie in Global South countries – who emerged through rapid economic growth over the past two decades, particularly in Asia – are gradually losing confidence in the political, economic, and moral leadership of both the United States and Europe. New centres of economic power, such as China, offer alternative development and investment models (e.g., through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative) and have become more attractive to the Global South bourgeoisie.

Among the 145 countries of the Global South, six groupings of countries can be identified. While each grouping has some identifiable shared traits, importantly, the grouping number correlates to the descending order of countries considered to be a threat to the US-led Anglo-American imperialist bloc. Membership in the groupings is dynamic and can change according to the political and economic conjuncture.

GS Grouping 1: Six Independent Socialist Countries

All six countries in Grouping 1 (Figure 25) are advancing socialism to varying degrees, and often take progressive international positions. Five of the six are in the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter.

China is the critical member in this grouping. Its GDP, measured by purchasing power parity, ranks first globally, almost tripling India’s. China’s GDP (PPP) corresponds to 119% of the United States’.⁹⁰ It has made the most significant advancement in human development by lifting 850 million people out of extreme poverty in the last four decades.⁹¹ Though it does not seek hegemony over the world system, it is viewed by the US and its allies as the prime threat to their hegemony, labelled in recent years as a ‘near-peer’ competitor in US State and Defence Departments’ strategy documents. China not only represents an economic threat but, with the resurgence of a stronger communist party under President Xi Jinping, represents a major political threat with its overt revitalisation of socialist and communist traditions. China is thrust by its national and social interests and its historical support for the Global South into the role of supporting counter-hegemonic processes and projects. China continues to publicly state a commitment to ‘narrowing the North-South gap’.⁹²

While China represents the major economic and political challenge to Global North hegemony today, Cuba and Venezuela represent the frontline of historical, socialist resistance. Cuba continues to push back against the suffering caused by the over six decades of the US-led economic embargo and blockade. Cuba and heavily sanctioned Venezuela have made no attempt to hide their pursuit of a socialist agenda. DPR Korea remains the West’s ‘bogeyman’ in the east, while Laos and Viet Nam have long-standing communist parties at the helm of their governments and are undergoing rapid economic development.

Ever since the founding of the Soviet Union, the world’s left forces have faced a contradiction between the needs of the state and people of the socialist projects and the needs of the working class in specific countries or regions. Strategic thinking by the working-class leaders in all countries is required to keep ‘contradictions amongst the people’ non-antagonistic and ensure that the decisive blow is directed at the centre of imperialism. Pursuing the dictum that communists have ‘no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’, requires an investigation of the concrete.⁹³ For example, defeats such as the fall of the Soviet Union are catastrophic for all workers. Numerous tactical decisions must be made to take advantage of the cracks in the imperialist camp to protect socialist projects and movements, whether in power or not.

GS Grouping 2: Ten Strongly Sovereign Seeking Countries

Countries in this grouping (Figure 26) are not socialist states but are prime targets of US-led regime change. These countries are fiercely defending their sovereignty and that of others (as seen by seven out of the nine voting against the US-backed resolution for Russian withdrawal in February 2023 and their full support of a ceasefire in Gaza).

Although these nations have different reasons for doing so, they face some of the most acute situations of the struggle for national sovereignty. They are on the frontline of the Global South’s struggle against imperialism. Whilst they are all either fully or partially economically dependent on the West, they are actively pursuing political independence. They are, therefore, subjected to extreme hybrid warfare from imperialism; put simply, most of these countries are included in US intelligence’s critical targets for regime change.

Particularly since the US-backed, right-wing coup in Ukraine in February 2014, followed by Crimea’s annexation for unification, Russia has been a primary target for regime change by the imperialist camp. The US and its allies have dedicated considerable resources towards weakening, dismantling, and denuclearising Russia; the US has provided more than US$ 90 billion in military assistance to Ukraine for the campaign against Russia from February 2014 to February 2022.⁹⁴ Belarus is geopolitically and economically aligned with Russia (such as through the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, formed in 1992, as well as the Union State of Belarus and Russia, formed in 1996) and, therefore, remains within the crosshairs of US intelligence.

Since the 1978 and 1979 revolutions that ousted US-aligned leaders, Afghanistan and Iran have been targets of US military intervention and political interference. Iran has been an obstacle to Western advances in the region, with its nuclear energy programme, strong regional influence in proxy conflicts, and consistent anti-Western (and anti-Israeli) posture. Afghanistan was invaded by the US in 2001, with the US spending two decades and over US$ 2 trillion (US$ 300 million a day) to gain a foothold in central Asia – eventually withdrawing in 2021.⁹⁵ Since 2011, Syria has been a battleground for US attempts to secure control over the whole of West Asia, a war that proves journalist Patrick Seale’s 1965 definition of Syria – ‘the mirror of rival interests’.⁹⁶

This group is growing, with countries such as Eritrea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger taking bolder steps to protect their national sovereignty. Eritrea has had a long-term hostility towards the US and being a target of US intervention via Ethiopia. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have rejected the neo-colonial presence of France in the Sahel and removed their Western-aligned political leaders. They have established both the Sahel Economic Alliance and the Alliance of Sahel States, aiming for economic and military cooperation. However, their political situation is still unstable, and they are struggling to guarantee their actual independence from imperialist powers.

GS Grouping 3: Eleven Countries Current or Historic Progressive

The countries listed in Figure 27 are allocated to this grouping based on two essential concerns: the relative degree to which they are targets of regime change and their role in publicly advancing international anti-imperialist stances. Those in this grouping are either the next in line for regime change (following Grouping 2) or are playing a clear role in speaking out against the interests of the imperialist camp.

Regarding countries that pursue progressive agendas, examples include Brazil under the Workers’ Party (PT) and South Africa under the tripartite alliance (which includes the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions), with the former showing leadership in building alternative intergovernmental institutions such as the South American Nations Union (UNASUR) in 2008, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2011, and the IBSA Dialogue Forum, which was supplemented by BRICS by 2009, with the latter playing an important role in building the African Union. These countries sometimes defend progressive international positions such as standing with Cuba against US sanctions in international organisations. Nepal abolished the monarchy in 2008, established a republic led by the left and has made significant strides in legally and politically emancipating historically marginalised communities.

Palestine has been under occupation and siege for over seven decades. Algeria has staunchly supported Palestinian self-determination and independence and, within the African Union, has been influential in promoting progressive stances on African unity and economic development. Following the popular coup in Niger, Algeria was the only African state to promptly advocate for non-military solutions to political crises.

These countries attempt to find a path of sovereign development within a global capitalist system yet confront severe internal contradictions. For example, South Africa was forced into significant economic concessions in the 1990s, including deindustrialisation and privatisation, leading to catastrophic results. Today, 57% of South Africans live below the poverty line, 46% are unemployed, and the share of manufacturing to the GDP has decreased from 25% in 1981 – during apartheid rule – to 12% in 2022.⁹⁷

Unlike China, for example, these nations have seen their revolutionary potential curtailed – or their revolutions did not culminate in socialism – but have tried to pursue progressive agendas in domestic, regional, and/or international spheres. These countries are considered by the US to have political positions that are inimical to the hegemony of the Global North. Many of these countries have experienced US interventions, hybrid warfare, sanctions, and government overthrows. Recent instances of these interventions include the coups in Honduras (2009), Brazil (2016), and Bolivia (2019). Zimbabwe continues to face US sanctions.

GS Grouping 4: Five New Non-Aligned Countries

With sizable economies of scale, the non-alignment that characterises countries in this grouping is economic, not political (Figure 28). These non-socialist countries are not reviving the political project of the Non-Aligned Movement. Most of these countries have had 50 years or more of independence from former colonial rulers and today have very different relationships to them.

Economically, all five non-aligned countries have significant GDPs (all ranking in the top 20 largest economies in GDP (PPP) terms in 2022) and are taking increasingly independent economic measures.

These countries have recognised that the US hoarding of foreign exchange reserves and sanctions against countries with 30% of the world’s population poses severe threats. Today, more than one in four countries are subject to UN or Western government sanctions, while 29% of the global GDP is produced in sanctioned countries, up from 4% in 1960s.⁹⁸

Politically, they are ambivalent. Militarily, Indonesia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia maintain very close relations with the United States. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest purchasers of advanced US weapons. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a less reliable partner for the West, notwithstanding Turkey being a NATO member.

This grouping shows highly contradictory behaviours on the international stage. They show some degree of slowly decreasing economic dependence on and alignment with the West and/or are prepared to oppose it on some key issues.

Despite India’s alignment with the US in organisations such as the QUAD, or its reactionary positions on Israel in its war on Gaza, since the start of the war in Ukraine, India has refused to accede to some important US demands, such as refusing to implement US sanctions against Russia. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar vocally defended his government’s refusal to accede to Washington’s pressure, saying at a press conference in June 2023, ‘A lot of Americans still have that NATO treaty construct in their heads… It seems almost like that is the only template or viewpoint with which they look at the world… That is not a template that applies to India’.⁹⁹ The conflict with Canada, and now with the US, over alleged Indian intelligence operations in their countries, is complicating the plan of the US to gain the support of India against China. The big national bourgeoisie of India is beginning to assert their interests.

