Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research in collaboration with the UL (Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society) Research Centre

The artwork in this study was produced by members of Young Socialist Artists (YSA). Since 2020, this group has brought together artists and cultural workers from across India who are embedded in social and political movements in their regions. Most of the YSA members who created the illustrations for this study are from and based in Kerala, where these cooperatives are part of the fabric of everyday life. The illustrations are based on photographs taken by the researchers who produced this text during their field visits.

Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat is the co-founder and director of the SAFAR Foundation, an action research centre based in West Bengal, India. He was active with the student movement at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he researched cooperatives during his MPhil in political science. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto, Canada, and a researcher at STREET Lab. His research focuses on socio-technical designs for resistance, exploring the intersection of technology and labour/social movement organising.

Aswathi Rebecca Asok is a development economist and law graduate with expertise in interdisciplinary, evidence-based, and policy-oriented research. Over the past nine years, Aswathi has conducted extensive research on Kerala’s development trajectory and explored a wide range of topics such as financial inclusion, poverty, gender, migration, labour, and decentralisation. She was a student activist at multiple universities and campuses in India.

Najeeb VR is a social scientist and research coordinator at the UL Research Centre in Kozhikode, Kerala, where he integrates transdisciplinary approaches to cooperative development, social transformation, and knowledge systems. He is also a member of the expert committee for the 14th Five-Year Plan Subgroup of the Kerala State Planning Board and actively contributes to academic outreach, curriculum development, and public scholarship. He holds a PhD in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University and is a recipient of the Revise PhD Fellowship of the Kerala Council for Historical Research.

Vijoo Krishnan is the general secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) and a polit bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). As a leader of the AIKS, he played a crucial role in the historic farmers’ agitation in Delhi in 2021–2022. Before becoming a full-time political activist, he was the head of the Department of Political Science at St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore. In 1998–1999, he was the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union. Vijoo is also a photographer who captures the everyday life of the working class.

Nidheesh J Villatt is a member of the All India Kisan Sabha’s Central Kisan Committee as well as the research coordinator of the P Sundarayya Memorial Trust, a research institute that focuses on agrarian issues and movements. Nidheesh is dedicated to studying and building the worker-peasant alliance, with a focus on its political economy and philosophy. He has written about agrarian and industrial class struggles, ‘competition’ under capitalism, political ecology, and Hindutva.

Nitheesh Narayanan is a movement researcher and writer who works at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He studies the history of working-class movements, including cooperatives, and was previously the vice president of the Students’ Federation of India and editor of its journal, Student Struggle. He has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the author of a number of books in English and Malayalam, including The 1921 Rebellion in Malabar: A Collection of Communist Writings, edited with Vijay Prashad, and If Humanity Is A Country: Cuban Days.

Sarga TK is an assistant professor at Azim Premji University, Bhopal. Her research engages with themes of urban mobility, labour migration, and construction cooperatives, exploring how work and movement shape the urban landscape. She previously taught at Kannur University in Kerala.

Subin Dennis is an economist and a researcher at Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He worked with the online news portal NewsClick as a correspondent before joining Tricontinental. He was active with the student movement and served as the Delhi state vice-president of the Students’ Federation of India. Subin’s writings in English and Malayalam on issues related to the economy and politics appear in various periodicals and websites. He is currently based in Kerala.

Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author of forty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of Global South, and (with Grieve Chelwa) How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa. Vijay is an editor at LeftWord Books (New Delhi), Inkani Books (Johannesburg), and La Trocha (Santiago).

Introduction: Possible Communism

But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the cooperative movement, especially of the cooperative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold ‘hands’. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behest of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.¹

– Karl Marx, Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association, 1864.

Misery greets the planet. Poverty persists for billions of the world’s people. Climate change – the product of capitalist expansionism – threatens the survival of life on Earth. Wars of grotesque proportions creep across the globe in myriad forms, including Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, as famines driven by human behaviour plague swathes of the population. It is as if the five horsemen of the apocalypse are no longer sufficient – instead, untold horsemen ride around the planet suffocating the possibilities of human life.

All of this contributes to the sense that nothing other than this nightmare is possible, that alternatives cannot be imagined. When resilient people dare to think of a better future, as they inevitably do, those in power meet them with mockery and strive to snuff them out. It is better for the powerful and the propertied to see to it that no alternative is allowed to flourish. The survival of even one kernel of hope would call into question the claim that History has ended.

One of these kernels is the Indian state of Kerala (population of 35 million), which has a rich history of socialist construction. Ten years after India won its independence in 1947, the Communist Party of India won state elections in Kerala. Right from the start, the left government in Kerala adopted an agenda to smash ancient social hierarchies and customs, provide social goods to the public that were not readily available in the rest of India (including quality public education, health care, and transportation), and construct the basis of working-class and peasant power by defending workers’ rights to organise in unions and build cooperatives. Though the national government in Delhi unconstitutionally removed the communist state government in Kerala in 1959, the agenda set by the left remained largely in place. The left has returned to power periodically (1967–1969, 1980–1981, 1987–1991, 1996–2001, 2006–2011, and 2016–present), each time expanding the agenda of decentralisation, encouraging public action, and building the basis for social democratic state institutions.² Even when the right came to power in the intervening years, it was not able to undermine the dynamic that had been set in motion by the left governments. It was in this context that the cooperative movement developed in Kerala.

People who are critical of the capitalist system are often as critical of the alternatives being built within the parameters of this system because they argue that such institutions are captive to capitalism’s logic. But this is a flawed assessment of cooperatives, which are – in fact – incubators of different logics of life and work that serve as beacons of inspiration and hope, offering a window into what humanity is capable of once the fetters of capitalism are transcended. Cooperatives provide schools for the working class and peasantry to learn how to build social relations based on a different economic foundation. In his third volume of Capital, Marx wrote:

The cooperative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e. by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.³

Marx’s insight here is crucial. Cooperatives are neither inherently mired in the capitalist law of value, nor are they easily able to transcend it. They are ‘sprouts’, he writes, of an alternative through which the working class can experiment with the annulment of capitalist management. Marx looked with great pride at the workers’ utopia being built in the Paris Commune of 1871, where he saw how the communards developed workers’ cooperatives and other means of building a new society amidst the jubilation of toppling the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon III (1852–1870).⁴ In The Civil War in France, Marx wrote that during the two months of the commune’s existence, from March to May 1871, the commune was the ‘form at last discovered’ for the future workers’ state. It was in this text that Marx wrote of the insights of cooperatives:

If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if the united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their control and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism.⁵

This text, The Cooperative Movement in Kerala, India, is part of a series from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research called Studies on Socialist Construction. It is about possible communism, the possibilities in our time of a future society. An honest appraisal of a heroic venture, this study shows us that Kerala’s cooperatives have been able not only to survive in a small niche, but also to grow into substantial institutions that have become an integral part of the region’s social life. There are 16,429 registered cooperative societies in Kerala today (12,278 of which are active, 3,354 of which are dormant, and 797 of which are under liquidation).⁶ Cooperatives operate in a wide range of sectors, from the production and distribution of goods and services to hospitals and restaurants to agricultural production and housing construction. The largest cooperative (although not strictly registered as a cooperative), Kudumbashree, has 4.8 million members, all of whom are women. One in four women in Kerala is a member of this cooperative. There are also many cooperative-like organisations that are registered as charitable societies and trusts, such as the Brahmagiri Development Society, which focuses on agrarian development, and the Janatha Charitable Society, a major milk producer. Most of the active cooperative societies have branches in different parts of the state.

There are, of course, challenges and contradictions, and these are discussed with clarity: there is no sense in exaggerating the possibilities presented by cooperatives that must struggle to survive in a world where the capitalist law of value is the law of the land. Nor is there sense in minimising these cooperatives’ important contributions to the people who live in Kerala – both in material and spiritual terms. These cooperatives are not merely a source of inspiration: they provide a blueprint for cooperatives around the world as seeds of a just future that exist within the confines of capitalism today.

Kerala’s Cooperatives

In 1943, at the 7th Session of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS, the country’s largest farmers’ union) in Bhakna Kalan, Punjab, the delegates discussed a range of issues, including the building of cooperatives. In one of their resolutions, the AIKS argued that cooperatives could help the farmers fight the ‘distress and humiliation’ of capitalist and colonial agriculture and enable them to achieve ‘economic, social, and national freedom’. During the deliberations, communist leader EMS Namboodiripad (1909–1998), or EMS as he was called, wrote a note entitled ‘Organisation – Not a Machine’. In the note, EMS pointed out that the resolutions would mean nothing without militant organisation that goes beyond ‘abstract politics’. Cooperatives would need to be built by the peasantry and agricultural workers to expand the democratic revolution and build the confidence of rural workers.⁷

In October 1956, the Communist Party of India held a meeting in Thrissur, Kerala, that focused on cooperatives. The meeting was chaired by Professor Joseph Mundassery, who would become the first minister of education and cooperation during EMS’s tenure as the chief minister of Kerala (1957–1959), and resolved that rather than allow the cooperatives to become a ‘pocket borough’ of the feudal classes, working people themselves would build them and there would be political education about the role these cooperatives played in building democracy and socialism. The party leadership also emphasised the need for successful rural credit societies and cooperative banks controlled by communists and workers as a way of eliminating the stranglehold of the moneylenders, nourishing agricultural production, and improving the living conditions of peasants and agricultural workers. It is out of this ideological clarity that Kerala’s cooperatives emerged to become a beacon for democratic worker-led cooperatives around the world.

Brief portraits of some of Kerala’s cooperatives make up the rest of this study. These portraits are written by scholars and political leaders who have worked closely with the cooperatives to learn about them and assess them. The data in the essays has been largely accumulated from the cooperatives and from government documents. We are grateful to the UL Research Centre for assisting us with this work.

These essays reveal some important facts:

1. The cooperative sector in Kerala would not have flourished without a long history of social reform that created the social basis for cooperation. When news about the Soviet Union trickled into Kerala, people involved in the social reform and anti-caste movements expressed their curiosity about its attempts to reconstruct social and economic relations. This curiosity led to studies about the cooperative movement in the Soviet Union, which were then presented in social reform and anti-caste movements’ public meetings.
2. The cooperative sector developed due to the vitality of the class struggle in Kerala, where organised peasants and workers pushed the social reform movement to combine the struggles against caste, landlordism, and colonialism. It was in these struggles that the peasant movement – mainly in northern Kerala – took the initiative to start peasant cooperatives to help the most impoverished amongst them. The emergence of these cooperatives weakened the grip of landlords, who could no longer lend money at usurious rates to the indebted peasantry or continue to be their main provider of consumer goods. Instead, they watched as the peasant cooperatives lifted the confidence of the masses. The success of cooperatives led to their duplication in other parts of the region, building on the organisational habits of mass movements.
3. The first communist ministry that came to power in Kerala (1957–1959) received mass support from the mass social reform movement and was bolstered both by the class struggle of previous decades and by the success of the cooperative movement. In turn, the communist government used a part of Kerala’s social wealth to finance the growth of more cooperatives across the state. The government set up coir (coconut fibre), handloom, and toddy (fermented coconut sap that is an alcoholic drink) cooperatives to enhance these sectors of the economy and improve the working conditions and wages of the workers.
4. The emphasis on building cooperatives to ensure mass employment and higher wages as well as to improve the efficiency and productivity of different enterprises meant that cooperatives could compete against the private sector.
5. The leadership of oppressed castes was drawn to the cooperative system and saw in them an opportunity to realise their independence and emancipation. At the December 1929 Cheramar Samajam Conference, for instance, the organisation’s president, Chaajan, told the two thousand members of the Pulaya community present there that these cooperative societies, along with education programmes and an anti-alcohol campaign, would be crucial for their struggles.⁸
6. The role of political education within cooperatives enabled their members to understand what they were building (socialism) and how what they were building was different – and better – than what the private sector had built (capitalism).
7. Without an extensive network of financial cooperatives, the entire sector would have been starved of funds. This system has also depended on the left’s periodic entry into government, which has prevented the large-scale privatisation of Kerala’s credit markets.
8. The cooperatives’ democratic structure, alongside the innovation of their members, allows them to diversify their work and adapt to the changing times. When tobacco consumption habits changed, for instance, the Dinesh Beedi⁹ Workers’ Central Cooperative Society shifted to food production.
9. A key element in Kerala’s cooperative movement is its commitment to social change, with an emphasis on using cooperative organisation to transcend patriarchy (through women’s cooperatives), caste hierarchies (through oppressed caste cooperatives), discrimination against tribal or Adivasi communities (through Scheduled Tribe¹⁰cooperatives), and discrimination against transgender communities (through transgender cooperatives) as well as to promote equality for people with disabilities.

This study shows how effective these cooperatives have been in promoting a social form of economic activity that offers a counter to the pressures of capitalism. In that regressive form of economic competition, workers’ livelihoods are the first to be dismissed, while profit is enshrined as a god. Kerala’s cooperatives invert this value system, putting the needs – and dignity – of the working class at their heart.

Vanshika Babbar (Young Socialist Artists), Uralungal Cooperative Workers, 2025.