Saudi Arabia differs from the US when its economic self-interests dictate, e.g., increasing Saudi-China investments (including oil deals paid in Chinese yuan) and using its partnership with Russia at OPEC+ to define the global price of oil. However, simultaneously, at the run-up to the Arab League summit in November 2023, Saudi Arabia blocked Algerian efforts to close US bases, blocked Iranian proposed military aid to Palestine, stopped a proposed trade boycott, and refused to curtail oil shipments to Israel. The Pentagon, CIA, and Saudi Arabia were front-line allies in the recent war against Yemen that took tens of thousands of lives. The US Special Forces provided Saudi pilots with the bombing coordinates of their targets.¹⁰⁰

Indonesia, home to the largest Islamic population in the world, has had a compounded average growth rate of the GDP (PPP) of 4.2% between 2012 and 2022.¹⁰¹ According to IMF forecasts, by 2030, Indonesia could be the fifth largest economy in the world by GDP (PPP). Its state-owned enterprises’ assets as a share of GDP increased from 43% in 2014 to 54% in 2018.¹⁰² In 2020, Indonesia banned the exports of raw nickel, a key component of lithium batteries. Indonesia accounted for 39% of global nickel production in 2022. Its total exports in current terms surged from US$ 183 to US$ 323 billion between 2020 and 2022.¹⁰³ On 2 February 2023, during the Mandiri Investment Forum in Jakarta, President Joko Widodo warned, ‘We must remember the sanctions imposed by the US on Russia. Visa and Mastercard could be a problem’. He also stated that, ‘If we use our own platforms, and everybody is using them, from ministries and local administrations to municipal governments, then we can be more secure’. Yet, in November 2023, the US (an active participant in the torture and assassination of 500,000+ Indonesian communists) and Indonesia signed an agreement upgrading their relations to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.¹⁰⁴ Indonesia withdrew its application to join BRICS in 2023 and has expressed public interest in becoming an OECD member.

Confronted with a war of aggression under international law, 1846 was the de facto moment that consolidated the emerging US imperial project in Mexico. Forced to exchange land for peace and cede 50% of its territory, the new Mexico-US border became a historical line that internally constitutes an inexorable and preordained determination. On the other hand, Mexico has a history that relentlessly returns to its anti-colonial roots, Indigenous culture, and anti-imperialist modern history. Very little analysis is given to the complex interdependency of Mexico and the US, e.g., in population, culture, economics, but perhaps more significant in terms of geopolitical security for the viability of US hegemony.¹⁰⁵ The government of López Obrador is, at multiple levels, an attempt of the Mexican social movements to launch a low intensity counter-neo-liberal reform. The concentration is on recovering the public property of all strategic resources, launching a new agrarian reform, and reclaiming land as social property. The current agrarian reform in Mexico guaranties by law the registration of 50.6 % of the territory as social communal property in the hands of campesinos and Indigenous communities (29,803 agrarian communes on 99.7 million hectares). However, the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, formerly the North America Free Trade Agreement) represents a constant impediment to the uncoupling or disentanglement of Mexico’s political position vis-à-vis the emerging Global South. In June 2023, the US began preliminary proceedings (through USMCA arbitration) to block the presidential decree that would take various measures to ban genetically modified corn, which makes up 96% of US corn exports.¹⁰⁶ The US is exhibiting more aggressive and interventionist policies to undermine the long and hard-fought historical gains of Mexican sovereignty. In 2022, Mexican President López Obrador refused to attend the VIII Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles after news emerged that the United States would not invite Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan leaders to the meeting.

The five countries in this grouping have differing political, economic, or military perspectives and different nuanced levels of closeness to the Global North. However, their growing new national bourgeoisies are gradually seeking alternative economic relations and occasional political divergences with the US, albeit out of self-interest and self-preservation. The question of the new national bourgeoisie emerging in the Global South is outside the scope of this text; it will be addressed in our 2024 research on capital formation and ownership in the Global South.

GS Grouping 5: One Hundred and Eleven Diverse Global South Countries

There are 111 countries that are not included in the previous Global South four groupings above, due to multiple diversities. Figure 29 lists the twenty largest economies; the full list is in the appendix. They do not share the same political views nor governmental systems. Eswatini, Qatar, and Bhutan are still governed by monarchies, whilst Libya, Syria, and Somalia do not have a single governing authority. A handful of countries have abandoned socialist agendas after being hamstrung by Western development finance, such as in the case of Angola and Mozambique. Due to imperialist political and economic intervention, a series of countries in this grouping suffer severe governmental dysfunctionality (breakdown of governance, authority, and law), and are almost entirely unable to provide for their people.

The economic performance of these countries varies significantly. For example, despite Nigeria being the second largest economy in Africa and having a GDP (PPP) fourteen times that of Cambodia, the former has seen a 0.4% negative annual average growth rate between 2012 and 2022, while the latter grew by an annual 5.3%.

Among these countries, they have different levels of military allegiance to the Global North. Egypt has been a strategic partner of Israel and the United States since 1979, while Bangladesh, Comoros, and Djibouti participated in submitting a referral to the International Criminal Court regarding the situation in the State of Palestine on 17 November 2023.

They have a range of internal conflicts and territorial disputes, such as in the case of Morocco’s colonial occupation of Western Sahara, beginning in 1975.¹⁰⁶ Others, for example the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti, are subjected to UN military interventions, where other Global South countries take part.

Countries in Grouping 5 participate in diverse multilateral platforms with both Global South and Global North nations. Membership in this grouping can change should a country develop more distinctive characteristics. For example, whilst Argentina has played historically progressive roles in the region, the recent right-wing drift currently precludes membership in that grouping today. Therefore, this is not a static or permanent position.

GS Grouping 6: Two De Facto US Military Colonies

The peoples of these two nations (Figure 30) largely align with the Global South. Both countries have had pro-US leaders, as well as independent-leaning leaders. However, these countries are – militarily – entirely controlled by the US.

Historically, both nations have been subordinated to the US through military conquest. After WWII, when the US had militarily occupied the Korean peninsula, and, later, at the end of the Korean War, the Republic of Korea retained a large US military presence. Its economic reconstruction was almost entirely funded and directed by the US. Following the Spanish-American War, the Philippines was a US colony for nearly five decades (1898–1946).

This vassalage is evident today: after the elections of Yoon Suk-yeol in the Republic of Korea and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Philippines in 2022, both have served as frontline positions in containing China. In February 2023, the Philippines invited the US to expand its military presence in the country by adding four more bases to the existing five US-operated bases – 30 years after Philippine lawmakers ruled to end permanently the US military presence in the country. The Republic of Korea has also increased the military expansion of the US, participating alongside Japan ‘to inaugurate a new era of trilateral partnership’ with the US.¹⁰⁸ In addition, the General Security of Military Information Agreement between Japan and the Republic of Korea, facilitated by their closer alignment with the US, expands intelligence sharing between the two countries to include ‘threats from China and Russia’.¹⁰⁹ Their military expenditures should be attributed to the US-Led Military Bloc.

Figure 31 lists all Global South countries with military spending exceeding the world average (except Russia, which was shown earlier). Many of these countries have close military relations with the United States but are not listed in Grouping 6.

PART IV: The West in Decline

The Erosion of United States Economic and Political Hegemony

US slowing economic growth, measured by a decelerating GDP growth rate, fall of net investment as a share of GDP, higher levels of unutilised productive capacity, and unemployment/underemployment began in the mid-1960s and accelerated from the early-to-mid 1970s.¹¹⁰The transition to the US becoming a net importer of capital exacerbated the contradictions of monopoly capital.

The change in the US capital account to becoming dependent on continuous large-scale import of capital from the 1980s onwards is key to a financialised wealth generation process and a crucial economic mechanism of US imperialism. The world’s capital assets are preponderantly in US dollars and feed the overall position of US monopoly-finance capital.

By 2009, the US began to plan its pivot to Asia to curtail China’s economic growth. Under the Obama period, the US began to move against the World Trade Organisation. This period also marked the increased reliance on tariffs, sanctions, protectionism, and hybrid warfare.

Given that it is now dependent on large scale net capital imports, which by 2022 reached US$ 1 trillion a year, the US has little internal economic ability to provide economic advantages to its Global North or Global South allies.¹¹¹ Indeed, it needs to continue to attempt to hollow out even more surplus from them.

Under neo-liberalism, the relative autonomy of the US state eroded, and private capital exerted more direct control of much of the state. Today, however, faced with rising international economic threats to the US position, and the failure of neo-liberalism to maintain US economic dominance, the collective political interests of the ruling class are being asserted by an increasingly autonomous state (as opposed to representing the interests of individual capitalist groups). To borrow from Lenin, for the capitalists also, ‘politics must take precedence over economics’.¹¹²

Financialisation or accumulation under the phase of monopoly-finance capital is truly a parasitic development aimed at drawing blood from a sponge and marking the structural crisis of capital. US capital has an internal contradiction. As US capital seeks to increase surplus extraction from its own working class, it risks losing support for its external military wars, which are aimed at removing international obstacles to US capitalist economic interests. The US ruling class is therefore forced into simultaneous attacks on the Global South and its own working class – this necessitated the rise of increasingly right-wing currents in US capitalism. In the 1930s, the US had sufficient reserves to confront a deep crisis of capitalism with a reformist domestic programme, unlike the open attack on the working class in Germany or Japan. However, it took WWII for the US to escape the economic depression not, as is popularly purported, the Keynesian New Deal. Today, in this new situation, the US has no alternative but to rely on combining external aggression with an increasingly repressive domestic agenda.

The US utilises inflation to attempt to increase profits – a trend exacerbated by military spending and the debt it incurs. Interest on US military debt accounts for around 70% of US federal government net interest payments. In the 1970s, the US was able to manage the consequences of its Viet Nam Bonanza in military spending by removing itself from the gold standard to push the cost of this debt onto other countries. This successful attack on imperialist rivals strengthened US economic and financial power compared to them.