Sahya Tea Cooperative

Nidheesh J Villatt and Vijoo Krishnan

At the 35^th conference of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) in December 2022, every delegate received a pack of Sahya tea along with Kerala’s famous spices and other condiments. It was not until months later, during a visit to Assam to report on the decisions made at the conference, that one of the delegates took note of the brand of tea. Local delegates inquired about it, claiming that it was better than their world-renowned Assam tea. Their query led us on a quest to find out more about the brand and the collective effort that went into its emergence.

In a letter to Wilhelm Bracke on 5 May 1875, Karl Marx wrote, ‘every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes’.¹¹ The story of the Sahya Tea Cooperative Factory, located in the remote area of Thankamany in the hilly district of Idukki, Kerala, shows the significance of the ‘real movement’ of socialism. Launched in 2017, the factory was established by the Thankamany Service Cooperative Bank, Ltd (founded in 1966). The Cooperative Bank has 15,000 members, most of them small peasants and workers, and operates in the Kamakshy village panchayat,¹² which is mainly inhabited by small tea growers. The Thankamany Cooperative Tea Factory mostly manufactures black, green, and a variety of blended teas.

The cooperative bank and tea factory must be understood within the broader trajectory of Kerala’s communist-led cooperative movement.¹³ Russia’s 1917 October Revolution had a tremendous impact on Kerala’s progressive movements and helped reshape their orientation within the national movement. In 1934, the strongest sections of these movements formed the All India Congress Socialist Party. Five years later, the party’s Kerala unit went on to transform itself into the Kerala unit of the Communist Party of India, which eventually built the AIKS and a number of trade unions in the region. It was in this period and in this context that the AIKS and other progressive forces began to intervene in the cooperative movement and confront the British strategy of keeping cooperatives insulated from the intensified class struggle that was erupting in the 1930s and 1940s. For instance, as EMS documented, during the People’s War (1941–1945)¹⁴ communists pressured the imperialist British government to procure grain from landlords and distribute it through ration shops, which were subsequently converted into producer and consumer cooperative societies.¹⁵ Communists in Kerala identified building cooperatives as part of the expanding class struggle, distinct from the benevolent colonial idea of cooperatives derived from the Rochdale Principles, which have served as the primary guidelines for cooperatives since 1844.¹⁶

The dialectical relationship between building a strong working-class organisation that opposes imperialism and building cooperatives had already been established in the AIKS’s 1943 resolution on cooperatives, passed at its 7^th Session. This resolution called on AIKS cadres to initiate cooperatives as a strategy to combat the economic and social subjugation of the peasantry. The insights from this resolution, particularly EMS’s note ‘Organisation – Not a Machine’, emphasised the necessity of militant class organisation to prevent cooperatives from devolving into ‘abstract politics’ and provided a crucial framework for later discussions on building cooperatives.

By the time communists and cooperative movement leaders convened in Thrissur in October 1956, the focus had shifted from the theoretical foundation laid in 1943 to the practical challenges of implementing this foundation in Kerala.¹⁷ During the meeting, participants took stock of the cooperatives’ activities in Kerala and criticised the delusions of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s bourgeois landlord regime, which suggested that the creation of cooperatives by itself would lead to socialism. The participants made the point that communists had to be consciously involved in the organisation of cooperatives and enrol large numbers of working people into these and other mass organisations in order to ensure their political education in the process. Reference was made to the successful cooperative rural credit societies and banks, which had eliminated the stranglehold of moneylenders and nourished agricultural production, thereby increasing the income of the peasantry and agricultural workers. What distinguished these cooperatives from unsuccessful ones was the role of communists in ensuring that the cooperative form was not coopted by reactionaries who tried to maintain old forms of rural power.

The Emergence of Small Tea Growers

In the late 1990s, the tea industry underwent a sweeping restructuring driven by the profit fetish of monopoly capital, marked by mergers, acquisitions, and an aggressive focus on brand building. Vertically integrated monopolies such as Unilever and Tata – known as Big Tea – abandoned direct ties to agricultural production and divested from tea estate ownership and management. For instance, in March 2000 Tata acquired Tetley Group, the world’s second-largest tea manufacturer and distributor, for £271 million.¹⁸ Both Tata and Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, shifted to creating and marketing new branded teas – including crush, tear, and curl (CTC) as well as blended tea products – aimed at a variety of tastes and price ranges.

This transformation coincided with a financial crisis in tea estates, which grow and process tea and are largely managed by non-monopoly capital. While most estates were sold to smaller firms, the monopoly companies secured their supply through contractual clauses that guaranteed access to sufficient unprocessed tea. As Professor Natalie Langford observes, the industry shifted from ‘vertical integration’ to value chains in which ‘firms have sought to advance their competitive position through the outsourcing of lower value-adding activities’.¹⁹ In practice, Big Tea considered agricultural production and estate management the most troublesome links in the chain, as they were heavily regulated by labour and environmental law, and sought to distance themselves from these sectors to avoid class struggle. Instead, they consolidated control over higher value-added activities such as blending, packing, branding, distribution, and sales. Meanwhile, small tea growers rose as the main producers of tea leaves: their share increased from 7% in 1991 to 52% in 2022 and is projected to reach 70% by 2030.

Before the formation of the Sahya Tea Cooperative Factory, the roughly 3,500 small tea growers in the Idukki area operated under the stranglehold of a system run by monopoly firms such as Tata and AVT Beverages (a leading player in southern India). These large companies bought green leaves (freshly plucked, unprocessed tea leaves) from both the farmers and ‘agents’ (intermediaries who often act as buyers on behalf of factories, typically charging a commission on the green leaf collected from small farmers) at ‘an arbitrary rate and [under] humiliating terms and conditions’, a group of farmers told us. Many of the farmers shared stories with us about how companies turned away their green leaves when they tried to bargain for a fair price, inventing superficial excuses which forced the farmers – who had carried the leaves from far away – to dispose of them or use them as manure. Scenes of dispirited farmers returning home on their tractors with their rejected crops were commonplace. These methodically planned rejections were designed to create a docile peasantry that would be inured to selling their crops to the companies at low prices. The entire system was highly favourable to the large companies.

In the absence of successful cooperative action, trading agents generally charge small growers across India a commission of 15%–20% per kg of green leaves. A large chunk of this is sold to bought leaf tea factories, which process tea from purchased leaves rather than growing their own. Another chunk is sometimes sold to tea estate factories owned by big plantations. Trading agents evaluate the quality and price of the leaves based on their ‘fine leaf count’ (the proportion of young, tender leaves and buds, which determine the tea’s overall quality) in a very subjective way, compromising the interests of small farmers.²⁰

Bought leaf tea factories usually sell their processed tea at auctions. Since the process is controlled by Big Tea companies (the primary buyers), the tea is sold at distorted prices.²¹ The entire auction mechanism in India is designed in such a way that the basic postulate of neoclassical economics – that the interaction between supply and demand determines prices – appears as a farce. On the other hand, estate factories typically sell only half of their processed tea at auctions, as mandated by the regulations outlined in the 1983 Tea Marketing Control Order (itself under the 1953 Tea Act), and sell the other half through more profitable private channels.

Auction participants consist of major tea packing companies, trading agents, and other leading packet tea brands. Since these companies then undertake value-added processes such as blending, sorting, grading, and packaging the tea before distributing it to consumers, small tea growers, who are on the lower end of the value chain, receive a disproportionately lower share of consumer spending on tea – around 15%. Tea packing companies, on the other hand, which are mostly big monopoly companies, receive 50% of consumer spending on tea. That is why it is imperative for small tea growers to climb the value chain and gain direct access to markets in order to secure better prices.²² This is exactly what the Sahya Tea Cooperative is setting out to accomplish with its brave move to enter the terrain of Big Tea.

Cooperative Tea

It was the difficult circumstances facing farmers that drove AIKS members to form the Sahya Tea Cooperative in 2017. Designed to process 15,000 kg of green leaves per day, the Sahya Tea Cooperative generates employment for more than 150 workers, most of them recruited from the agricultural working class and peasantry, while also protecting the interests of the peasants amongst the small tea growers. When we visited the cooperative factory and catchment area in September 2023, what caught our attention was the visible confidence among the small tea growers.

The first three years of the cooperative, from 2017 to 2020, were challenging: not only did it have to begin to pay back the large loan it had taken at 12% interest, but it was besieged by a number of shocks, such as the 2018 Kerala flood and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2023). Yet, despite the financial challenges the cooperative faced, it was able to procure green leaves and pay farmers INR 12 per kg (far higher than the corporate rate of INR 7 per kg). The cooperative’s steady prices in turn forced the corporate tea suppliers to increase the rates they pay to small tea growers.

The cooperative’s leadership convened peasants and workers to brainstorm how to improve their financial situation. Since Big Tea companies dominated the market with their packaged tea products, they decided to improve their marketing strategy and launch an effort to make inroads into the market. KS Chithra, a popular singer known as the ‘Nightingale of Kerala’, became the Sahya Tea Cooperative’s brand ambassador and helped popularise its brand, refusing to take any payment for her work. To strengthen its market presence, the cooperative also made use of Kerala’s Public Distribution System, such as Supplyco (Kerala State Civil Supplies Corporation) and Consumerfed (Kerala State Cooperative Consumers’ Federation), as well as the system that provides goods to police canteens.

The cooperative also received other forms of support from the state, such as in 2020–2021 when Kerala’s state government bought Sahya tea for the food kits distributed during the pandemic. As a result of these creative marketing mechanisms and state assistance, the cooperative turned a profit in its fourth year (2020–2021) and began to pay INR 18 per kg for green leaves and distribute the profits as incentives to the farmers who supplied the leaves. This set a historic precedent: for the first time, farmers were remunerated fairly for their contributions.

Vanshika Babbar (Young Socialist Artists), Udayapuram Cooperative Workers, 2025.

The Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society

Najeeb VR

In 1925, before the communist movement was established in southwestern India, the followers of the social reformer Vayaleri Kunhikannan Gurukkal, also known as Sri Vagbhatananda Guru, (1885–1939) founded the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society (ULCCS) to provide construction workers with social protection. Today, the ULCCS is Asia’s largest workers’ cooperative, and it was ranked second in the 2021 World Cooperative Monitor list of industry and utilities cooperatives. United Nations Development Programme Resident Coordinator in India Lise Grande calls it a model cooperative whose success provides ‘great lessons for the rest of the world’.²³ From its origins amongst a group of labourers, ULCCS, located in a rural part of Malabar in northern Kerala, now constructs roads and bridges, buildings, and software systems. The cooperative’s commitment to social harmony and inclusion as well as worker cooperation has allowed it to succeed in areas of social production that are often challenging for cooperatives.

The ULCCS was formed at a time when work was difficult to come by and when forms of caste and class discrimination were even more severe than they are today. In 1917, Sri Vagbhatananda Guru’s followers started the Atma Vidya Sangham school, whose members formed the United Credit Cooperative in 1922 to help each other if any of them faced financial problems due to discrimination in the credit market, which was controlled by the dominant castes. They also founded a school for their children, who had been denied education by the dominant castes in the region. Taking the advice of Vagbhatananda, they decided to form the Mutual Aid Society of Daily Wage Labourers in 1924 to circumvent the labour ban that the elite had imposed on them in an effort to curtail their struggle against caste discrimination. Then, on 13 February 1925, the workers created the Uralungal Kooli Velakkaarude Paraspara Sahaaya Sahakarana Sangham (Uralungal Labourers’ Mutual Aid and Cooperative Society, now ULCCS). Slowly, more and more workers joined the ULCCS, which now has a presence across Kerala.

During its initial years, the ULCCS was seldom able to obtain contracts, and when it did, the tender (or contract) amounts were set at a very low level. In order to compete, the ULCCS underbid private contractors, offering 27.5% less than the private bids. Though this enabled them to get some contracts, the profit margins were negligible. Inexperience with road work and other forms of large-scale construction led to problems for the ULCCS. The cooperative sustained itself by obtaining minor contracts from local governments and by receiving short-term loans from the better-off members of the cooperative. The ULCCS also received funds from microfinance systems such as payattu (money-gathering games) and kurikkalyaanam (marriage announcements)²⁴ and used its growing prestige to provide assistance for its members’ basic needs by collecting donations from local merchants.

As time went by, ULCCS workers improved their skills and became more adept at basic business practices. The increased efficiency and quality of their work in turn attracted more lucrative contracts, and their work ethic introduced a new culture of excellence in Kerala’s construction industry. By the 1940s, they began to receive funding from the Malabar Cooperative Central Bank as well as fixed deposits by the public in ULCCS schemes.

Over the past century, the ULCCS has grown from a collective with an initial capital of INR 0.37 (USD 0.13 in 1925 dollars) to an annual revenue of INR 25 billion (USD 300 million) in 2023. It is comprised of 18,000 workers, including more than 1,000 engineers and 1,200 technicians. The cooperative not only advances the well-being of its workers and the surrounding community, fulfilling thirteen out of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but also ensures that the quality of the work (including its timely completion) is balanced by reasonable costs. These factors, alongside the ULCCS’s modern construction techniques, allow it to compete against private corporations and win major contracts, such as those from the National Highway Authority of India, the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, and the Government of Kerala. The ULCCS has completed over 7,500 major projects and is currently working on 500 projects worth INR 6.5 billion. Since it operates as a cooperative, the ULCCS has been able to provide better pay for its workers than they would earn in the private or even government sectors.

As part of its effort to keep pace with workers’ aspirations, the ULCCS has entered various sectors of the knowledge economy such as software development, diversifying from its initial form as a construction workers’ cooperative to take on the challenges facing cities and work in our times. These initiatives include:

1. UL CyberPark in Kozhikode, the first cyberpark in India’s cooperative sector and part of one of the central government’s Coastal Economic Zones.
2. UL Technology Solutions, a next-generation digital solutions firm located in the UL CyberPark.
3. The arts and craft villages Sargaalaya (in Iringal) and the Kerala Arts & Crafts Village (in Kovalam), which the ULCSS manages on behalf of the Government of Kerala. These villages help artisans produce handicrafts for the domestic and international markets.
4. UL Housing, which uses the cooperative’s construction skills to build apartment projects under the brand name UL SpaceUs. The first such building, called One Anthem, is in the UL CyberPark.
5. The high-tech Matter Material Testing and Research Laboratory, or MatterLab, an outgrowth of the ULCCS’s construction work created in 2021 to develop and test new sustainable construction materials.
6. The Indian Institute of Infrastructure and Construction, which ULCCS manages on behalf of the Government of Kerala in collaboration with national and international educational institutions.
7. UL Education, which develops students’ skills through a range of institutions and projects, such as:
   1. The Madappally Academic Project for Learning and Empowerment
   2. The Vagbhatananda Edu Project
   3. The Scholastic Excellence Programme for Students
   4. The UL Space Club (for young aspiring astronauts).
   5. The ULCCS Centenary LP School, an aided lower primary school in Muttungal managed by the ULCCS which offers classes from kindergarten to the 4^th standard.
8. ULCCS Charitable and Welfare Foundation, the cooperative’s social responsibility wing, which runs three key projects under the name UL Care:
   1. The Prasanthi School for Children with Special Needs
   2. The Nayanar Sadanam Institute of Vocational Training and Placement for Adults with Intellectual Challenges
   3. The Madithattu Geriatric Centre
9. UL Insight, a management consultancy firm jointly managed with Insight Advisory and Consulting India

As a workers’ cooperative, the ULCCS does not allow non-workers to become members. Its board – which is elected by and represents the workers – has thirteen directors, each of whom has between thirty and thirty-five years of experience in various sectors of the construction industry. Each worksite, including the project’s management, is overseen by a board member who evaluates the work at the end of each day.

Navin S. (Young Socialist Artists), Tailors of Dinesh Apparels, 2025.

Credit Cooperatives in Kerala

Aswathi Rebecca Asok

Credit cooperatives – member-owned financial institutions that provide affordable credit and financial services to rural and marginalised populations – were formed in Kerala even before the state was established in 1956. They largely service small-scale farmers and workers, often where private commercial banks are absent or insufficient. In Kerala, they have historically played a vital role in supporting land reform beneficiaries and preventing the re-concentration of land ownership. For instance, the Trivandrum Central Cooperative Bank was set up in 1915 to provide finance to the emerging cooperative sector in the area. Later, similar credit cooperatives were established across the northern Malabar region and in Cochin. In 1956, the Trivandrum Central Cooperative Bank became the Kerala State Cooperative Bank, anchoring the credit cooperatives of the new state. Today, there are 4,146 credit cooperatives in Kerala, accounting for over one-third of the total lending institutions in the state.²⁵ These credit cooperatives have played a vital role in economically uplifting the people, particularly in rural Kerala. For example, when the communist ministry initiated land reforms in 1957, small-scale farmers who received land needed finance to begin cultivation, but this credit was not available from the private sector in sufficient volumes. It was the credit cooperatives that stepped in, providing the necessary capital and sparing farmers from having to borrow from moneylenders and the feudal class. Without the presence of credit cooperatives, a substantial portion of the distributed land in Kerala would have returned to the feudal class and moneylenders in the form of mortgages.

Though private commercial banking has emerged in rural Kerala, credit cooperatives continue to provide a vital function. Kerala is the fifth-best connected state in India in terms of coverage by commercial bank branches, yet there is a wide rural-urban gap in the distribution of these branches. Reserve Bank of India data from 2024 shows that only 5.3% of these branches are located in rural areas, while 22.5% are in urban areas and 72.2% are in semi-urban areas.²⁶ However, if cooperative credit institutions are added into these figures, 25% of the bank branches in the state are located in rural areas.

The Structure of Credit Cooperatives in Kerala

Kerala’s credit cooperative sector is structured into two parallel systems: short-term cooperatives, which provide seasonal working capital loans for agriculture, and long-term cooperatives, which offer investment credit for rural infrastructure and agricultural development. Each system has its own institutional structure, including banks operating at village, district, and state levels.

Short-term cooperatives have historically operated through a three-tier structure consisting of Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACSs) at the village level, district cooperative banks at the district level, and the Kerala State Cooperative Bank at the state level. In 2019, this structure was simplified to two tiers by merging the district- and state-level banks into a single entity now known as Kerala Bank. This simplified structure has strengthened the integration and efficiency of the short-term cooperative network. Broadly speaking, this structure can be visualised as a pyramid: PACSs form the base, and Kerala Bank serves as the apex. Long-term cooperatives form a separate structure anchored by the Kerala State Cooperative Agricultural and Rural Development Bank at the state level and supported by primary cooperative agriculture and rural development banks at the district and block levels.

At the foundation of the short-term cooperative structure are the PACSs, popularly known as ‘societies’. Each village in Kerala has at least one PACS, making them the most accessible and familiar financial institutions in rural Kerala. These PACSs also form the backbone of the state’s broader cooperative movement. With 30.3 million members in 2022, Kerala’s PACSs account for the largest membership in India – more than double that of West Bengal, the state with the second highest membership.²⁷ Most members come from small and marginal farming households or other economically and socially disadvantaged communities. This large membership base has enabled PACSs in Kerala to mobilise INR 1.217 billion in deposits – over two-thirds of the total deposits held by PACSs across India.²⁸

The vibrant role that Kerala’s PACSs have played in enhancing credit availability and accessibility for the rural poor and other marginalised sections of the population underserved by commercial banks is illustrated by several Kerala-based empirical studies.²⁹ These studies show that socially and economically deprived groups perceive cooperative societies as their friendly neighbourhood institutions and, therefore, as the most approachable banking institutions. Half of the low-income households in rural Kerala rely on the cooperative sector for loans, while 25% borrow from commercial banks. The studies also note a higher dependence of Dalit and Adivasi borrowers and extremely poor households on credit cooperatives compared to other socioeconomic categories and point to the barriers that stand between poor people and commercial banks. Further, the specific characteristics of financial cooperatives – familiarity between customers, employees, and the members of the boards of directors, as well as the right of anyone in the locality to secure membership – make these institutions easily accessible to marginalised populations. Complex forms, complicated procedures, and even the attire and sophisticated nature of commercial bank staff often instil a feeling of ‘otherness’ among the poor towards commercial banks.

The potential of credit cooperatives in Kerala to free socially and economically vulnerable groups from the clutches and exploitation of moneylenders is evident from the story of Mannarkkad Rural Service Cooperative Bank Ltd, located in the district of Palakkad.

Mannarkkad Rural Service Cooperative Bank Ltd

The Mannarkkad Rural Service Cooperative Bank Ltd (MRSCB) began operating in 1989 with just 305 members and a share capital of INR 30,000. Over the last three decades, the bank has made tremendous progress in terms of membership, deposits, and share capital. Currently, the bank has more than 16,000 members, a share capital of INR 40 million, and an annual turnover of INR 7.5 billion. It has mobilised a total of INR 2.7 billion as deposits, distributed a total of INR 2.5 billion as loans, and consistently earned a profit since 1994. It pays a dividend of 25% to its members, which is the maximum permitted amount by the Kerala Cooperative Societies Act. In 2018, the bank launched a microfinance scheme called Muttathe Mulla (Jasmine in Your Yard) for poor villagers who live near the bank in order to save them from illegal moneylenders and private microfinance companies that charge exorbitant interest rates. Under this scheme, a person is eligible for bank loans at a discounted rate, which enable them to pay off older loans taken from moneylenders. The scheme has been implemented with the support of Kudumbashree neighbourhood groups, which are entrusted with the responsibilities of identifying those in need, distributing the loans, and collecting the weekly payments from borrowers at their doorsteps. Seeing the success of this scheme, the Government of Kerala adopted it at the state level and decided to implement it all over the state through PACSs.

Apart from providing traditional banking services, PACSs are also making diverse interventions to advance the development of rural local economies, thus acting as the backbone of the rural financial sector in Kerala. The institutions undertake a range of activities, such as distributing credit and inputs at subsidised rates; supporting farming, animal husbandry, and small-scale industries; and arranging facilities for processing, branding, and marketing local produce.

Palliyakkal Service Cooperative Bank Ltd

The Palliyakkal Service Cooperative Bank Ltd (PSCB) was established in 1943 in the Ezhikkara grama panchayat (village panchayat) of Ernakulam district. Predominantly an agrarian village, Ezhikkara is known for the cultivation of pokkali rice (a salt-tolerant rice variety) and fish farming, both of which serve as the local community’s major income sources. During its first decades of its existence, the PSCB engaged in traditional banking activities such as lending money and accepting deposits. However, its financial performance turned out to be very poor with a very low recovery rate. In 2000, the PSCB’s board of directors conducted an in-depth analysis of the bank and found that the low profitability and reduced employment opportunities in the region’s farming sector were the major contributing factors to borrowers’ low repayment. The bank recognised the need to enhance the local community’s income in order to improve its financial viability.

With this in mind, the PSCB decided to address the agrarian crisis facing farmers in its area. It held consultations with its members and the local community and developed a strategic plan for achieving local self-sufficiency in food production, ensuring local food security, and driving local economic development. Mutual aid groups were formed under the aegis of the PSCB in seven sectors: pokkali rice cultivation, horticulture, floriculture, milk production, poultry, pisciculture, and herbal plant cultivation. To increase agricultural production, the PSCB regularly provided these community-based farmer groups with training, accessible (such as low-interest or easy-to-access) credit, and forward and backward linkages (connections to input suppliers and to markets for selling their produce). The bank also provided farmers with continuous agricultural consultancy through its agricultural officer, as well as financing, and introduced innovative agricultural practices. In addition, it offered facilities to procure and market produce and arranged its own distribution centre for agricultural inputs such as organic seeds, organic fertiliser, and agricultural equipment. The PSCB organised agricultural labourers into the Green Army, a service through which it provided farmers with a sufficient labour force, and set up a pokkali rice mill to improve the processing of pokkali products. It also organised markets where fruits, vegetables, milk, and eggs procured from the farmers were sold at some of the highest prices in Kerala. Landowners in the area supported these initiatives by allowing the bank to use their land for farming. Presently, more than a thousand families in the locality are involved in activities initiated by the bank, whose concerted efforts and achievements in reviving the local economy are widely recognised.

Over the past few years, the bank has won several performance awards in the cooperative sector. In the 2020 state budget, then Finance Minister of Kerala Dr T. M. Thomas Isaac announced the virtual Kerala Food Platform, which enables farm products to be purchased directly from farmers and delivered to consumers, ensuring not only more widely accessible and healthier products but also better returns for the farmers by avoiding intermediaries. In recognition of the PSCB’s interventions in the area, the bank was selected to implement the programme.

Cooperative Development

Kerala’s extensive network of credit cooperatives has received international acclaim for its achievements furthering the development of rural economies. Free of the rigidities and cumbersome procedures that characterise commercial banks, these ‘people’s banks’ play a key role in making several state programmes a success. Such initiatives include the Care Home project, which built safe and better homes for families affected by the floods and landslides of 2018, and welfare pension schemes. Furthermore, these grassroots credit institutions played a key role in helping the state recover from the massive floods of 2018 and the COVID-19 pandemic by extending financial support to the people of Kerala. Between the long-term process of development and the short-term dynamic of relief, these institutions have proved themselves vital to progress in Kerala.

Kadambari (Young Socialist Artists), Dinesh Beedi’s Read Aloud Programme, 2025.

Kerala Dinesh Beedi Workers’ Central Cooperative Society

Nitheesh Narayanan and Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat

On 15 February 1969, the Kerala Dinesh Beedi Workers’ Central Cooperative Society (Dinesh Beedi) was registered with the State Registrar of Cooperative Societies. Initially, the cooperative established one central society and twenty primary production units, where the workers rolled beedi (a type of thin hand-rolled cigarette). The cooperative was formed after a sustained period of agitation by the workers, whose demands to improve their working conditions were also taken up by the communists. In 1966, the efforts of communist leader AK Gopalan led to the passage of the Beedi and Cigar Workers (Conditions of Employment) Act in the Indian parliament, which laid out a minimum guarantee for the well-being of beedi workers, including decent wages and social security, and left the responsibility to implement the act to the discretion of state governments. It was worker agitation and the passage of this act that provided the impetus for the formation of Dinesh Beedi three years later.