An accurate historical perspective, as well as short-term shifts, is required when analysing a potential decline of an empire. In Europe, the transition from slavery to feudalism took several centuries as did the transition from feudalism to capitalism. France was still fighting remnants of feudalism in the 19^th century, hundreds of years after European capitalism had begun on a small scale in Italian city-states.

The relative economic decline of an imperialist state can be traced by its increasing need to extract capital from abroad – with the UK and US both following a similar historical trend. The UK stopped being an exporter capital beginning in the early 1930s (Figure 32).

A country’s balance of payments is equal to the difference between its domestic capital creation (savings/surplus) and its domestic capital investment. If a country’s ‘domestic’ capital creation is larger than its domestic investment, it is, therefore, exporting capital and runs a balance of payments surplus. If a country’s domestic capital creation is less than its ‘domestic’ capital investment, it runs a balance of payments deficit and is importing capital, that is, it has a surplus in its capital account.

From 1913 to the early 1980s, with rare exceptions, the US generated more surplus than it invested ‘domestically’. It had a surplus of capital that it could invest in other countries and extend its international hegemony not only through violence. Post-WWII, the particular beneficiaries of this were imperialist countries whom the US wished to enmesh, integrate, and dominate, as seen by the Marshall Plan in Europe. Other beneficiaries, such as the Republic of Korea, became military frontier states to constrain Russia and China and thus received US economic investment.

By the late 1960s, the US understood that the most urgent economic, as opposed to political, threat did not come from communism. The attention began to focus on curtailing the growth of other capitalist rivals. A few capitalist economies – first Germany in the immediate post-war period and then Japan until the late 1970s – achieved investment rates far higher than the US, reaching 30% of the GDP or above. This enabled these countries to achieve higher GDP growth rates than the US. This was a historical result of the immense defeats of the German and Japanese working classes by fascism – the consequences of which continued into the post-war period. German and Japanese capitalists were able to increase the rates of exploitation, which financed high rates of capital investment. Simultaneously, their ‘late industrialisation’ also allowed them access to better quality technology, which further increased productivity. While the US was prepared to accept the economic consequences of this in the immediate post-war period, the continuation of this process began to impact US economic growth.

To prevent effective economic competition from these countries, the United States used political and military pressure to force down their rates of investment and, therefore, growth rates. The decoupling of the US dollar from gold in 1971, and therefore the removal of restraints on the weaponisation of the US control of the international monetary system, played a key role in this process.

The numbers in Figure 33, positive or negative, show the balance between domestic savings/capital creation and domestic investment over the span of 120 years. A positive number, for example, 0.8% for 1929, means the US is saving/creating more capital than it is investing domestically, i.e., it is lending/exporting capital abroad. A negative number, for example -3.9% of GNP for 2022, means US domestic investment is higher than US domestic capital creation/saving. Thus, there is an inflow of capital of 3.9% of GNP from abroad. A positive number represents an outflow of capital from the US, and a negative number indicates an inflow of capital into the US.¹¹³

But despite this ability to slow down imperialist rivals, the US proved incapable of raising its own economic growth rate (to achieve a new higher rate of investment and exploitation), partly because of the withdrawal of US-based capitalists from long-term productive investments within the United States. Indeed, US economic growth decelerated further – the average annual economic growth of the US today is only 2.0%, less than half its growth rate in the 1960s and far behind the rate of growth of China or indeed of a series of Asian states. Figure 34 shows that the US has had a long-term overall decline in average growth rate since 1953.

Confronted with this situation the US has subsequently turned to tariffs, economic sanctions, and technology bans, leading to an increasingly protectionist environment. However, despite this economic decline, as already analysed, the US still maintains a military lead over all other states. US Imperialism, therefore, now turns to a growing reliance on force.

Tracing the processes underlying this and showing the inability of the US to raise its rate of growth without a complete restructuring of the US economy (which is not on the agenda), Line 1 in Figure 35 shows that from 1965 onwards, US net saving/capital creation progressively fell until by 2009 it was -2.7% of GNI. Line 2 shows that from the 1980s on, US borrowing from abroad, the use of capital imported from other countries, began to rise sharply. By 2002, for the first time, US borrowing from abroad was higher than its domestic net capital creation – i.e., for the first time, even the immediate increase in US capital stock was being financed more by capital from other countries than from the US itself. This slightly reversed and then fluctuated until 2020, when, once again, more of the addition to the US capital stock was financed from other countries.

To summarise this overall process, the US has structured the world economy to its advantage. Its corporations obtain gargantuan amounts of surplus value through the global arbitrage in the Global South and the entire imperial system forces US dollars on foreign countries – including via not only economic processes but through US military bases and other means. The aim is to create a system whereby countries have no choice but to put their US dollars into US securities, financing the US deficit and US domestic investment. This is how global monopoly-finance capital, which is an advanced form of financial imperialism backed by military and political power, works.

What is upsetting this system is that monopoly capital is relatively stagnant in terms of production (the real economy), which has allowed China and other countries in the Global South to leap forward in production. Hudson’s Super Imperialism provides useful insight on what the consequences would be if the US lost its dollar hegemony.¹¹⁴

Figure 36 shows that China has outpaced the US in net fixed capital formation, whilst the US has seen a gradual decline. Whilst this section does not cover the rise of China, it should be noted here that every year since 1992, for 30 years, China has been a net exporter of capital. It is this surplus of capital that makes economically possible the financing of international initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

This becomes a critical factor in understanding that two nuclei of international processes are developing:

• The US has increasingly become a fetter on the development of the productive forces domestically and globally.
• China is now focused on the development of its national productive forces and on working with the developing nations as a whole. This presents a new path to modernisation through the development of the world’s productive forces taken as a whole (through the BRI, the Global Development Initiative, and various continental-scale industrialisation projects).

The Sunsetting of Bourgeois Liberal Democracy

Some outside of the US have long held an illusion that democracy in the US has existed for centuries and has only recently been defaced. In 1776, both wings of US capital, those led by Alexander Hamilton and those led by Thomas Jefferson (a slave owner), ensured that only property-owning white males like themselves had the right to vote. From 1776 onwards, property rights were sacrosanct and subordinated all other rights.

‘Freedom of speech’ was effectively restricted to those who owned the means of material production. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The German Ideology (1846), these were generally those who owned the means of mental production, that is, the media, beginning with the printing press. In some cases, this right extended to those known to have fringe or no support, or others who were no threat to the system. Those opposing capitalist class interests who had the chance of any significant support were subjected to suppression, imprisonment, and sanctioning, as well as judicial murder or assassination. Bourgeois democracy was always a vehicle for protecting property rights. Only the pressure of the US to defend itself against socialist projects internationally in the twentieth century temporarily extended voting rights to black people and increased the appearance of free speech and other civil liberties.

There is a great misunderstanding internationally about the US electoral parties. From their inception, neither the Democratic nor Republican parties were formed as mass membership parties. They have been primarily top-down associations of propertied elites and professional class allies, closely aligned with the status quo. Third parties have practically no influence in the US system, a political party duopoly. The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee that run their respective parties are formally organised as not-for-profit, tax-exempt corporations. They are primarily money-based, vote-gathering machines that periodically attract voters in the context of electoral contests and thus are quite distinct from membership political parties like many European parties. Although there are registered Democrats and Republicans, this mainly affects the right to vote in their respective primaries. Party affiliation for the vast majority of the population, thus, does not go beyond votes cast in particular elections. Therefore, around half of US voters see themselves as politically independent, not attached to either of the major parties. Indeed, neither political party, when in office, reflects the interests of the majority of the US population.

One of the most poignant written words on the hypocrisy of America’s self-proclaimed greatness is found in a poem by Langston Hughes:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’.)

…

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay —
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.¹¹⁵

Large sections of the capitalist class in the Global North and their hangers-on indulged in a period of euphoria caused by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. They deluded themselves into believing in the ‘end of history’ with aspirations for a perpetual unipolar world. The War on Terror campaign espoused by the US was a brilliantly constructed methodology to gain support for militarism.

Between 2006 and 2009, new realities began to set in:

• The demise of the Soviet Union did not result in Yeltsin’s promise of a de-nuclearised Russia nor the permanent establishment of a Russian government entirely following US directions. The usual cries of ‘who failed in Russia?’ followed.
• US strategic circles began to announce the idea (both amoral and unscientific) that the US could achieve first-strike nuclear war capability.
• In the face of NATO’s continuing eastward expansion and claims of the United States to be on the verge of nuclear primacy, Vladimir Putin delivered his Munich speech in February 2007, marking the end of any illusions about Russia being adopted into the Anglo-American club. In that speech, Putin criticised the ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations’ and suggested that the world must not be governed by ‘one master, one sovereign’.¹¹⁶
• The creation of the Centre for New American Security in 2007 marked a historic marriage of two groups of foreign policy elites, the mainly Republican neo-conservatives and the largely Democratic liberal hawks. Their joint strategy was to move to target Russia via Ukraine immediately.
• Led by populist neo-fascists, the Tea Party arose in 2009. It appealed to the petty bourgeoisie and a section of the upper strata (mainly but not exclusively white) of the working class who had made little to no economic progress and feared a loss of privilege. This signalled the ending of the so-called bipartisan consensus that had dominated the US system for decades.
• The bubble caused by financialisation turned into the Third Great Depression starting in 2008, the most significant economic crisis since the 1930s.
• There was growing evidence that there would be no Gorbachev in China to lead the surrender of the Chinese Revolution.
• The ‘Pivot to Asia’, which is more precisely the pivot to China, and a strategy for the US control of Eurasia, was devised.