When the communists won the 1967 state elections in Kerala by a landslide, EMS Namboodiripad, the new chief minister, implemented the Beedi and Cigar Workers Act. Private owners of the beedi factories protested, with some of them – such as Ganesh Beedi – going as far as abruptly shutting down their factories. They refused to negotiate with workers because they wanted the government to withdraw from implementing the legislation. When workers from the districts of Kannur and Kasaragod in northern Kerala began to suffer from the social impacts of these closures, trade unions and communists came together in a united front to demand support for them. ‘Workers knew only beedi-making, and it was not easy to find alternative jobs for such a large number of them’, wrote GK Panikkar, who later became the chairman of Dinesh Beedi from 1969 to 1996. ‘The economy of the district was shaken’, he said.³⁰ It was at this point that the unionised workers decided to organise a cooperative for beedi production.

The formation of this workers’ cooperative became not only a solution to the crisis created by factory closures and an antidote to capital flight, but also an expression of the dignity of labour and the spirit of collective action. ‘The emergence of Dinesh Beedi was not as simple as many think’, said KP Sahadevan, who led the united front and helped establish the cooperative. ‘It was the result of the continuous struggle waged by the working class and by the overall militancy of the period’.³¹

The idea to form Dinesh Beedi was inspired by the Indian Coffee Workers’ Cooperative Society, formed in 1958 under the initiative of AK Gopalan. That earlier experience gave confidence that such worker-run schemes could work, which – alongside support from Kerala’s communist ministry – helped turn the beedi workers’ idea into reality nearly a decade later.

Capital for Dinesh Beedi came from the workers themselves. They fixed a share value of INR 20 in 1969, but many of them could not afford to buy their shares since the daily wage at that time was less than INR 3. To solve this problem, the state government provided INR 19 as a loan to each prospective worker-owner. Workers repaid the loan through instalments that were deducted from their wages. Though the project could not initially accommodate the 12,000 workers who lost their jobs, the 3,000 workers who first joined were accompanied by another 1,000 workers within a month. In other words, a third of the unemployed beedi workers entered the cooperative. The class-conscious beedi workers of northern Malabar made it clear that no divisions would be allowed between those who entered the cooperative as worker-owners and those who did not, and they educated all workers, whether employed in the cooperative or not, about how the cooperative worked.

From the onset, Dinesh Beedi faced a number of challenges. For instance, it had to struggle to gain a foothold against customers’ longstanding loyalty to older private brands. In the early period, the cooperative was stuck with unsold beedi packets, and it seemed like the new venture would not succeed, despite the workers’ efforts to produce high-quality beedi. At this point, through collective discussion, the workers decided to launch a mass campaign to promote Dinesh Beedi at every shop, requesting that they purchase their brand. This mass campaign gradually made Dinesh Beedi the preferred brand among Kerala’s working class and peasantry. Within a few years, Dinesh Beedi emerged as one of the most popular beedi brands in India and the largest beedi producer in southern India. The cooperative, which had started with 3,000 workers in 1969, employed 42,000 workers by the 1980s, becoming one of the largest worker cooperatives in Asia. As a result, they were able to pay themselves higher wages and social security than was provided in the private sector.

However, the point of a cooperative is not just to survive in the capitalist system but to use its democratic structure to expand the social horizons of its workers. Dinesh Beedi’s worker-owners both created a dignified work culture and eliminated the private contract system, which did not honour established workers’ rights – one of the main complaints during the agitations of the 1950s and 1960s. It was also among the first firms to provide its workers with paid time off, bonuses, and bereavement benefits. At the workplace, Dinesh Beedi encouraged both trade unionism and political discussion, such as through a ‘read aloud’ programme in which a designated worker read important literary works or texts on contemporary affairs to the other workers. It also organised arts and sports clubs in villages to provide workers, their families, and the community at large with necessary leisure activities. These reforms had a profound impact on the beedi industry, and some of them were even adopted by private firms. Dinesh Beedi became a symbol of resistance and of workers’ unity and dignity.

In the 1990s, a crisis in the beedi industry threatened Dinesh Beedi’s existence. The crisis stemmed from several developments, including the emergence of new private-sector beedi firms that paid wages below the government-mandated minimum and offered higher margins to retailers; a shift among younger consumers from beedis to cigarettes; and government anti-tobacco campaigns. Dinesh Beedi supported the government campaigns, which gained momentum as public awareness of tobacco’s health risks grew. Because of this new consciousness, the cooperative stopped hiring new workers after 1993 and consumer demand declined year after year. Dinesh Beedi workers’ hours were reduced, and many left the cooperative to seek employment elsewhere.

In this context, Dinesh Beedi’s worker-owners began to discuss diversifying production in order to save the cooperative. To support this initiative, Kerala’s Industries Minister Susheela Gopalan, a leader of the communist movement, held a state-wide workshop on diversification on 30 August 1996 in which many scientists provided their inputs to the cooperative’s worker-owners. Soon after, Dinesh Beedi launched a set of pilot products such as coconut milk (1997) and curry powder (1998). In the late 1990s, Dinesh Beedi expanded into five new ventures:

1. Dinesh Foods manufactures and retails spice powders, coconut milk, virgin coconut oil, coconut milk ice cream, fruit squash, fruit jam, syrup, and pickles, mostly employing former beedi workers. The cooperative has four manufacturing units in Kannur district, ensuring round-the-year employment for its workers.
2. Cafe Dinesh operates cooperative restaurants and catering services in Kannur, Payyannur, Pinarayi, and Thalassery. Dinesh Foods’ products are available at these outlets.
3. Dinesh Information Technology Systems (DITS), established in 1999, provides IT support for the cooperative sector in Kerala, including the cooperative banking sector. In 2001, DITS established the Dinesh Software Park in Kannur.
4. Dinesh Auditorium in Kannur rents out a large hall with capacity for 1,000 people and is available for conferences and weddings.
5. Dinesh Apparel, created in 2007 in Kannur and Kasaragod, produces clothes for local and export markets. It employs more than 400 people.

By diversifying into Kerala Dinesh, as it became more popularly known by the early 2000s, the cooperative was able to thrive and reduce its reliance on a harmful product. Democratic decision-making and a belief in prioritising workers’ interests have led to the creation of a cooperative ecosystem that continues to capture the imagination of workers across the world.

Vanshika Babbar (Young Socialist Artists), Dinesh Foods, 2025.

A Small Village Builds Its Own Labour Cooperative

Sarga T. K.

Kodom Belur, a village panchayat located in a remote part of Kerala’s northern Kasaragod district, had long been marked by deep socioeconomic disparities rooted in feudal landlordism. The material conditions of its people were shaped both by the land reforms of the decades following Kerala’s formation in 1956 and by remittances from migrants to the Persian Gulf, which gave rise to a new wealthy class. Yet large sections of the population did not benefit from either the land reforms or the remittances and remained unemployed, socially bereft, and frustrated by rampant corruption in publicly funded projects. Construction labourers were often denied their rightful wages while contractors seized public funds without completing projects.

Construction is a demand-driven sector. The need for infrastructure depends on the level of economic development, and the quality of physical infrastructure is unevenly distributed across regions. Construction work does not always take place where labour is available, nor is the need for labour constant. Workers go from one job site to another based on the availability of contracts, with the amount of labour and capital required dependent upon the size and value of each project. At each stage of construction, different skill sets are needed and new workers are brought in, giving capital investors the upper hand throughout the entire construction process. In large-scale projects, multiple layers of subcontracting further increase workers’ vulnerability. Altogether, the structural characteristics of construction activity create ample conditions for labour exploitation.

In 1996, Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government launched the People’s Campaign for Decentralised Planning, which built an impressive process to decentralise planning by drawing large sections of Kerala’s population into discussions about the problems and unmet potential in the state. These efforts galvanised the people of Kodom Belur to organise against exploitative construction companies and boycott the privately contracted public works in the area. They built an action group that began executing public contracts independently. However, technical backwardness, limited capital, pressure from private builders, and obstruction by corrupt officials – especially in the Public Works Department – undermined their efforts to assert popular control over these projects.

In 1997, a local elected leader and the panchayat standing committee chairman for Kodom Belur, AC Mathew, galvanised the members of the action group to organise themselves into the Hosdurg Labour Contract Cooperative Society. The society aimed to pool its members’ skilled labour and raise capital through their own savings so that they could bid for public works. In 2004, the society was renamed Udayapuram Labour Contract Cooperative Society. The society has grown from 221 initial members to 2,981 today, including 235 permanent Class A members (those with full voting rights and long-term participation in the cooperative), about one-quarter of whom belong to the Scheduled Tribes category. The Udayapuram Society secures construction contracts from the Kerala Public Works Department, local self-governing bodies, and other government departments. It is owned and maintained by its members and receives funding from the National Cooperative Development Corporation, district cooperative banks (now Kerala Bank), and the Kerala Financial Corporation.

The cooperative’s model is rooted in mutual aid and ultimately aims to improve the quality of life of its members. Before the creation of the Udayapuram Society, construction work was largely carried out by private builders. It was through the Udayapuram Society that labourers were able to overcome wage exploitation and dependency on private contractors.

The increased volume of work has gradually led to better socioeconomic conditions for its members. From 2011 onwards, the society began to undertake large-scale construction projects. It also diversified its activities to include agriculture and other industries in order to stabilise growth and make better use of available human resources. By creating productive job opportunities, the society became an engine of growth in the regional economy.

Junaina Muhammad (Young Socialist Artists), Kudumbashree, 2025.

Kudumbashree

Subin Dennis

One of the most striking things about Kudumbashree is its sheer size: 4.8 million women – about one-third of adult women in Kerala – are members of this network.³² Although Kudumbashree (which means ‘prosperity of the family’ in Malayalam) began in May 1998 as a state-initiated programme to eradicate poverty among women, it has since become a transformative force in Kerala’s social and political life. ‘Partly a movement and partly a government programme’, as V. K. Ramachandran describes it, today Kudumbashree is engaged in a wide range of activities, from microfinance and collective farming to manufacturing apparel and running restaurants.³³ It has become a ubiquitous presence in Kerala society.

Though Kudumbashree is not organised under the laws that govern cooperatives in Kerala, it is imbued with a cooperative spirit – the basic units of the Kudumbashree community network are controlled and run by its members in a democratic manner based on the ‘one member, one vote’ rule.³⁴ The community network has a three-tier structure:

1. The lowest tier is the Neighbourhood Group or NHG (Ayalkkoottam in Malayalam), consisting of ten to twenty members. All adult women in the neighbourhood are eligible to become members, and there is a focus on including women from economically and socially disadvantaged sections of the population.
2. The second tier is the Area Development Society (ADS), which is formed by federating all the NHGs in a ward of the relevant local self-government institution (LSGI, also known as local body or local government), such as a panchayat or municipality.
3. The third tier is the Community Development Society (CDS), which is formed by federating all the area development societies in the local body.

The Kudumbashree community network is supported by a government structure called the Kudumbashree Mission (officially the State Poverty Eradication Mission). The mission is led by a governing body chaired by the state minister for local self-governments, an executive committee chaired by the additional chief secretary of the department of local self-government, and a government official who serves as executive director. There are fourteen district Kudumbashree missions (one for each district in Kerala) under the state mission.

Origins

Previous local experiments in community development served as precursors to Kudumbashree.³⁵ One such experiment was the Community-Based Nutrition Programme, initiated by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the town of Alappuzha in 1991 to improve the health and nutritional status of women and children. The programme established women’s community development societies at three levels: NHGs, ADSs, and CDSs. A similar project was implemented in Malappuram district from 1994 onwards with a five-tier structure (NHGs, ADSs, CDSs, block-level CDSs, and district-level CDSs), though it was eventually reduced to three, like the one in Alappuzha. Thrift and credit societies, which mobilised the small savings of poor women members of the community development societies and provided loans to their members, became an integral part of the community organisation.

The early 1990s were also a time when the Kerala Sasthra Sahitya Parishad (Kerala Forum for Science Literature, or KSSP, Kerala’s biggest people’s science movement) was leading new experiments in a participatory model of planning for local development. The formation of NHGs, which participated in resource mapping and planning at the local level, was part of these experiments. The most prominent among them was implemented by KSSP at the Kalliasseri village panchayat in Kannur district in 1993, where nearly two hundred NHGs were formed.

In 1996, the Left Democratic Front government came to power in Kerala and launched the People’s Campaign for Decentralised Planning (also known as the People’s Plan Campaign) that same year. The campaign led to a much greater devolution of funds and powers to local governments, and NHGs were formed to strengthen the process of decentralised planning.³⁶ As part of the campaign, the state government also made it mandatory for local governments to earmark 10% of their annual plan funds exclusively for various projects that targeted the social advancement of women.

All of these processes and experiments informed the creation of Kudumbashree.

In 1997, a special government task force recommended forming the State Poverty Eradication Mission (the Kudumbashree Mission). The mission was announced in the 1997–1998 Kerala state budget and inaugurated on 17 May 1998. Its aim was to eradicate absolute poverty through concerted community action under the leadership of local governments.³⁷

Today, Kudumbashree’s major programmes include microfinance, income-generating economic activities such as agriculture and microenterprises, and the implementation of various welfare and development initiatives of local governments.

All members of Kudumbashree are part of its thrift and credit programme. Members of Kudumbashree neighbourhood groups meet once a week and make small contributions to a thrift fund, which is then used to give small loans to members who need them. Most neighbourhood groups are also linked to banks, which provide loans to the groups. The groups then use these loan amounts for livelihood activities such as collective farming and setting up microenterprises.³⁸

Collective Farming

One of Kudumbashree’s most noteworthy initiatives is collective farming.³⁹ Groups of four to ten NHGs members who are interested in farming are organised into Joint Liability Groups, also known as sangha krishi (collective farming) groups, which identify land (often land that is lying fallow) suited for cultivation in their village and surrounding areas. With the help of the panchayat and the Kudumbashree District Mission, they take the land on lease from landowners and cultivate it. Group members also pool their own land and cultivate it. Active sangha krishi groups are linked with banks, and loans are made available to them with subsidy on interest. The Kudumbashree Mission also supports the collectives by providing them with farm machinery, seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides at subsidised prices. The state agriculture department provides periodic training and technical support. Funds from various central government initiatives are also used to support the collective farming efforts. Ten thousand skilled women farmers from the sangha krishi groups have been designated as ‘master farmers’ who function as resource persons who provide training to the rest of the sangha krishi group members.

As of 30 June 2025, the number of women farmers who are part of the Kudumbashree sangha krishi groups in Kerala has reached 439,255. There are 96,177 sangha krishi groups, which have brought 21,457 hectares of land under cultivation.⁴⁰ The main crops they grow are rice, vegetables, tubers, and bananas. The produce is first used for consumption among the women farmers’ families, and the surplus is then sold in village markets. Kudumbashree’s collective farming efforts have strengthened the food security of members’ families, and improved their incomes and living standards.

Local Governments

The Kudumbashree community network plays a crucial role in the development initiatives of the local governments under decentralised planning in Kerala. While local governments are responsible for planning and implementing programmes for economic development, social justice, and poverty alleviation, Kudumbashree’s core mission is poverty eradication.⁴¹ From the beginning, this shared focus has meant that Kudumbashree NHGs, ADSs, and CDSs work in tandem with the local governments.

Kudumbashree acts as the implementation agency for several poverty eradication schemes and development initiatives of the state government. For instance, the Destitute-Free Kerala programme, aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in the state, is implemented by Kudumbashree, and the beneficiaries of the programme are identified by Kudumbashree members. The programme is intended to provide food, medical treatment, clothing, welfare pensions, schooling, land, and housing to those identified as destitute.⁴²

As part of the planning process, Kerala’s local governments establish working groups for key development sectors such as health, education, poverty reduction, development of women and children, and social security, and it is mandatory that at least one Kudumbashree CDS member be included in every such working group.⁴³ These working groups are tasked with surveying existing resources, analysing local conditions, exploring development potential, and identifying people’s needs. Moreover, people’s development needs are assessed at ward-level assemblies (known as grama sabhas in villages and ward sabhas in towns and cities). Kudumbashree members are the most active section of such assemblies and play a crucial role in keeping the assemblies vibrant.

In February 2020, Kerala’s left government announced that it was opening one thousand restaurants, to be run by Kudumbashree, where food would be provided at subsidised rates.⁴⁴ During the COVID-19 lockdowns that year, Kudumbashree began setting up these restaurants, christening them ‘people’s restaurants’. During these months, Kudumbashree – along with local governments and employees’ unions – was also involved in running community kitchens across the state. As of 1 March 2025, there were 1,198 people’s restaurants functioning in the state, run by 5,104 Kudumbashree members.⁴⁵

Microenterprises

Microenterprises set up by Kudumbashree units are involved in a wide range of sectors, including the production of packaged foods, apparel, sanitary napkins, umbrellas, bags, pottery, floor mats, soaps, and toiletries. There are Kudumbashree initiatives that brand and market agricultural products produced by tribal farmers in various districts in the state to ensure that the producers receive higher incomes. The Home Shop network, which takes the products of Kudumbashree microenterprises directly to households, has been established in all fourteen districts in the state. There are also units that engage in rearing livestock and poultry and running fish farms.

Kudumbashree units run restaurants and canteens across the state; manage parking at railway stations; process coconut oil, cashew, and tamarind; and make snacks, pickles, and pappadam (a thin, crisp lentil-based snack). They run fitness centres, women’s hostels, daycare centres for children, driving schools, coir (coconut fibre) units, book binding units, printing centres, medical labs, tailoring units, and supermarkets. There are also units that manufacture LED bulbs and electronic products.

There are Kudumbashree all-women construction teams consisting of supervisors, masons, plumbers, and electricians who have been trained by the Kudumbashree Mission with the support of various other agencies. Kudumbashree also has a Haritha Karma Sena (Green Task Force) which collects plastic waste from houses and businesses, transports the waste to shredding units for recycling, and assists in household biowaste management. Amrutham Nutrimix, the cereal-based powder given to children aged six months to three years at Kerala’s childcare centres, is also manufactured by 241 Kudumbashree units in the state.⁴⁶

As of 1 March 2025, there were a total of 157,097 Kudumbashree microenterprises in the state, run by 318,265 Kudumbashree members.⁴⁷ Out of these, 69,484 enterprises were in the production sector, 49,381 in the service sector, and 35,646 in the trade sector.⁴⁸

Impact

Kudumbashree has transformed the lives of its members, helping them improve their living standards, gain income-generating work outside their homes, strengthen their confidence and self-esteem, and increase their visibility in the public sphere. Kudumbashree members have also become a major presence in the activities and leadership of local governments in the state.

According to a 2015 sample survey carried out across Kerala by the Laurie Baker Centre for Habitat Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (henceforth LBC Survey), 54.1% of Kudumbashree members were engaged in some form of income-generating economic activity.⁴⁹ This was double the work participation rate of adult women in the state (26.3%). The LBC Survey also showed that before joining Kudumbashree, 66.1% of its members were engaged solely in household work and were not involved in any income-generating activity outside their homes or in studies. This dropped to 37% after they joined Kudumbashree.⁵⁰

Another sample survey conducted by Ambika Devi R in 2008–2009 as part of her PhD work at the University of Kerala showed that Kudumbashree helped nearly 50% of its members gain access to income-generating activities.⁵¹ As part of this survey, Kudumbashree members were asked how much control they had over their income, the options being ‘to a great extent’, ‘to some extent’, and ‘no control’. As much as 88.8% of the women reported that they had control over their income ‘to a great extent’ after they joined Kudumbashree. The percentage of women who had the same level of control over their income before they joined Kudumbashree was much lower: 66.7%.⁵² A 2016 survey in Ernakulam district by Taramol KG as part of her PhD work at Bharathiar University showed that the incomes of Kudumbashree members increased significantly after they became part of the community network.⁵³

Households with Kudumbashree members have also reported an increase in their acquisition of consumer durables and household assets as a result of their improved incomes. The 2015 LBC Survey showed that the percentage of Kudumbashree members living in kutcha houses (made of less durable materials such as mud, leaves, straw, and grass) was 6.7 percent, down from 22.9 percent before they joined Kudumbashree.⁵⁴ Furthermore, Kudumbashree members reported that their improved incomes helped them provide higher education to their children, secure better healthcare, and improve their houses or construct new ones.

A substantial proportion of the women who joined Kudumbashree (27.4%, according to Ambika Devi’s study; 36%, according to the LBC Survey) have reported that their public speaking skills have improved since they joined the network. A significant proportion of women (38.4%, according to the LBC Survey) gained the confidence and skills to demand services or facilities from government offices.⁵⁵ Similar gains have been made in their confidence to participate and express their views in meetings, and to take part in local government functions. The collective nature of Kudumbashree activities also helped improve the spirit and practice of mutual help among Kudumbashree members.⁵⁶

As mentioned earlier, Kudumbashree members are among the most active sections in the activities of local governments in Kerala. This has directly translated into greater representation of Kudumbashree members among elected representatives to local self-government institutions (LSGIs): of the 21,854 people elected as LSGI members in Kerala in the 2020 local government elections, 7,058 were active members of Kudumbashree.⁵⁷

To sum up, Kudumbashree has become a vital element of Kerala’s social and political life. It has helped women – particularly those from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds – improve their living conditions. Kudumbashree has enhanced their status within their families and enabled them to participate more effectively in the public sphere, including the political arena. Unsurprisingly, it has been referred to as one of the ‘greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programmes in the world’.⁵⁸

Notes

This study was written by Neville Roy Singham, chair of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s advisory board. The author acknowledges with gratitude the crucial support of the Tricontinental team, spanning multifaceted research, comprehensive statistical analysis, technical infrastructure, and the production of this publication. An earlier version of this study was published in Guancha (观察者网), whose editors provided valuable advice for further research and analysis. The author takes full responsibility for any errors or omissions in this work.

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory in the World Anti-Fascist War (WAFW), the Western powers spin their familiar tale: US industrial might and British resolve saved the world from fascism. This is a lie. The truth burns in the numbers: while the Western powers calculated their economic advantage, the Soviet and Chinese peoples paid in blood. Fascism was defeated not by Anglo-American capital but by socialist leadership and mass heroism – a brilliant strategy from Moscow and Yan’an, unbreakable resilience from workers and peasants who refused to surrender, and a sacrifice that saved humanity from slavery.

The real war began not in 1939, when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, but in 1931, when Japan invaded Northeast China (东北).¹ For ten years, China fought mainly alone except for Soviet aid, which included planes and pilots. Britain, France, and the United States sent only minimal aid to China from 1937 to 1941. Washington and London would rather count profits.

Throughout the same decade, the Soviet Union raced against time, force-marching industrialisation while knowing invasion was imminent. Josef Stalin’s February 1931 speech to industrial managers predicted with terrible precision: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under’.² Ten years later – June 1941 – the Wehrmacht invaded. The USSR had exactly one decade to prepare for a war everyone knew was coming. The preparation was not enough to prevent the initial catastrophe, but it was exactly enough to enable recovery.

The Atlantic powers’ initial strategy until just before their entry into the war was simple and cynical: let fascism and communism destroy each other.

1. The West’s Deliberate Delay: A Strategy of Treachery

The timeline of Western betrayal speaks for itself. From 1931 to 1941, as Japan carved up China, Western banks maintained their offices in Tokyo, Western oil fuelled Japanese warships, and Western scrap metal became Japanese bullets.³ When full-scale invasion erupted in 1937 – the Rape of Nanjing, the terror bombing of Chinese cities – the Allied imperialists’ response was to sell more oil to Japan. The US provided 80% of Japan’s petroleum until 1941.⁴

This was not isolation but calculated provision – fascism executing what the failed White Encirclement could not accomplish. By 1941, 250 US corporations operated in Nazi Germany.⁵ Thomas Watson of IBM automated the Holocaust while maintaining personal friendships with both US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull.⁶ General Motors’ German subsidiary Opel produced Wehrmacht trucks until 1944, with GM later claiming a $22.7 million tax write-off for its ‘abandoned’ Nazi operations.⁷ The US continued strategically to be economically, politically, and militarily committed to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Western historiography attributes this late US entry to ‘isolationism’. This ahistorical view ignores documented precedent: during the White Encirclement of 1919, the US deployed 11,500 troops to Russia – 4,500 to Arkhangelsk and 7,000 to Vladivostok – alongside British, French, and Japanese forces, fighting the Red Army directly with over 500 US casualties.⁸ US President Woodrow Wilson also provided more than $50 million in military support to White armies. When direct military intervention failed to nip socialism in the bud, the strategy shifted. US policymakers consistently favoured right-wing autocrats who promised stability and anti-Bolshevism over democratic movements. This policy produced open support for European fascism. In 1933, President Roosevelt stated that he was ‘deeply impressed by what [Benito Mussolini] has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy’.⁹

The first British strategy, even when it entered the war, was to let Hitler and Stalin exhaust each other. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France, while declaring war on Germany, did nothing – the ‘Phoney War’ lasted eight months while they hoped Hitler would turn east. Winston Churchill’s anti-communist hatred defined his career. In 1919, he sought to ‘strangle Bolshevism in its cradle’.¹⁰ By 1945, with Hitler barely dead, he planned Operation Unthinkable – using Wehrmacht forces to attack the Soviet Union.¹¹

Churchill’s genocidal impulses targeted communists and colonised peoples equally. His racial violence was extensive: celebrating killing ‘savages’ at Omdurman (1898), supporting concentration camps that killed forty-eight thousand Africans and Boers, and advocating poison gas for Iraqi ‘uncivilised tribes’ (1920). By 1942, as Bengal starved, he told Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’. When Amery begged for famine relief, Churchill replied that Indians ‘breed like rabbits’.¹² Three million Indians died while Britain exported Bengal’s rice. After Churchill’s India tirade, Leo Amery wrote in his diary: ‘I couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s’.¹³ Today, Britain venerates this man, who differed from Hitler only in his victory.

The US entered the war only when it was directly attacked at Pearl Harbor (Hawaiʻi) – a decade into Japan’s war against China. The Second Front, promised for 1942, was not delivered until June 1944 – 730 days late, after the battles at Stalingrad (1942–1943) and Kursk (1943) had already broken the Wehrmacht’s spine.¹⁴ By D-Day, the Red Army had already destroyed the myth of German invincibility and Nazi defeat was already determined. The US and Britain had to invade continental Europe in 1944, by which time the Soviet Union had already guaranteed the defeat of Germany, to ensure that the socialist USSR did not liberate the entire continent, threatening capitalism in Western as well as Eastern Europe.