China’s economy continued to expand rapidly after the beginning of the Third Great Depression, while the Western economies were anaemic.¹¹⁷ In 2016, China exceeded the US in terms of GDP (PPP), and there was palpable fear that by 2030, China would surpass the US in GDP at current exchange rates (CER). The US ruling class needed a response.

Neo-fascism and extreme right-wing forces grew globally. Obama, the Democratic president, adopted regressive domestic measures that would have been the envy of previous Republican administrations. Trump’s election weakened the shared identity of the bourgeoisie’s interests and widened awareness of the limitations of the US political system.

Internationally, this situation also it marked a resumption of global awareness of imperialism as the greatest danger facing humanity. Faced with the evident failure of neo-liberalism, which had culminated in the Third Great Depression, a new movement to reverse some aspects of the hollowing out of the state that neo-liberalism had produced began.

To accurately understand the events following the start of the Third Great Depression, we must evaluate the preceding 60 years. In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater, an extreme right-wing capitalist, lost the general election but succeeded in bringing the far-right into the mainstream of the Republican Party and the country. The Democrats lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a Republican centrist, who seized the white Southern vote and introduced a new institutional racism-based incarceration system, which both parties have followed since. The Democratic Party began a period of internal fracturing and began abandoning any leftward positioning in the name of ‘electability’ and ‘triangulation’. Instead, it attempted to capitalise on the rightward momentum of the Republicans.

The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan marked the actual far-right takeover of the Republican Party. The 1985 formation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a private corporation, marked the beginning of a new phase of the Democratic Party: the rise of the New Democrats. A list of some former chairmen of the DLC included Dick Gephardt, Chuck Robb, Sam Nunn, and Joe Lieberman – all military hawks, who favoured shifting social spending to the military. The DLC successfully defeated the left, and its crowning victory was winning the Presidency by their chosen candidate, Bill Clinton, in 1992.

Clinton’s virtue from the standpoint of the DLC was that he could bring the white South back into the Democratic Party by talking left and walking right. For example, he adopted both anti-welfare and pro-incarceration policies (both racial code positions) while making pretensions of a progressive agenda. Less anti-labour than Reagan, he nonetheless represented the Democratic strategy of trying to remain the ‘centre’ in a political dynamic that had shifted far to the right, with the Democrats standing for a lighter, kinder version of neo-liberalism.

It is instructive to think of the Democratic and Republican Parties as operating like private corporations with revenue derived mainly from various capitalists to serve the interests of the shareholders and the corporation’s top officers. For the Democratic Party, this includes groups like the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Centre for American Progress (CAP).¹¹⁸ The product sold is elected officeholders who implement the interests of their financiers. Well-known officials include John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, once elected, became parasites of the state, earned tens of millions, and joined the higher echelons of the capitalist class. At least 85 of the 154 people from private interest groups who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Hillary Clinton, while she led the State Department under President Obama, donated a combined US$ 156 million to the Clinton Foundation.¹¹⁹

The DNC business model requires the assembly of a disparate array of electoral blocks and the necessity of manipulating numerous social strata, groups, and movements. There is now more than ever a sharp rift between the interests of the people who vote for the Democratic Party versus the vastly different interests of the Democratic Party paymasters.

A more comprehensive assessment is beyond the scope of this document. However, the idea of entrepreneurial democracy, in which the concepts of competition between individual capitalists and groups and the battle to acquire votes like a market, trace back to Joseph Schumpeter.¹²⁰

In the last twenty years, the Republican Party has been transformed ideologically. The emergence of the Tea Party in 2009 signalled both a growing neofascist ideology and the creation of a more engaged core and base. Although the Republican Party also has internal fractures, the weaponisation of large sections of the lower middle class has engendered a radical right that destabilises bourgeois liberal democracy.

All the previous contradictions of race, class, gender, and social identity became weaponised by both the far right and the DNC corporation for different purposes. The social rift between various strata of the US is acute. Hyperbolic claims that the US is heading towards a civil war are highly misleading, however. There is no economic basis for California seceding from the US. This is not the pre-civil war period in the US.

Starting in 1970, the US working class received very little of the vast increases in wealth created by the US’s world domination. Millions of children suffer food insecurity, and their parents have precarious employment and lives. The US is undergoing significant demographic changes, with some estimates showing that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority within the US by 2045, which suggests a trajectory of US racial capitalism toward enhanced segregation and even apartheid.

Narcissism, pessimism, nihilism, and fatalism are now fundamental features of an increasingly stagnant capitalism in the Global North. The traditional trappings of bourgeois liberal democracy are becoming fetters on the needs of capital, which is, ironically, caught up in a process of self-negation.

These fissures inside the US political system are significant to the US working class, which is in a very uneven development of its revolutionary capacity. It faces great danger and opportunities. There can be no illusion that ‘worse is better’.

Simultaneously with this erosion of liberal democracy, millions of young people from Jakarta to Istanbul to Johannesburg to Des Moines, Iowa, have now been brought into political life based on their moral, racial, religious, and political outrage. This has been met with severe repression by Washington in its global geopolitical, economic, and hegemonic military roles. The United States is a waning hegemonic power; it is a wounded one and, as a result, is more dangerous.

A Defeated and Submissive Europe and Japan

Since the end of WWII, the United States has been committed to the military, political, and economic integration of countries in Europe and Japan into a bloc that it controls. Through the NATO+ structure, the US ensured complete military dominance within the imperialist group, deploying many military bases in countries defeated in WWII, including in Japan (120), Germany (119), and Italy (45). The latter is home to over 12,000 US military personnel.¹²¹

Beginning in the 1950s, the US brought European political elites into their orbit. Through the Marshall Plan, European economic interests were subordinated to those of the US. Over the next fifty years, even imperialist leaders who dared to partially oppose US interests – such as Jacques Chirac (president of France between 1995 and 2007) or Gerhard Schroeder (Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005), both of whom opposed the US invasion of Iraq – were targeted by the US for replacement.

After WWII, Japan, as a frontline state against Soviet and Chinese communism, was allowed to rapidly develop its economy. However, in the 1980s, Japan’s economic rise began to pose a possible threat to the United States’ global economic hegemony, leading to increased bilateral trade frictions. The United States forced a rapid appreciation of the Japanese yen through the 1985 ‘Plaza Accord’, reducing exports and causing Japan to lose its economic momentum.¹²² Then, following the 1987 Wall Street crash, the US compelled Japan to adopt ultra-loose monetary and economic policies. This aimed to increase the flow of capital to the US to aid finance its international aggression against the USSR. In the process, it created the ‘bubble economy’ in Japan, the bursting of which plunged Japan into a decades-long economic stagnation.

In the fields of information technology and new energy, among other high-tech areas, Japan also faced suppression from the United States, hindering its industrial upgrading. Toshiba was the global leader in semiconductor manufacturing by 1987 until it was sanctioned by the US under the pretext of making deals with the USSR (very similar to what the United States has done with Huawei in China). Toshiba’s main competitors, IBM and Intel, benefited from this policy by the US state.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and Germany’s subsequent reunification, the German bourgeoisie coveted Russia’s markets and low-cost energy. They desired economic ties with Russia but only as long as they and their French compatriots could maintain their unfettered domination of the European project, which they had held since WWII. This meant building economic ties with Russia but excluding Russia’s political leadership from any equal participation in Europe’s political affairs, decisions, or structures. US strategy in turn had been to avoid any strategic relationship between Russia and Germany as their combined strength would create a formidable economic competitor in Europe.

Ownership of capital and the means of production are always fundamental. Over the last 30 years, the ability of capital to move quickly and seamlessly between the borders of imperialist countries has increased exponentially. Capital investments have a defined number of primary categories including stock, notes, bonds, private equity, real estate, and many forms of derivatives. The stock market is one of the fundamental vehicles for most capitalists to make long-term investments. A German firm that goes public may do so in either the US or German stock exchanges. Large funds like Vanguard purchase these funds, but they are not the beneficial owners. They are just effective trustees for the funds of major capital (some small percentage of this capital is owned by the petty bourgeoisie and privileged sectors of the working class through pension funds and other instruments).

The original shareholders of this firm eventually can and do sell their now public stock. They no longer remain dependent on managing their wealth via their investment inside one company. Rather they hire wealth managers, either through firms such as Goldman Sachs or their own advisors, who in turn, invest the cash proceeds from the sale of stock. For many capitalists, their advisors will have them invest well over 50% of their portfolio in the US stock markets. The German capitalist’s ‘family wealth’ therefore does not disappear when the German company they had originally owned declines in value.

The economic, political, and social consequences of this change in capital markets and ownership are vast. This newly minted global – formerly ‘German’ – capitalist behaves very much like their French, English, Swedish, or US peers. This level of integration and denationalisation of capital results in a much more robust economic and, eventually, reinforces political allegiance to the US.

Such a high level of stock market and capital integration rarely occurs in Global South countries for many historical reasons. A capitalist in Turkey has much greater difficulty having their company go public in the US. What the Turkish capitalist can do is to go public in Turkey, sell their stock, turn the proceeds into US dollars, and then invest those dollars in US stocks. This is the most common pathway for the Turkish capitalists to join the global elite. This process, however, is much more competitive, happens in smaller amounts, is less frequent, and is elongated.