US priorities were clear: better a fascist Europe than a socialist one. Better Japanese domination of Asia than Chinese liberation and the expansion of socialism. The metropolitan powers’ hatred of communism and love of their colonies outweighed their anti-fascist principles.

2. When Inter-Imperialist Rivalries Mattered

The Western strategy towards Nazi Germany followed a logic established in 1917. When British intervention failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks, geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder – appointed high commissioner to organise support for the White Army – recommended that German rearmament, though dangerous to British interests, was essential as a bulwark against Bolshevik control of Eastern Europe. The Treaty of Versailles (1919), as economist Thorstein Veblen observed, was fundamentally ‘a compact for the reduction of Soviet Russia’ – a goal that, while ‘not written into the text of the Treaty’, was nonetheless ‘the parchment upon which the text was written’.¹⁵ This remained Western strategy through 1945: contain and destroy the USSR, even if it meant enabling fascism.

At Munich in 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain formalised this strategy with Hitler: Germany would receive a ‘free hand’ in Eastern Europe to attack the USSR in exchange for respecting British imperial interests. Yet inter-imperialist rivalry imposed limits. Britain wanted Hitler to destroy the Soviet Union but feared that unchecked German expansion would threaten the British Empire itself – the contradiction explains both the collusion and Britain’s eventual war declaration.

When Britain sent negotiators to Moscow by slow merchant ship, Admiral Reginald Drax arrived without written authority – the message was unmistakable: no real alliance with communists.¹⁶ Foreign Secretary Halifax praised Hitler in a 1937 meeting as a ‘bulwark against Bolshevism’, while a 1939 government-endorsed pamphlet by Lord Lloyd of Dolobran identified Hitler’s ‘final apostasy’ not as invading Poland but as signing the German-Soviet pact—‘the betrayal of Europe’.¹⁷ Facing isolation, Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 – not from choice but from necessity created by Western collusion with Hitler.

In the following twenty-two months (September 1939–mid-June 1941), the Soviet Union more than tripled its army from 1.6 to 5.3 million, doubled its tank production from 2,794 units in 1940 to 6,590 in 1941 (including 1,225 T-34s), and moved entire industries eastward. US attachés reported massive industrial transfers to the Urals by late 1940, before the invasion. The USSR pushed its borders 200–300 kilometres west, trading space for time. Stalin knew war was coming.¹⁸

In May 1940, Churchill became prime minister as France and Britain’s army fled Dunkirk. Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax proposed negotiating peace through Mussolini – Germany could have Europe if Britain kept its empire.¹⁹ Churchill opposed this plan, not from principle but out of arithmetic. If Germany were allowed to conquer Europe, its strength would mean it could later overturn any peace agreement and defeat Britain. To take only one example, the Caucasus produced 25.4 million tonnes of oil annually – 80% of Soviet output. Germany had 3.1 months of oil reserves.²⁰ If Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler seized Soviet resources, Britain faced certain defeat.

By continuing the war, Churchill forced Germany to maintain forty-nine divisions in Western Europe and Norway – 24% of total Wehrmacht strength that could not be deployed against the USSR.²¹ While significant, this did not prevent the assembly of history’s largest invasion force.

Germany launched Operation Barbarossa with 153 German divisions totalling over 3 million troops. The Imperial War Museum, Britain’s unrepentant national museum, calculates that 80% of the German Army was committed to this invasion.²² Additionally, 36 Axis-allied divisions joined the assault – 16 Finnish, 15 Romanian, 3 Italian, and 2 Slovak – bringing the total to 189 divisions. This force of nearly 4 million troops represented the overwhelming concentration of Axis military power. The Eastern Front was not another theatre of war but the primary site of fascist aggression, where the Wehrmacht deployed its best units, most experienced commanders, and maximum strength.

This was the largest military invasion in human history. Yet the Soviet Union defeated this unprecedented assault through its own strategic depth, mass mobilisation, and industrial relocation.

Facing extremely powerful adversaries, Stalin and Mao Zedong took into account how to exploit inter-imperialist rivalries that became so intense by the 1940s. These inter-imperialist contradictions – contingent moments when empire’s internal conflicts accidentally serve revolutionary forces – are usually brief and unreliable. They emerge unpredictably from capitalism’s internal contradictions, must be recognised and leveraged when they appear, but never mistaken for a strategic alliance.

3. Economic Power in 1941: The Myth of Western Might

In 1941, world GDP totalled approximately $4.5–$5 trillion (in 1990 international dollars). Those with the greatest capacity to fight fascism deliberately chose not to do so.

As documented by economic historian Mark Harrison in his book The Economics of World War II (1998), the Anglo-American imperial core commanded approximately 30.2% of world GDP. The US alone controlled $1,094 billion – roughly 22–24% of global output – while maintaining comfortable neutrality a decade into the WAFW. The British Empire added $344 billion (7–8% of world GDP), extracted from 427 million colonial subjects. In total, this camp (the US and its territories and the British Empire as defined by the British in 1941) controlled 28.6% of the world’s population. The US remained neutral until it was attacked. Britain declared war but prioritised empire.

Sources: Population data mainly from Maddison (2010); GDP data mainly from Harrison (1998), p. 10, table 1.3; USSR population for 1941 from Statista (2025); China and world-total GDP are corroborated estimates by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. See appendix for full methodology.

The US dedicated just 11% of its GNP to military spending before Pearl Harbor. The US military in December 1941 fielded only 1.62 million troops from a population of 133.9 million – just 1.2% of its population was under arms. By contrast, Germany had 7.3 million troops from a population of 70.2 million (10.4%), and the Soviet Union had 7.1 million from a population of 195.4 million (3.6%) by year’s end. Britain, despite declaring war in 1939, had reached 53% of national expenditure on military efforts, but much of this went to protecting empire, not fighting fascism directly. In North Africa, British forces fought to maintain colonial control, not liberate populations. Churchill’s quote: ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister to liquidate the British Empire’. ²³

Sources: Troops data from Harrison (1998), p. 14, table 1.5; population from Maddison (2010) and Statista (2025). See appendix for full methodology.

The fascist-imperialist Axis had weaponised its economies. Germany devoted 52% of GNP to military spending in 1941, reaching 70% by 1943, and fielded 3 million troops for the Barbarossa invasion (1941). Other Axis powers fielded an additional 500,000 to 700,000 troops (Romania, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia), thus allowing Hitler to claim that this was a pan-European operation. It was and remains the largest military invasion in human history. Japan maintained 1.7 million soldiers in China with a military burden of 27% of GDP after a decade of continuous warfare.

The Axis, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan, also included pact signatories Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Croatia, with Finland as a co-belligerent. The Axis powers and the territories they controlled commanded approximately 20.1% of world GDP. This figure was composed of contributions from Germany proper ($412 billion), the annexed territory of Austria ($29 billion), Japan ($196 billion), Italy ($144 billion), the heavily industrialised occupied territory of France ($130 billion), and the other members (approximately $47 billion). In addition to this, ‘neutral’ collaborators, including Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, contributed a separate 2.6% of world GDP to the Axis economic sphere.

The socialist camp – the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist base areas that would tie down 60% of Japanese forces – represented approximately 8% of world GDP with $359 billion. By mid-1941, with German armies deep in Soviet territory, even this was shrinking. Yet the Soviets had mobilised 28% of GNP for military expenditure. The Red Army expanded the army’s peacetime strength from 1.5 million on 1 January 1938 to over 5 million in June 1941.²⁴

China’s tragedy was written in numbers. Controlling 23% of the world’s population (490–525 million people), China generated only around 5% of world GDP after its century of humiliation and a decade of Japanese devastation. Official data from the Kuomintang (KMT) government is scarce. In 1937, the year of full escalation of Japanese aggression, the estimate for KMT troops was 1.7 million; by 1941, the US military estimated 3.8 million troops. A scholarly monograph on Chinese military history estimated that there were 6 million KMT troops in the summer of 1941.²⁵ The people’s army, led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), grew from 56,000 in 1937 to around 440,000 in 1941 and 1.3 million in 1945.²⁶ With little domestic arms production, military capacity depended on foreign supplies, especially from the Soviet Union. China had people but few weapons, courage but little industry, resistance but scant resources.

The pattern of foreign aid exposed priorities. Between October 1937 and June 1941, while the US watched, the Soviet Union provided China with over $250 million in credits, 1,235 aircraft, thousands of artillery pieces, tens of thousands of machine guns, as well as ammunition and supplies.²⁷ The Soviets sent more than 2,000 pilots – 200 of whom died defending Chinese cities – and military advisers.²⁸ While the USSR was fighting for survival, it still managed to send aid that represented 0.07% of Soviet GDP annually. Soviet pilots flew combat missions over Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chongqing. Before Pearl Harbor, the US provided almost nothing despite commanding 22–24% of world GDP.

Even after entering the war, China received just $632 million in Lend-Lease aid (1941–1945) while Britain, along with its two white settler states (Australia and New Zealand), received $25.8 billion of the $30.3 billion assigned by the US to the ‘British Empire’.

Sources: Lend-Lease aid numbers from US Department of State (1945), p. 14, table 2, and pp. 42–43, table 25; population data from Maddison (2010); China death data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405; India death data from Sen (1977), p. 36. See appendix for full methodology.
*‘British India’ here refers to India and today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Lend-Lease aid and population numbers for British India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) are included here.
*‘White settler states’ refers to Australia and New Zealand.

Chart 1: Per capita aid: whites received $442.3 per person; non-whites (China, British India, and Ceylon) received $4.4 – a 101:1 ratio

Chart 2: Per death valuation: white deaths ‘valued’ at $52,913; non-white (China, British India) deaths at $155 – a 341:1 ratio

The British Empire in 1945 (as defined by the US in the Lend-Lease Programme) consisted of 58.3 million whites and 443.1 million non-white subjects. The mathematics was simple: the US directed 85.1% of the British Empire’s Lend-Lease aid to whites, who comprised only 11.6% of the Empire’s population.

From 1945 to 1948, the US provided at least $1.4 billion to Chiang Kai-shek’s government, with over half being military aid – double the $700 million in military aid given during the WAFW – excluding substantial surplus property sales.²⁹ Additional aid continued through 1949 when the Nationalists lost the civil war. The formula: minimal help against Japan, maximum support against communism.

Poignant observations were made by two articles in Historical Review published by the China Academy of Social Sciences in August 2025:

First: Overall, in the early stages of the full-scale War of Resistance, the Soviet Union’s vital assistance to a China engaged in an arduous struggle was like ‘offering fuel in snowy weather’.

Second: After the end of the Anti-Japanese War, the US actively aided and supported the Kuomintang reactionaries in launching a civil war and signed the seemingly reciprocal but actually unequal ‘Sino-American Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation’ with the Nationalist government, aiming to maintain influence over China through economic control and military intervention.

The economic arithmetic was clear: the Anglo-Americans had the money but would not fight. The fascists had militarised everything. The socialists had little but gave all.

Source: Harrison (1998), p. 21, table 1.8. See appendix for a verbatim transcript of the source data.

4. China’s Fourteen-Year Resistance: The Forgotten Foundation of Victory

China’s fourteen-year resistance against Japanese imperialism tied down the bulk of Japanese land forces throughout the war. Chinese forces prevented over half a million Japanese soldiers from attacking the Soviet Far East or sweeping through the Pacific.³⁰ As the war progressed, increasing numbers of KMT soldiers defected to the Communist forces, strengthening the guerrilla resistance. Every Chinese soldier who held a position with obsolete weapons and an empty stomach prevented a Japanese soldier from fighting elsewhere. China’s military weakness made its resistance more heroic, not less.

The Red Army soldiers who fled Ruijin, site of the first Chinese Soviet Republic, crossed frozen mountains in straw sandals in 1935 while KMT bombers with US engines hunted them from above.³¹ Blood froze in their footprints. Toes turned black and fell off. Those who survived became the core of guerrilla forces that by 1940 tied down 60% of Japanese troops.

The following numbers shatter every myth about who won this war:

Sources: USSR data from Andreev et al. (1993); China data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405; India data from Sen (1977), p. 36. See appendix for full methodology.

The deployment patterns expose the truth: socialist forces were desperately engaged in existential struggle while capitalist forces carefully husbanded their strength for post-war advantage.

5. The Blood Price: Who Really Defeated Fascism

The global struggle against fascism killed 85 million human beings.

That is 3.8% of humanity: dead.

Sources: USSR death data from Andreev et al. (1993); China death data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405; French Indochina population from Budge (2014) and death data from The National WWII Museum New Orleans (n.d.); other population data from Maddison (2010). See appendix for full methodology.

Who paid this price reveals who saved the world. The arithmetic will destroy every lie that the late arrivals have said about this war, not as statistics but as accusations. Every number is a crime – every percentage a verdict.

59.8% socialists dead, 13.1% colonised peoples dead – only 1% Anglo-Americans dead.

This was not their war. It was their profit.

Sources: USSR data from Andreev et al. (1993); China data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405 and p. 442. See appendix for full methodology.

But even these deaths tell only half the horror. The wounded – those who survived maimed, traumatised, broken – vanished from Western history. We restore them here: thirteen to eighteen million Soviets wounded – ignored. Each lived with pain that Washington and London never felt. Every Western soldier wounded became a casualty worthy of pensions, medals, remembrance. The eleven to twenty-six million wounded Chinese vanished from history as if they never existed, never suffered, never mattered.

The arithmetic convicts: socialist forces suffered 59.8% of all WAFW deaths with less than 15% of world GDP. In Korea, 99% of deaths were Korean or Chinese. In Vietnam, 99% of the deaths were Southeast Asian. The pattern screams across three wars, across five decades, and across continents – those with nothing saved humanity while those with everything preserved their strength for the post-war plunder.

6. The Soviet Union Destroyed Fascism in Europe

The Red Army eliminated or decisively defeated the Wehrmacht’s strength in battles that decided humanity’s fate: Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. The price: 27 million Soviet deaths.³² That’s 13.8% of the Soviet population based on a population of 196.0 million in 1940. That is 1.2% of the entire world’s population wiped out because they stood between fascism and the rest of us.

These were not abstract statistics. Whole villages where no men between the ages of eighteen and fifty survived. The Soviet Union inflicted 9 million of Germany’s 11.1 million military casualties. This victory was partly possible because China’s resistance prevented Japan from attacking the Soviet Far East during 1941–1942 when Moscow hung by a thread. As President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in 2025, China’s resistance was ‘one of the crucial factors that prevented Japan from stabbing the Soviet Union in the back during the darkest months’.

Among Soviet deaths were 1.3 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust’s eastern killing fields, 3.3 million prisoners of war deliberately starved in German camps, and millions of civilians killed in accordance with Generalplan Ost (Master Plan for the East) and other Nazi racial policies targeting ‘subhuman’ Slavs.³³

7. China’s Demographic Catastrophe

At least 23.6 million deaths were documented from 1937 to 1945 alone – 20.6 million direct deaths from combat and massacres, plus 3 million from the 1942 Henan famine caused by the Japanese disruption. Before that, from 1931 to mid-1937, the Japanese invasion also resulted in an estimated 450,000 deaths. The total documented deaths from 1931 to 1945: 24.05 million. With wounded included, total casualties reached 35 million. However, even this staggering figure understates the catastrophe. When including the 15 million who were never born because of the war’s destruction, China’s total population loss exceeded 50 million. The West acknowledges perhaps 15–20 million dead, ignores the wounded entirely, and erases the demographic hole that took generations to fill.³⁴

The forced-labour system added another dimension to this genocide: from 1935 to 1945, 20% of the 11.5 million forced labourers in Northeast China died (2.3 million deaths). Among the 38,935 forced labourers shipped to Japan, 17.5% were killed in the emperor’s homeland, according to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences historian Bian Xiuyue.³⁵ This research documents the genocide in precise terms, not with vague estimates.

The Western insistence on counting only deaths performs a double erasure. When 35 million Chinese were killed or wounded, focusing only on the West’s understated count of 20 million or fewer deaths erases at least 11 million wounded people whose lives were destroyed by Japanese aggression.

China’s 2015 government survey, involving 600,000 participants, documented systematic extermination through multiple methods. The Nanjing Massacre: 300,000 killed in six weeks and an estimated 20,000–80,000 rapes.³⁶ Japan’s ‘Three Alls’ campaign – ‘Kill all, burn all, loot all’ – turned entire provinces into graveyards. Even regular POW camps revealed a national chauvinism extermination policy: Japan killed 99.9% of Chinese prisoners but only 27.1% of Western POWs.³⁷

8. The Colonial Holocaust: Eleven Million Erased

While the imperial powers preserved their strength, their colonies bled. A total of 11.2 million colonial subjects died – more than ten times the total Anglo-American war death toll.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million Indians through British policy. While Bengalis starved, Britain exported rice from Bengal and denied relief ships.³⁸ Churchill told his private secretary that ‘the Hindus were a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due’. He wished that Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, head of the British Bomber Command, could ‘send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them’.³⁹

The Dutch East Indies lost 3.4 million people – 4.7% of the population. Both colonial powers killed them – the Dutch through centuries of extraction that left them defenceless, the Japanese through forced labour, starvation, and systematic violence.

In Java alone, 1.8 million excess deaths occurred between 1944 and 1945. The rōmusha forced-labour system sent 300,000 Indonesians overseas; only 77,000 returned.⁴⁰ On the Sumatra Railway alone, 17,000 of 22,000 Javanese labourers died – a mortality rate of 77%.

French Indochina: 1.5 million deaths – 6.5% of the population. The 1944–1945 famine killed 1–2 million Vietnamese through the combined extraction of Japanese requisitions and continued French colonial administration.

Burma: 270,000 to perhaps as high as 1 million dead under Japanese occupation while Britain fled, destroying oil fields but abandoning the Indian labourers and Burmese civilians who had no means of escape. The Thailand-Burma Railway (402 kilometres) killed 215 people per kilometre of track laid: 31 Western POW deaths per kilometre, 184 Asian labourer deaths per kilometre – a six-fold racial calculus.⁴¹ The shorter Kra Isthmus Railway (90 kilometres) had an even higher mortality rate of 537 deaths per kilometre (Huff, 2020), constructed entirely by Asian workers whose deaths went largely undocumented by Japanese authorities. Of an estimated 260,000–270,000 total workers on both railways, approximately 90,000–140,000 Asian labourers perished, including significant numbers among the more than 100,000 Malays and Tamils conscripted from British territories.

Malaya and Singapore: up to 150,000. Philippines: 765,000.⁴² Portuguese Timor: 14% to 19% of its population – the highest death rate of any territory in South Asia.⁴³

The colonial arithmetic: killed by fascist occupation while colonial masters hoarded resources. Indians starved; Britain had grain. Indonesians died; Dutch extraction had built nothing to save them. Vietnamese perished; France maintained its extraction apparatus even under Japanese rule.

Eleven million colonial deaths. Museums memorialise the 12,000 US and Filipino soldiers who died in the Bataan Death March.⁴⁴ The rōmusha who built the Burma Railway – 90,000–100,000 dead – have no museum nor movie like Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

9. Africa: Two Million Erased

Africa became the Allies’ emergency reserve when France fell, and the Western colonies in Asia were lost to Japan. Britain, France, and Belgium extracted maximum resources from African colonies while fighting a war supposedly for freedom. Between 1.6 and 2 million Africans died – from fascist invasion, forced labour, combat service, and systematic starvation. Colonial authorities, who tracked copper production down to the metric tonne, never counted African deaths.

Ethiopia: The First Battlefield

The WAFW began in Africa in 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. A 1945 Ethiopian government memorandum documented 760,300 deaths: 275,000 battle deaths, 300,000 from hunger among refugees, 75,000 patriots killed during occupation, 35,000 in concentration camps, 30,000 in the February 1937 Addis Ababa massacre, 24,000 executions, 17,800 civilians killed by air strikes. Despite signing the Geneva Protocol, Italy used 300–500 tonnes of mustard gas and dropped 4,336 aerial bombs filled with sulphur mustard and 540 bombs containing diphenylchlorarsine on Ethiopia. Soviet analysts calculated that these chemical weapons caused 30% of Ethiopian combat deaths. At Ametsegna Washa cave in 1939, Italian forces gassed and machine-gunned over 5,500 Ethiopians.

Ethiopian women fought as armed combatants (arbegna) against Italian occupation – the Ethiopian government’s official Book of Honour, 1935–1941 documented their sacrifice, recording one-third of its names as women patriots who took up arms against fascism, though Western histories erase them entirely.⁴⁵ These women learned to use rifles and grenades, endured aerial bombardment and mustard gas attacks, and in some cases took command of troops. By March 1948, the UN War Crimes Commission identified 1,200 Italian war criminals from the Ethiopian campaign. Prosecutions: zero.⁴⁶ Badoglio, who was implicated in the Italian genocide in Libya (1929–1934), went back to Italy to become Mussolini’s last prime minister.⁴⁷ The Italian field marshal who authorised the systematic use of chemical weapons that killed tens of thousands of Ethiopians became the Anglo-Americans’ ‘valuable asset’ against communism.

When the Bonomi government appeared ready to arrest Badoglio, Prime Minister Churchill sent a ‘Personal and Top Secret’ telegram on 8 December 1944 to Sir Noel Charles, the British ambassador in Rome, stating: ‘You are responsible for the Marshal’s safety and sanctuary in the British Embassy or in some equally safe place to which he can be removed’.

Combat Service

Nearly one million Africans served. France deployed 100,000 African soldiers against Germany in 1940 – 17,500 killed. Morocco sent 90,000 troops to France. In Burma, 90,000 African soldiers constituted 9% of imperial forces. The 82nd West African Division suffered 2,085 casualties – the highest in the XV Corps.

Military apartheid structured everything. African privates received one-third of white soldiers’ pay, and corporal punishment remained legal for Africans until 1946. Officers were so rare among the 500,000 African soldiers that each was known by name. The racial discrimination extended beyond institutional policy into brutal violence: in 1940, the Nazis massacred 3,000 Black French soldiers and Hitler kept African POWs in captivity while releasing white prisoners.

Extraction Mathematics

Africa supplied 98% of Allied industrial diamonds, 90% of cobalt, 50% of gold production, and 39% of chromite. The British conscripted 100,000 men for Nigerian tin mines between 1942 and 1944. Death rate from disease on the Tente Dam: 10%.⁴⁸ Production increase: 6%. In Belgian-occupied Congo, mandatory labour reached 120 days annually. French West Africa: 38,153 men in forced-labour armies. Entire villages fled – 6,000 from Forécariah to Sierra Leone.

The Shinkolobwe mine provided uranium for the atom bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ore: 75% uranium oxide versus 0.2% considered marketable in North America. Congolese miners handled radioactive ore bare-handed. Their names: never recorded. Their deaths: never counted.⁴⁹

Forced crop substitution created famine. Mozambique: 800,000 in forced cotton cultivation. Cape Verde: 24,643 dead from wartime famine. Nigeria: Groundnut exports rose, while millet production was abandoned. Starvation followed export ledgers.

The Betrayal

1 December 1944, Thiaroye, Senegal: French officers massacred West African veterans demanding back pay. Official count: 35 dead. Military archives: 70 dead. Current historical research: 300–400 dead. The archives contain falsified documents and remain classified eighty years later, deemed ‘sensitive’.

Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945: French forces began killing Algerians in Sétif and Guelma. Algeria counts 45,000 dead.⁵⁰ France admits to 1,500.

The 1945 Nigerian general strike.

Madagascar, 1947: 40,000 killed, crushing independence.

French West African railway strike, 1947–1948: 160 days, 20,000 workers on strike.

Gold Coast (now Ghana), 1948: British Superintendent Imray personally shot three veteran protest leaders.

General strikes erupted from Durban to Tunis, from Dakar to Dar es Salaam. Mombasa, 1947: 15,000 workers paralysed the city.

Witwatersrand, 1946: African miners struck despite 1,248 wounded by police.

The pattern was set: veterans demanding wages were massacred, workers demanding rights were shot, independence movements would be crushed. France would kill 1.5 million in Algeria. Britain would cage 1.5 million Kenyans. Portugal would burn Mozambique. The veterans who survived fascism now understood the enemy. Within a decade, liberation wars would erupt from Algeria to Kenya, from Angola to Mozambique – led and influenced by socialist movements and leaders who learned that the West’s six-hundred-year formula never changed: maximum extraction, maximum death, minimum acknowledgement, no accountability.

The 1935–1945 accounting the colonial powers never made: between 1.6 and 2 million Africans dead. Ethiopia alone: 760,000. Military deaths: 75,000. Forced labour and famine: hundreds of thousands. Colonial authorities documented copper down to the metric tonne: 262,394 tonnes. African deaths: ‘unrecorded’.

10. How Socialism Defeated Fascism Through Superior Strategy

Three battles proved Japan could be beaten. At Pingxingguan (平型关) in 1937, Communist forces killed over 1,000 Japanese and captured 82 vehicles – Japan’s first defeat.⁵¹ At Taierzhuang (台儿庄) in 1938, the Japanese were routed. There are varying historical estimates. One 1996 study estimates that there were 20,000 casualties among 55,000 Japanese soldiers.⁵² At Wanjialing (万家岭) on 10 October 1938, an entire Japanese division – 31,000 troops – was reduced to 1,000 survivors. It was Japan’s darkest day.

The CPC’s Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 – a series of coordinated strikes across northern China – shattered Japanese infrastructure. The CPC’s forces tied down 60% of Japanese forces and 95% of puppet forces – not some vague ‘bulk’ but a precise, bleeding majority.⁵³ ‘Sparrow warfare’ (麻雀战) made Japanese patrols bleed for every mile. Tunnel warfare in Ranzhuang (冉庄) in 1939: sixteen kilometres long, connecting five villages, guerrillas appearing and vanishing like ghosts.⁵⁴

The defeat of fascism was not just about sacrifice; it was a brilliant strategy that turned initial weakness into strength. Socialist leadership did not just mobilise the masses; it outthought and outfought its enemies, despite every material advantage.