Figure 37 shows research from the OECD that indicates the percentage of beneficial foreign ownership for each of the major stock markets in the world.¹²³ These show that Europe overall has a high percentage of foreign ownership, whereas the US, China, and Saudi Arabia all have less than 20% foreign ownership. Different national imperialisms, and their ruling classes, are not separate or economically divided from each other. They do not pursue substantially divergent strategic national goals on any scale comparable to that before World War II. Progressive and socialist forces, however, always utilise partial, economic, or tactical differences between imperialist powers where valuable.

The situation in Germany today, for example, clearly illustrates the effectiveness of this integration process and economic consolidation by the US as shown in Figure 38. According to 2020 IHS Markit data, only 13.3% of the German stock market’s value is owned by Germans, while investors from North America and the UK own 58.3%.¹²⁴ A 2023 study by Ernst & Young revealed that at least 52.1% of the market value of the 40 blue-chip stocks that make up Germany’s DAX index is owned by funds outside of Germany in 2022. Of the remaining shares, 16.5% ownership is unidentified (very likely also owned by foreign capital), with only 31.3% of the market value owned by Germans.¹²⁵ The major companies of the German economy are primarily not owned by Germans.

Germany’s industrial value added has declined from 9% of the world to just above 6% in the last 18 years.¹²⁶ The loss of cheap Russian energy and its adaption to risk-managed decoupling are likely to be disastrous for its international competitiveness. In addition, the advent of Electric Vehicles (EV) has led to a huge loss with the end of the importance of the combustion engine. This had been a core one-hundred-year technology superiority enjoyed by Germany.

In 2022, FDI in Germany decreased 50.4% year-on-year.¹²⁷ Over the course of 15 quarters, starting in Q3 2019, Germany’s GDP increased by a paltry 0.6% in total, in constant prices, whereas China increased 20.2% during the same period, and the US by 8.1%.¹²⁸

In media, the US dominates more than the Global South. The European television market is largely a US business: ‘Around one in five (18%) of all private TV channels (excluding local TV) are US-owned and over one third of all SVOD (39%) and TVOD (33%) services in Europe belong to a US company… Around half of all children’s TV channels in Europe are US-owned (48%) and so are 59% of entertainment subscription video-on-demand services’.¹²⁹

The collapse of ‘national will’, the willingness to pursue a path corresponding to its national capitalist interests, demonstrated by Germany in the context of the war in Ukraine, shows that Germany has been defeated for a third time since the beginning of the twentieth century (the first two being the world wars, as noted by Hudson).¹³⁰ Despite the cost to itself, Germany supported sanctions against Russia and military aid to Ukraine. When Israel’s war on Gaza entered its 100th day, having killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, Germany – with its historical violence in Namibia and domestic holocaust against Jewish people during WWII – supported Israel in the hearing at the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa.¹³¹

Over the last few months of 2023, political representatives of German capital in the Bundestag privately raised and then introduced measures to restrict trade with China under the guise of de-risking. This is clearly in contradiction to the short- and medium-term interests of German business. Marx described the relations between the capitalists as one between a band of warring brothers.¹³² In periods of crisis, the state, as an organ of the ruling class, exerts its political role despite the fissiparous nature of intra-capitalist relations. Today, the short-term interests of executives at nominally German companies are subordinated to the interests of Hyper-Imperialism.

With the formation of the German Empire (1871–1918), political and economic expansion into Eastern Europe, rather than solely territorial expansion, was a key strategy. After reunification in 1990, Germany pursued a dual strategy: first, it decisively supported the US strategy towards Russia of NATO expansion. Second, it led a simultaneous strategy of ‘capital penetration’ into Russia with the aim of securing political control in that state of groups most tied to Western and German interests and against those pursuing a more independent policy. German capital supported proxies like Russian billionaire (at the time) Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2001, Khodorkovsky established the Open Russia Foundation, with Henry Kissinger as one of its trustees.¹³³ By 2004, he was imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement after attempting to carry out policies against Putin.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel pursued dual strategies of supporting military preparations against Russia and organising the internal opposition to Putin. She also orchestrated the building of Nord Stream 2 despite huge US resistance. The latter however was for German self-interest, not for the appeasement of Russia, nor to hinder NATO expansion. In 2014, she arranged the release of Khodorkovsky and enabled a calculated breach of the Minsk agreements. But the dual strategy ended in February 2022, when Germany as a willing partner alongside the US, and with the help of Ukraine, decided to wrestle and topple Russia.

Germany’s reality, however, is that unless it were prepared to undertake a full break with US policy, which no significant section of the German bourgeoisie is prepared to consider, any strategy it has fails without US support – giving the US the whip hand in this relationship. A paradox arose in which the US wanted to maintain German-Russian enmity, but not support a full German victory against Russia. This explains in part why the US appears to be threatening to cut off Ukraine’s funding. The US goal of destroying German-Russian relations has already been achieved as well as the vassalage of Europe and Germany under penalty of the deindustrialisation of Germany.

The US will continue to deprive the German bourgeoisie of all major options for asserting independent political positions. With the help of the capital ownership links that we have described, the German bourgeoisie will be faced with absolute subsumption of the options for the action of German capital under the US aegis. The hostility towards Russia acts as a driver of Europe’s subordination to the US and as a loss of any possibility of independent development.

The situation of antagonistic contradictions between US and European capital on fundamental issues has ceased. Small differences exist, but they are not strategic. The depth of US subordination of Europe is seen by the fact that only 11 of the 49 countries in the Global North are not part of a known US spy network nor attended the Vilnius NATO+ meeting. They are Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, San Marino, Serbia, and Switzerland. Collectively they have 28.3 million people (nearly equivalent to Delhi’s population) and a combined GDP of .8 trillion (1% of world GDP), a small portion of the Global North.

While a member of the secret Fourteen Eyes, Germany’s impotence was on full display when it was revealed that the US spied on its leaders, and it was incapable of even a whimper. Today, Europe’s bourgeoisie has become a toady for US intelligence operations.

NATO has long pressured Germany to spend a minimum of 2% of GDP on the military, following what was called the Goldilocks principle (established in the 1950s), aimed at:

… encouraging defence contributions from medium-sized allies – for example, [the Republic of] Korea during the Cold War, or Poland today – while treading lightly when it comes to larger allies like Germany or Japan. In doing so, it seeks to maximise contributions from allies that are powerful enough to supply meaningful military power to the alliance but not so powerful that they can afford to spurn the alliance.¹³⁴

Japan’s governments have pursued policies of political provocation to China, at the behest of the US, despite the great advantages to Japan’s economy that would flow from closer ties with China. In the UK, US opposition to the ‘golden period’ of relations with China carried out under David Cameron’s premiership forced its reversal under his successors – with damaging consequences for British capital.

The creation of the Centre for New American Security in 2007 marked a historic marriage of two groups of foreign policy elites, the mainly Republican neo-conservatives and the largely Democratic liberal hawks. Their joint strategy was to move to target Russia via Ukraine immediately.

In 2022, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida set spending targets for the following five years of 43 trillion yen (US$316 billion).¹³⁵ It already has the second greatest number of F35 advanced aircraft in the world (after the US) and signed an agreement in 2020 to purchase 105 additional aircraft. These aircraft can be retrofitted with nuclear weapons. It has penned a revised national security strategy to allow the country to develop a pre-emptive strike capability and deploy long-range missiles.¹³⁶

The rearming of the two main fascist powers of WWII must be considered a crime. A dangerous revanchist movement is re-emerging in Germany. The difference is that this time they do so as part of the US-Led Military Bloc.

PART V: Changes in the World Order

A Southwards Shift of the Economic Base

As the countries of the Global North have faced prolonged declining economic growth, countries of the Global South, especially in Asia, have displayed a higher economic growth trajectory over the past thirty years. As can be seen in Figure 39, at the end of the Cold War in 1993, the Global North accounted for 57.2% of the global GDP (PPP), while the Global South accounted for just 42.8%. Thirty years later, these proportions have definitively inverted: the share of the Global South has reached 59.4%, with the Global North holding at 40.6%.

The G7 (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan) is the core economic countries of the Global North bloc, and in 1993, these seven countries accounted for 45.4% of the global economy. Meanwhile, the most significant economies of the Global South, later known as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), made up only 16.7% of the global economy in that year. Among them, Russia had just emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and China was deepening its economic reforms and establishing a socialist market economy. Neither Russia nor China were competitors to the G7 at the time. Thirty years later, the BRICS countries accounted for 31.5% of the global economy, having surpassed the G7 (30.3%) as shown in Figure 40.

In August 2023, BRICS expanded by inviting six countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina (although Argentina has now temporarily declined). BRICS10 (excluding Argentina) added 4% to BRICS’s share of the world GDP (PPP) as shown in Figure 41.

Over the past thirty years, the absolute leader of the Global North, the United States, has seen its share of the world economy slowly decline in PPP terms from 19.7% in 1993 to 15.5% in 2022. However, in the Global South, China’s rapid rise has been the most notable variable. In 1993, China only accounted for 5% of the world economy (Figure 42); by 2016, China’s economy had surpassed that of the United States in PPP terms; and by 2022, China’s share of the world economy had reached 18.4%. This marks the first time in over 600 years that a non-white dominated country has economically broken through the hegemony of the white imperialist countries. This economic reality led the US to urgently begin to try to suppress China’s rise.

However, it would be a mistake to view China as the sole source of growth for the Global South. Even without China, the economies of the Global South had surpassed the Global North by 2022 — with their respective shares of the global economy at 41% and 40.6% (Figure 43). The overall economic development of the Global South has enabled them to objectively have the capacity and to seek a more just international order, which is contrary to the wishes of the imperialist bloc of the Global North.

We have identified all 43 countries – whose share of the world GDP (PPP) amounts to 41.1% (Figure 44) – that are part of one or more of the three new non-imperialist controlled international organisations: BRICS10 (founded in 2009, expanded in 2010 and 2023), Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (founded as ‘Shanghai Five’ in 1996, expanded in 2001, 2017, and 2023), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations (founded in 2021). The full list is provided in a later section.

Figure 45 shows the past decade’s average annual growth rate of GDP (PPP) per capita of the 21 largest economies in the Global South and the G7 countries. China’s growth rate (5.8%) continues to lead among major countries. Asia’s growth rate is generally higher than other countries in the Global South. The next five countries with the highest growth rates are Bangladesh (5.3%), Viet Nam (4.9%), India (4.6%), the Philippines (3.3%), and Indonesia (3.1%). Aside from the United States, the rest of the G7 countries have an average per capita growth rate of less than 1%. Regrettably, the largest economies in Africa and Latin America have experienced negative per capita growth: Nigeria and South Africa at -0.4%, and Brazil and Argentina at 0% and -0.7%, respectively.

Of course, we acknowledge that growth rates themselves can mask the intense class struggles within these countries, where the share of the growth is not nearly equitably distributed between capital and labour. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the growth rates and what their trend lines describe.

One of the most significant changes in the world economy of the last 20 years has been a dramatic shift in the geography of world industrial production.

The World Bank publishes the industry percentage of GDP using the current prices and current exchange rates, which this study refers to as the Current Exchange Rate (CER) method. Currently, we are unaware of any published industry percentages for GDP (PPP) calculations.

Figures 46 and 47 show changes in the percentage of industry value added in GDP for both CER and PPP terms over the last 18 years. It is likely that the figures of the industry value added world share are somewhere in between the CER and PPP. Subsequent charts in this series are shown only for the PPP method and have the same qualifications as made for the first series.¹³⁷

What we see is that there is indeed a change in the base of the economy, with the Global South home to the majority share. Despite many predictions of a new post-industrial society, no major country has achieved modernisation without industrialisation.

The world share of industry value added of BRICS10 is now double that of the G7 (Figure 48).

The results show the following for industry valued added as a percentage of the world using GDP (PPP):

• China is the world’s leading industrial country with a 25.7% share value added, while the US holds only a 9.7% share.
• The Global South has a 69.4% share, while the Global North has a 30.6% share.
• BRICS10 has a 44% share and exceeds the G7.
• The share of Japan, Germany, France, and the UK are also declining, whilst India is increasing (Figure 49).

We used the World Bank industry percentage multiplied by the annual GDP (PPP) for each country for each year to derive a country-based industrial value added. We then used these to calculate the percentage of total world industry value added by each country and country grouping category. There are some limitations and complex issues regarding this methodology.

Some economists have tried to minimise this change. Some argue that US dollar monopolies and ownership of large multinational corporations mean GDP figures overstate the change. China, at a minimum, cannot be said to have all its production under the lock and key of the US. Even in India, it is a mistake to understate the significance of a growing big national bourgeoise (albeit large sections of it politically reactionary). Moving industrial production to the Global South could only have occurred with massive improvements in their infrastructure.

In his parting words to Russian President Vladimir Putin during his state visit in March 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, ‘Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together’.¹³⁸ Eurasia is now centre stage for determining the future of the next period of human existence.

US Strategy to Curtail China’s Economic Growth and Influence

In 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered his famous Munich speech criticising US monopolistic dominance, ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts’.¹³⁹ In the same year, the Centre for New American Security (CNAS) was formed. By 2009, secret US cables to Washington revealed by Wikileaks stated:

Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialisation of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution… When Xi takes the helm of the party, he might aggressively attempt to address those evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.¹⁴⁰

The alarm bells in Langley and Foggy Bottom were ringing. The West’s dream for the rise of a ‘Chinese Gorbachev’ was eviscerated in 2012. It became clear that an economically ascendant China would not be imminently defeated. Thus, the Pivot to Asia strategy began integrating its allies to contain China. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly declared that ‘the twenty-first century will be America’s Pacific Century’.¹⁴¹ In contrast, Xi Jinping said to US President Barack Obama, ‘The Pacific Ocean is broad enough to accommodate the development of both China and the United States’.¹⁴²

By 2016, China’s GDP, calculated by purchasing power parity, had surpassed that of the United States. In 2020, the Centre for Economics and Business Research predicted that by 2028, China’s GDP, measured in US dollars, would overtake that of the US, a forecast that became a ‘demon barrier’.¹⁴³ US officials repeatedly defined China as the most significant strategic threat facing the US and the Global North.

The relative decline of US power, the rise of socialist China, and the economic growth of the Global South are key reasons behind US active subordination and subsequent integration of the rest of the imperialist countries. This has led to a full military, political, and economic bloc under US control. In 1998, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, ‘The most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran… not out of a sudden love for one another but out of a shared opposition to the predominant power (the US)’.¹⁴⁴

CNAS, formed by a combination of neo-cons and liberal hawks, spawned a core cadre of US policy elites – from both parties – who focused on developing a new geopolitical strategy for the US. By 2021, ignoring Brzezinski’s warning, they began publicly promoting the preparation for simultaneous wars. Significant figures from CNAS include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, and former Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Michele Flournoy. Former CNAS staff and consultants have permeated strategic organs of the state, including the National Security Council.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, whilst not a member of CNAS, now plays a dominant role in the Presidency and pursues the same international strategy. In April 2023, Sullivan gave a speech titled ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institute.¹⁴⁵ This speech was significant for three distinct reasons. First, it is very unusual for such an important speech on the US economy to be given by a National Security Advisor. Historically, National Security Advisors, like Henry Kissinger, stayed in the realms of national security, geopolitics, and military affairs. Second, Sullivan’s speech sought to create a ‘new Washington Consensus’ to re-establish US economic hegemony. Third, Sullivan acknowledged the depth of the US structural crisis, including its economic stagnation.

This economic plan is required to support military expansion. In July 2023, the US proposed a bill to add US$ 345 million in military aid to Taiwan.¹⁴⁶ From Tel Aviv to Kiev to Taipei, the US is escalating its military operations to the doorsteps of Eurasia.

Cold Wars, necessarily associated with conflicts between nuclear powers, are always dangerous. In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, in which they decried the ‘propaganda model’ utilised by the US corporate media, often in partnership with the state. They wrote it long before that system was able to avail itself of the new technological tools of surveillance and targeted communication characterising the digital age. Thanks to whistle-blower Edward Snowden the world was able to get a glimpse of the vast expansion of US control over all communications and how it has integrated all the US IT tech monopoly platforms into adjuncts of US national security infrastructure.

‘Collect it all’ was how a former senior intelligence officer described the National Security Agency’s former director Keith Alexander’s approach to data collection. All the emails, phone calls, and text messages of all types (including those of WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal), every key stroke, and every URL are captured for the vast majority of the world’s population (outside of China, Russia, and a few other countries). They are stored in vast networks of hard drives in locations like Bluffdale, Utah. The US created a global network able to capture and manage nearly every packet of data on all undersea optical cables, all cellular traffic, and satellite data traffic.

Despite military hegemony, capital still needs the approximation of consent. Over time, new techniques such as machine learning created a qualitative leap in the ability of the US to conduct psychological secret warfare against the people, the Global South, and their populations.¹⁴⁷ The economic models of all media companies collapsed with the advent of the internet and the creation of economic tech monopolies, which disintermediated all media profits. A new era of fully weaponised media outlets began – a development that is part of the overall hybrid war strategy (including economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation) that has been utilised by the US establishment around the world.

The pivot to Asia, in reality a pivot to China, began formally in 2012 under Obama. The US combined propaganda, diplomatic, economic, and political strategies to try to curb, at first, China’s economic development and, later, its growing influence in institutions like BRICS. Starting in 2016, Trump attempted to avoid conflict with Russia and began to focus all US energies against China.

Over the last eight years, the US used a coterie of selected and curated topics to define the Western media narrative on China. Despite millions of dead Muslims at the hands of NATO forces in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the West managed to integrate their formidable array of soft-power resources to wage a fierce cold war against China. Even the chief propagandist of the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels, might have been amazed at the hubris of the West in claiming the mantle of human rights and attempting to use Xinjiang as the whipping point against China.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and former army colonel, noted that an important strategic goal of the US military’s invasion and long-term stationing in Afghanistan was to contain China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2013–present) and to create ethnic divisions and social unrest in Xinjiang.¹⁴⁸ The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC became central props in a hallmark US psyops campaign.

As we have explained in the economic analysis of Western economies, it is not irrational for the West to seek to retard China’s growth. Central to the next stage of development of China’s economy is promoting a dual circulation economy, i.e., to increase the weight of the domestic market while continuing to keep growing its international trade, switching to high quality development, and advancing the economic development of the western provinces of China. Attacking Xinjiang simultaneously accomplishes many Western interests: weakens China’s domestic growth strategies, isolates China internationally, masks US violence against Muslim countries, and continues to support extremist groups to destabilise their adversaries.

Fabricated allegations of genocide among the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, entirely unsubstantiated by the US State Department, enabled the US government to impose sanctions on China, aiming to strike at China’s entire textile industry chain, which exports more than US$ 300 billion and accounts for over one-third of the world’s textile exports, ranking first globally.¹⁴⁹ But despite US sanctions, Xinjiang’s foreign trade surged by 51.25% year-on-year, reaching US$ 30 billion in the first three-quarters of 2023, with trade with five Central Asian nations increasing by 59.1%.¹⁵⁰ China has just announced a free trade zone in Xinjiang to promote connectivity with regional Belt and Road countries.

In addition to ‘soft-power’ warfare, the US spared no effort to contain China’s development in high-tech sectors, especially in weakening China’s capacity to produce or even purchase top-end semiconductor chips. By imposing long-arm jurisdiction on technology such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines manufactured by the Dutch company ASML, the US seeks to prevent China from entering the future of chip technology. The Biden administration believes that its impact will extend far beyond weakening China’s military advancements, but also threatening China’s economic growth and scientific leadership.

Gregory C. Allen, director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project and senior fellow in the Emerging Technology Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believes that the message conveyed by the export controls against China issued by the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in October 2022, is part of ‘a new US policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry – strangling with an intent to kill’.¹⁵¹ C.J. Muse, an industry analyst in the US, stated: ‘If you’d told me about these rules five years ago, I would’ve told you that’s an act of war — we’d have to be at war’.¹⁵²

Despite severe restrictions by the US, China continues to outgrow the Global North (Figure 50).

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China strengthens its economic connections with the Global South. From 2013 to 2022, China’s total trade volume with countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative reached US$ 19.1 trillion, with an average annual increase of 6.4%. Cumulative bilateral investment exceeded US$ 380 billion, and China’s foreign direct investment exceeded US$ 240 billion. China’s new contracted projects reached US$ 2 trillion, with a cumulative turnover of US$ 1.3 trillion completed.¹⁵³

Ironically, US containment in high-tech fields has only strengthened China’s resolve for self-reliance in innovation. In recent years, China has made significant breakthroughs in independent innovation in high-end chips, electric vehicles, and digital technology, making the US blockade and containment in high-tech fields increasingly unrealistic.

The Global North Pushing the World Towards War

The peaceful rise of the Global South countries, led by Asia and especially China, poses a comprehensive economic challenge to imperialist world dominance. For the first time in 600 years, the Atlantic imperialist powers are confronted with a non-white economic force capable of countering them.

To contain China’s rise, the US is intensifying internal integration within the imperialist camp, allowing and demanding that two fascist countries defeated in WWII – Japan and Germany – rearm themselves. US political leaders unanimously consider it essential to contain and defeat China as a core strategic enemy and started a New Cold War. US military leaders make alarming statements about China. The US geopolitical goal is to overthrow the regimes of China and Russia, de-nuclearise and if possible, dismember both countries, split them into several small countries, and ensure they can never again challenge US military or economic hegemony.

On Russia’s western border, NATO’s eastward expansion has brought the security issue of Ukraine to a critical boiling point. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States had promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward since its original mission – countering the Soviet Union and containing European communism ­– had concluded with the end of the Cold War. However, NATO reneged on that ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ and it inducted 14 new member states, including several former Soviet Republics. In 2018, Ukraine amended its constitution to prioritise joining NATO and the European Union as its national strategy, posing a significant threat to Russia’s national security. With Kiev only 760 km away from Moscow, allowing NATO to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine would constitute an uncontrollable military threat to Russia.

Simultaneously, neo-Nazi forces in western Ukraine were on the rise. In January 2022, torchlight processions were held in cities like Kiev and Lviv, commemorating the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Prior conflicts saw western Ukrainian nationalist extremists hoisting Nazi flags and threatening to annihilate eastern Ukrainians and pro-Russian elements. Ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine had to organise resistance and seek Russian aid. Under these circumstances, Russia launched a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, essentially facing a direct confrontation with NATO’s military force.

In the Western Pacific, the United States continuously attempts to stoke tensions over the South China Sea and Taiwan. In August 2022, despite strong opposition and solemn representations from China, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, seriously violating the One-China principle and the provisions of the three US-China joint communiqués, severely impacting the political foundation of Sino-American relations; it is important to recall that in 1972, in the Shanghai communiqué, the United States accepted the ‘One China’ policy, which acknowledges that there is only one China and that Taiwan is not a separate, sovereign state). In August 2023, the US Navy, along with forces from Canada and the Republic of Korea, conducted joint military exercises in the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea.¹⁵⁴ However, the exercises ended abruptly after just five hours due to China’s targeted military mobilisations.¹⁵⁵ Since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became president of the Philippines in June 2022, the Philippines has opened multiple military bases to the US, strengthened security ties with Australia and Japan, and sparked disputes with China over sovereignty issues in the South China Sea. Warships from the US, Canada, Australia, and other countries also frequently patrol and exercise in the South China Sea, causing several close encounters and frictions with the Chinese Navy.

To date, faced with continuous provocations from the United States and its allies, China has maintained a restrained stance, striving to avoid military conflicts with the US and its allies – a confrontation that could escalate into a global nuclear war. However, Taiwan holds a special significance for China. As part of China, historically and under international law, Taiwan’s continued separation signifies that China’s civil war, and even the ‘century of humiliation’ that began with the Opium Wars in 1840, has not ended. The division of Taiwan is unacceptable to China, ultimately even if it means the risk of direct war against the United States.

With the direct support of Biden and Blinken, Israel is advancing an ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The situation in Gaza starkly reveals the true face of the imperialist camp of the Global North as a collective of white settlers: when conflicts arise between white settlers and colonised people of colour, the imperialist camp uniformly stands with the settlers.

The fault lines of Ukraine and Palestine have exacerbated the polarisation of the social democrats, sections of whom have proven unable to overcome their desire for acceptability and join in a robust movement for peace.

Let us return to the quote from NATO and the EU that they would be ‘protecting our one billion citizens, preserving our freedom and democracy… against all threats’. This sentence, appearing in the first paragraph of the NATO-EU 2023 communiqué, clearly outlines the structure of today’s world: the imperialist camp, centred around the US and based on NATO infrastructure, is fully united and mobilised militarily, politically, and economically, ready to stifle any emerging forces that might pose a threat to their hegemonic status. This unprecedented immense imperialist pressure has forced many in the ‘rest of the world’ (those outside the imperialist camp) to identify alternative structures and identities for self-preservation.

EPILOGUE: A Credible Economic and Political Alternative World Order

Twenty-five years after the publication of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) – identifying this as the greatest geopolitical danger for the US – China, Russia, and Iran have indeed grown closer in various fields, including economics, politics, and security. Not coincidentally, they are the only three countries that are in the BRICS10, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter and United Nations (Figure 51). The driving force behind this convergence – precisely as Brzezinski predicted – is the escalating hegemonic pressure from the imperialist group led by the United States. Compared to NATO, which is highly unified in ideology, military command, and intelligence sharing, there is no anti-imperialist international organisation that is comparable. Nevertheless, three influential international organisations have emerged within the Global South:

• The BRICS organisation, initiated by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is an economic cooperation mechanism that expanded to 17 official and unofficial cooperating partners after the BRICS summit in August 2023. BRICS10 represents 45.5% of the world population, 35.6% of the GDP (PPP), and 44% of the global industrial output. The BRICS New Development Bank began with US$ 100 billion in capital investment and its Contingent Reserve Structure also holds US$ 100 billion.¹⁵⁶
• The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) started with a focus on security issues. It brings together countries from the Eurasian continent – from the large economic performers like China, India, and Turkey to the leading OPEC countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as member countries of the League of Arab States – to address security challenges through multifaceted development approaches. The SCO represents 60% of the Eurasian territory, a quarter of the world’s GDP, and 40% of the global population.¹⁵⁷ In July 2023, Xi Jinping proposed the creation of an SCO development bank.
• The newly established Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations (FUNC) seeks to advocate for multilateralism and oppose hegemony and unilateralism within the framework of the UN Charter. Currently, this group has 20 member countries, with Venezuela as its initiator. On the issue of Palestine, the group supports the just demand for national independence of the Palestinian people, backs Palestine’s bid to become a formal member of the United Nations and supports the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Hitting its 10-year milestone, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has also had a significant impact on the Global South. To date, with an investment surpassing US$ 1 trillion, the BRI has been a pivotal force in infrastructure development in the Global South.¹⁵⁸

Contrary to the imperialist camp, the primary aspirations of the Global South countries are sovereignty and development, and to achieve peace. Specifically, they face at least eight common challenges and opportunities (Figure 52), elaborated on below:

• Multilateralism: Engaging in profound multilateral dialogues and cooperation among Global South countries without reliance on platforms provided by the Global North countries.
• New Modernisation: Building regional economic integration through economic corridors and belts within the Global South to realise economies of scale at the continental level.
• De-dollarisation: Reducing dependence on the US dollar (especially for those countries facing sanctions) in international trade through mechanisms like local currency transactions, currency swaps, and regional common currencies.
• Innovation led by the Global South: Promoting democratic and open technological innovation among Global South countries. This includes reducing the economic premium caused by intellectual property monopolies in areas like medicine, new energy, and information technology.
• Reparations and Debt Resolution: Addressing the century-old debt trap imposed by imperialist countries through collective negotiations for reductions and compensations.
• Food Sovereignty: Ensuring the peoples’ and states’ right to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries, transnational corporations, and free trade agreements.
• Digital Sovereignty: Enhancing the capability of Global South countries to control digital spaces in hardware, software, data, content, standards, and regulations, and constructing alternatives to the US monopolised digital platforms.
• Environmental Justice: Formulating fair emission rights allocation plans and urging imperialist countries to compensate for their long-term cumulative pollution. Financialisation of nature is a dead end for the Global South.

Humanity faces a dangerous and ruthless military power. The US is on a march to rearm the two main fascist powers of WWII, as it itself turns more towards a politics of the extreme right and neo-fascism.

It is sadly very true that the left forces outside the socialist camp are indeed weak and that the subjective aspect of revolution in most countries is not ready for conducting revolution. But we are witnessing significant changes and breaks in consciousness, albeit not full class consciousness. Millions of people are in the streets reviled by the sickness of not only the US and Israel’s genocidal regimes but also of France and the UK. The four nuclear powers of imperialism have banded together, demonstrating their power. The likely cost of this will be the creation of a future generation of youth in the Arab and Muslim world who will never forget nor forgive this flaunting of brutality and humiliation. Mao Zedong described this historical dialectic:

Imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are – paper tigers. On this, we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers that can devour people. On this, we should build our tactical thinking.¹⁵⁹

Under President Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has proposed visionary recommendations for humanity. The China model of modernisation, a result of socialism with Chinese characteristics, indicates a path for the Global South countries that does not rely on exploiting and oppressing other nations. It balances the material and spiritual civilisation, economic development, and the ecological environment, offering an essential reference for the development of the Global South.

As a result of over 600 years of humiliation, racial violence, and economic exploitation by the Global North, we have arrived at this stage of Hyper-Imperialism. However, an emerging Global South, even with its contradictions, reminds us that human beings are not constrained to remain victims of history. Despite the different context of subjective factors, the concluding call of The Communist Manifesto (1848) remains compelling today:

We have a world to win.

***

‘Black Woman’

by Cuban Poet Nancy Morejón

Still I smell the foam of the sea they forced me to cross.

Night, I cannot recall the night.

Nor could the ocean itself recall it.
But never have I forgotten the first seagull I glimpsed.
High up, the clouds, like innocent ever-present witnesses.
Perhaps I’ve not forgotten my lost coast nor even my ancestral tongue.
They dropped me here and here I’ve lived.
And because I work like a dog,
Here is where I was reborn.
And I sought to rely on epic story of the Mandinga after epic story.

I rebelled.

His Grace purchased me in a public square.
I embroidered His Grace’s cloak and I bore him a son.
My son was given no name.
And His Grace, he died at the hands of an impeccable English lord.

I trudged forward.

This is the land where I was lashed and beaten upside down.
I paddled along all its rivers.
Under its sun I sewed, harvested, and ate none of the crops.
I got a slave barracks for a house.
I myself carried the stones to build it,
but I sang in the natural beat of the nation’s birds.

I rose in rebellion.

In this very land I touched the warm blood
and rotten bones of many others like me,
brought here, or not, as I was.
Then I stopped thinking about the way to Guinea forever.
To Guinea or Benin? Was I thinking about Madagascar or Cape Verde?

I worked even more.

Then I laid the foundation for my best millenary chant and my hope.
Here I built my world.
I went to the mountains.
My true independence happened at the palenque
and I rode with Maceo’s cavalry.

Only one century later, alongside my descendants,
from atop a blue mountain,

I came down from the Sierra

to put an end to capitalists and usurers,
and generals and the petit bourgeois.
Now I am: only now do we hold and create.
Nothing is beyond our reach.
Our land.
Ours the sea and sky.
Ours the magic and the amazing dreams.
My equals, here I see you dance
around the tree we planted for communism.
Its generous wood is clearly resounding.

APPENDIX

Methodology

This report was compiled with data and charts from Global South Insights (GSI), based on diverse sources, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, OECD, the Conference Board, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Monthly Review, and World Beyond War, among others (see Figure 55). In this section, we present the methodological definitions and criteria that guided the elaboration of this report.

All 193 UN Member States and Palestine as an Observer State are included in the Global North Rings or the Global South Groupings.

In analysing the Global North, we found that among the factors included in our investigation – historical, military, and intelligence relationships – a critical factor was each country’s relationship to US intelligence. As a result, we have divided the Global North into four rings, comprising 49 countries in the US-Led Imperialist Camp. Our analysis of the Global South indicated factors such as the country’s economic and political independence from imperialism and the strategic relationships between Global South countries. However, a critical factor was the relative degree to which they were targets of regime change and their role in publicly advancing international anti-imperialist stances. Therefore, the 145 Global South countries are divided into six groupings.

In addition to UN member countries, we have included the number of military bases in non-UN member countries and in the territories – sometimes contentious – where foreign bases are located.

Other comparative calculations in this report include all countries and territories from their respective source database.

Although invaluable, international databases, such as those from the IMF and the World Bank, are burdened by limitations arising from disparities in national statistical production processes, particularly in the methodologies for variable measurement. This leads to the non-harmonisation of national data compiled by international databases at its sources. Similarly, international databases may have limitations regarding completeness. The data governance and rigorous audit procedures conducted by GSI sought to ensure maximum data consistency.

Regarding GDP-related data, this report primarily uses the IMF data. Notably, the IMF database does not include data for four countries: Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, due to their sovereign decision of not being subject to IMF dictates, as well as Monaco and Liechtenstein. The GDP (PPP) field in tables featuring these four countries is left blank.

Economic data from the World Bank is used only to calculate world industry value added. The World Bank publishes the value added of industry as a percentage of GDP using current prices and exchange rates, referred to in this study as the Current Exchange Rate (CER) method. Only in this case are both CER and GDP (PPP) values presented.

In this document, GDP (PPP) is adopted as the standard. This is not a choice free of controversy, and due to the scope of this report, we will not delve into our methodological reflections on such controversies. PPP conversion factors are statistical estimates based on baskets of goods and services for benchmark years, further applied to GDP for GDP (PPP) estimates. Although there are arguments that GDP (PPP) data could overestimate countries in the Global South, it is a more accurate measure in comparing economic performance and living standards across different countries, as it adjusts for differences in price levels and provides a more stable metric for international comparisons. At the same time, GDP (PPP) delivers a more meaningful basis for ranking countries regarding their economic size and contribution to the global economy, compared to the GDP rankings using CER. In such rankings, countries with strong currencies may rank higher, even if their actual economic output is not as significant.

Figures 53 and 54 show the comparisons for CER versus PPP calculations of percentage of world total GDP for 1) China versus the United States and 2) the Global South versus the Global North. Both CER and PPP show a dramatic rise in relative percentages for China and the Global South.

However, PPP conversion factors to measure military spending are necessarily less reliable than current exchange rates because no price data is collected for military expenditure. Therefore, the nature of military spending lacks this information for international comparisons. SIPRI recognises that using the PPP adjustment for military spending is inaccurate and, therefore, is less reliable than using currency exchange rates. Regarding military spending, we combined data from Monthly Review for actual US military spending, along with SIPRI data, to calculate the real worldwide military spending using CER.

As for other military data, various sources were used to comprehensively address this central phenomenon to analyse Hyper-Imperialism; however, limitations persist due to differing methodologies, measurement variables, data scarcity, and secrecy. We used data from the US Congressional Research Service combined with the Military Intervention Project (MIP) for the quantity of interventions. While the former is an official US publication that serves as a primary data source on US military interventions, it does not include some secret missions and does not aggregate its data to differentiate between the various types of US Armed Forces’ overseas interventions. The latter uses a more comprehensive definition of military intervention, although it only publishes a data summary. Finally, we used the lists published by World Beyond War, Declassified UK, and the US Department of Defence Base Structure Report for data on military bases.

In addition to the aforementioned data sources, GSI’s elaboration in this report draws from a broader set of data sources listed below. GSI carefully created new categories and built complex data integration platforms to provide the analysis from a Global South standpoint. Classification processes are inherently challenging and subject to modification since domestic and regional politics can change quickly. Extensive data collection and integration across diverse countries allowed for hypothesis testing. For example, in determining who were the closest allies of the US, we assessed closeness to US intelligence. The data for this analysis was exposed by Edward Snowden when he showed that, in addition to the ‘Five Eyes’ – the world’s oldest intelligence partnership between five anglophone Western states, which began with the 1946 British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement – there were two other hidden groups, the ‘Nine Eyes’ and the ‘Fourteen Eyes’ (SIGINT Seniors Europe, formed in 1982).

The foundation for this report is the integration of databases, data analysis, and GSI’s elaboration.

Global South Insights

Global South Insights (GSI) is a network of researchers committed to advancing quantitative, data-driven research in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is a partner of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

GSI has employed advanced data technologies focused on statistical databases from multiple authoritative institutions, embedding comprehensive data governance and audit mechanisms.

Common issues facing researchers include:

• Complex data sources, difficultly in data integration. For commonly used data such as population and GDP statistics, organisations like the United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund each have different statistical approaches. The data released by these institutions lack standardisation, leading to various compatibility and interoperability issues during data integration.
• Poor data quality, difficultly in data auditing. Missing and erroneous data exist in the datasets published by various organisations. Auditing original data and integrated/analysed data relies heavily on manual operations, which is labour-intensive, inefficient, error-prone, and lacks repeatability.
• Basic processing tools, difficultly in advanced analysis. Data integration and analysis depend significantly on basic tools like Excel, which are inefficient and cumbersome for operations like 10-year rolling averages and linear regression. These challenges make it difficult to conduct higher-level abstract analyses.
• Limited visualisation, difficultly for insight presentation. Relying on the limited chart formats provided by Excel makes it difficult to create more expressive data presentations like composite charts, maps, heatmaps, etc. Charts created with professional design tools cannot automatically update with data changes.
• Lack of data asset management, difficultly in team collaboration. Quantitative research processes based on Excel files lack the accumulation and management of data assets such as source data, data audit results, data processing workflows, process data, and interim outcomes, making it difficult to support long-term collaborative research among multiple people and multiple topics.

Full list of ‘One Hundred and Eleven Diverse Global South Countries’