Soviet innovation transformed defeat into total victory. The USSR faced an impossible equation: while constructing humanity’s first socialist society from the ruins of tsarism’s feudal system – transforming social relations of production and reproduction at an unprecedented scale – it had exactly one decade to build a military-industrial capacity for the inevitable war.

When German armies smashed through Soviet defences in June 1941, Western observers gave the USSR weeks to survive. Within six months, the USSR imposed the first major strategic defeat on Nazi Germany with the Moscow counteroffensive; within eighteen months the Red Army was decimating entire German army groups. The secret lay in combining revolutionary military doctrine with unprecedented social mobilisation. Deep battle theory envisioned rupturing enemy lines at multiple points, then exploiting with reserves to annihilate entire fronts. When the crisis arose, 1,523 factories were loaded onto 1.5 million railcars and evacuated beyond the Urals in five months under Luftwaffe bombardment.⁵⁵ Seventeen million Soviet citizens evacuated with their factories.⁵⁶ The Kirov Works was evacuated from Leningrad to Chelyabinsk, where 5,800 machines were installed and operational in less than three weeks – in roofless halls, with workers living in tents at –40°C.⁵⁷

Soviet tank production rose from 6,590 in 1941 to 24,719 in 1942 – nearly quadrupling despite catastrophic losses.⁵⁸ The Soviets produced over 100,000 tanks and self-propelled guns total, versus Germany’s 43,000 (1941–1945).⁵⁹ The T-34 so devastated Wehrmacht forces that German engineers desperately tried to copy it and failed. Even RAND Corporation admitted that it was the ‘epitome of creative design’.⁶⁰

Stalin created the State Defence Committee (GKO) on 30 June 1941, which coordinated this unprecedented evacuation. Workers laboured around the clock and built new factories around the equipment as trains arrived. By March 1942, these evacuated plants were producing at pre-war levels. The Germans had captured areas containing 40% of the population, 60% of coal, steel, and aluminium production, yet Soviet military output surpassed German production by 1942.⁶¹ Only a socialist-led society could achieve this miracle of relocation while under invasion.

This was scientific superiority.

Stalingrad demonstrated a superior battle strategy over German tactical excellence. General Georgy Zhukov let the Germans pour their best units into urban combat where tank superiority meant nothing. Every building became a fortress; every room became a battlefield. While German forces exhausted themselves in the city, Soviet reserves massed on the flanks. Operation Uranus in 1942 struck with mathematical precision, targeting the Romanian armies Germany had positioned on its flanks – weaker Axis-allied forces holding critical positions. Multiple simultaneous attacks shattered these Romanian armies and encircled the entire Sixth Army.

By the war’s end, Soviet offensives routinely destroyed entire German army groups across thousand-mile fronts. The same army that collapsed in 1941 was by 1944 conducting operations of complexity and scale that no capitalist military could match.

This was not heroism alone, but the fusion of Marxist science with mass creativity. Where capitalist armies preserved professional forces, the Soviet system mobilised everyone. By 1942, women in the Red Army numbered 800,000. By 1945, there were 246,000 women in uniform on the front line – snipers, pilots, tank crews, not just nurses.⁶² Partisan warfare tied down 500,000 German troops with locally organised forces; approximately 205,600 partisans were organised behind German lines by 1 July 1944.⁶³ Despite losing most of its prewar industrial base, the USSR outproduced Germany in every category that mattered: 112,100 combat aircraft to Germany’s 89,500.⁶⁴ Of Germany’s 3–3.5 million military deaths, 2.6–3.1 million died fighting the Red Army; of their 11.1 million total casualties, 9 million came on the Eastern Front.⁶⁵ From 1941 to 1942, Germany had to deploy 72–80% of its entire military strength along this 3,000-kilometre front – and lost them there. While the Allied imperialists faced 54 German divisions on D-Day, the Red Army was simultaneously dismantling and destroying 156½ divisions in the East.⁶⁶

Meanwhile, Chinese innovation overcame the Japanese superiority in arms. The CPC transformed China’s weakness into strength. Its Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army tied down 60% of Japanese forces through guerrilla warfare. Its ‘comprehensive resistance’ turned every farmer into a supplier, every worker into a saboteur, every student into an organiser.

The KMT’s conventional forces engaged the remaining 40% but faced severe challenges in battle despite some notable defensive victories.

In On Protracted War (1938), Mao provided a scientific analysis: Japan was strong but small, isolated, and barbaric; China was weak but vast, progressive, and with time on its side. Mao predicted three phases – strategic defensive, strategic stalemate, strategic counteroffensive – exactly how the war unfolded. The prophecy proved exact.

The rear battlefield became Japan’s bleeding wound. Communist forces established bases throughout the occupied territories, implementing land reform to mobilise peasants and democratic governance to unite all patriotic classes against the invader. By the stalemate phase, guerrilla warfare tied down 60% of Japanese troops and 95% of puppet forces. Tunnel warfare, mobile warfare, and landmine warfare – each tactic exploited Japanese vulnerabilities. The occupiers controlled the cities and railways; the resistance controlled everything else.

The Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 proved the occupied zones were graveyards, not colonies. Coordinated strikes across northern China destroyed Japanese infrastructure and shattered the myth of pacification. Every blown railway, every ambushed convoy demonstrated a simple truth: superior weapons meant nothing when every village was hostile, every peasant an intelligence network, every night an opportunity for attack. The Japanese found themselves drowning in an ocean of people’s war.

This was scientific application of revolutionary theory to concrete conditions. The equation proved exact: correct political line plus mass mobilisation equals military miracles. China proved that imperialism’s technical superiority crumbles when an entire people refuse to be enslaved.

The contrast with capitalist military leadership was also stark. US and British commanders had every advantage: larger forces, uninterrupted supply lines, overwhelming air support. Yet they moved cautiously, preserving forces rather than eliminating enemies. Operation Market Garden (1944) failed. The Ardennes caught them by surprise. It took them eleven months to advance from Normandy to Berlin, a distance the Red Army covered in four months while fighting more challenging battles.⁶⁷

The US ‘production miracle’ was actually inefficiency. Manufacturing productivity fell 1.4% annually during the war. Cost-plus contracts guaranteed profit regardless of waste – corporations were paid all costs plus profit. The Truman Committee’s verdict: ‘War is waste – waste of manpower and material’.⁶⁸ The formula: maximum profit, minimum efficiency, let others bleed.⁶⁹

Socialist and colonised peoples: 73% of all deaths.

Anglo-Americans: 1%.

Sources: Author’s elaboration based on Mukerjee (2010), p. 205 and pp. 246–247; Murayama (1995); Nie, Guo, Selden, and Kleinman (2010), p. 5; Kohn and Harahan (1988), p. 88; Stone (1952), p. 312.

11. Fascism’s Anti-Communist Laboratory: The Domestic Rehearsal for Global Genocide

Before fascism turned outward to conquer nations, it perfected mass murder at home. From 1931 to 1945, fascist regimes systematically exterminated 216,000–286,000 communists and leftists across Germany, Spain, Italy, and Japan – not casualties of war but deliberate political genocide.⁷⁰ Millions more faced imprisonment, torture, and exile.

This was the rehearsal for what was to come next, watched with approval by the colonial metropoles. Better dead communists than red revolution. While fascism perfected its killing techniques on communists at home, the imperial ‘liberal democracies’ calculated their economic advantages.

Germany industrialised political murder, and its first targets were the Communists. In the November 1932 elections, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was a massive political force, securing nearly 6 million votes (16.9% of the total).⁷¹ This entire political world was targeted for annihilation. Following the Reichstag Fire in February 1933, the Nazi regime launched its first mass wave of terror. Conservative data indicate that at least 100,000 political opponents were arrested in 1933 alone, with 600 dying in custody; the KPD leadership’s own estimate placed these figures at 130,000 arrested and 2,500 murdered.⁷²

These early arrests filled the first concentration camps – such as Oranienburg and the notorious Dachau – which became the laboratories for industrialised extermination. The chaotic brutality of the Sturmabteilung (SA) soon gave way to the bureaucratic terror of the Schutzstaffel (SS). By the end of 1933, at least 27,000 people were held in the camps, the vast majority political prisoners – 80% were members of the KPD and 10% from the Social Democratic Party of Germany.⁷³ There, methods of dehumanisation were refined. By 1937 the red triangle marking political prisoners was the precursor for the classification of all victims, and the system of torture and forced labour became standard practice. The assault on the Communists established the blueprint for the Holocaust; over the course of the Nazi regime, approximately 150,000 Communists would be imprisoned, and between 20,000 and 30,000 would be murdered or executed.⁷⁴ The torture and murder of communists served as the laboratory where Nazis perfected techniques later deployed against Jews, Roma, and Slavs.

Spain turned political cleansing into a science. Franco murdered 150,000 to 200,000 civilians behind the lines and executed 50,000 Republicans after March 1939.⁷⁵ The prison population reached 233,000 by 1941.

The Badajoz massacre (1936): 4,000 unarmed leftists slaughtered.⁷⁶ International Brigades volunteers faced a 30% casualty rate – Nationalists often executed international prisoners.⁷⁷ In 1940, Franco refused Nazi requests to repatriate Spanish Republicans from French camps, declaring them stateless – condemning more than 10,000 to Nazi concentration camps.

Japan’s Special Higher Police arrested 65,000 under the Peace Preservation Law.⁷⁸ Torture was policy – the autopsy of proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji in 1933 revealed systematic brutality.⁷⁹ Between 1942 and 1945, one Jinzhou court in Manchukuo alone sentenced 1,700 to death and 2,600 to life for ‘thought crimes’.

Italy had already demonstrated the pattern before 1931: squadristi carried out 2,120 acts of anti-socialist violence between 1919 and 1922, including 709 killings, while systematically attacking socialist councils and worker organisations across the Po Valley and throughout Emilia-Romagna.⁸⁰ Though these pre-1931 murders are not counted in our figures above, they established fascism’s violent blueprint. By 1943, the OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police, had compiled surveillance files on 130,000 suspected subversives.

Western leaders did not just know – they applauded.⁸¹ Churchill stated in 1937: ‘I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism’. To decode this Harrow (upper-class private school) circumlocution, Churchill was announcing he preferred Hitler to Stalin while preserving the linguistic escape route of never having actually said so.

This support extended from political and media elites to industrial capital, with US industrialist Henry Ford providing a direct ideological blueprint for Nazism. Hitler called Ford his ‘inspiration’ and kept a large portrait of him in his Munich office. Ford’s antisemitic book, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920–1922), was translated and ‘circulated to millions throughout Germany’, promoting the core Nazi fiction of a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ conspiracy to control the world. Hitler copied passages from it for Mein Kampf (1925), and high-ranking German officials alleged that Ford provided some of the Nazi Party’s earliest funding. In July 1938, Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest decoration the Third Reich could give a foreigner.⁸² Every Western handshake with fascism was signed in communist blood.

These techniques would later return in Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador – anywhere people chose socialism over subjugation.

12. The Anti-Communist Crusade: From Hidden Agenda to Open War

The Atomic Bombings: The First Act of the Cold War

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 targeted the Soviet Union more than Japan. Japan was already defeated. Admiral William Leahy, the highest-ranking US military officer and Truman’s chief of staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir: ‘The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender’. General Dwight Eisenhower told Secretary of War Stimson in July 1945: ‘Japan was already defeated… dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary’.

The July 1946 US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Japan would have surrendered by November 1945 ‘even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated’. Historian Gar Alperovitz documents similar opposition from five additional five-star US officers.⁸³

Yet the bombs were dropped. The timing exposes the calculation. At the Yalta Conference (4–11 February 1945), the Soviet Union committed to enter the war within three months of Germany’s surrender – establishing an 8–15 August deadline. Philip Morrison, a Manhattan Project physicist, revealed in 1948 that ‘the scientists responsible for making the bomb were pushed to meet a “mysterious” deadline in which it was to be ready by “a date near August tenth”’. The Trinity test succeeded on 16 July 1945 during the Potsdam Conference. Truman issued the bombing directive on 25 July. Hiroshima: 6 August 1945. Soviet declaration of war: 8 August. Soviet invasion of Manchuria: early morning of 9 August. Nagasaki: 9 August, hours after the Soviet offensive began.

President Truman’s Potsdam diary reveals his calculations. On 17 July, after meeting Stalin: ‘He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15th. … Japs [will be finished] when that comes about’. He noted contentious issues with the Soviets, then wrote: ‘I have an ace in the hole and another one showing’. On 18 July: ‘Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland’. Secretary of State James Byrnes was explicit. His aide Walter Brown’s diary recorded on 24 July that Byrnes hoped that ‘after [the] atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill’. Secretary of War Stimson’s diary entries from May 1945 describe the bomb as giving Washington ‘all the cards’, a ‘royal straight flush’ in dealing with Moscow, and the ‘master card’ in US diplomacy.⁸⁴

The Soviet invasion destroyed Japan’s last strategic hope. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima did not trigger immediate surrender negotiations. The Supreme War Council did not convene an emergency meeting on 7 or 8 August. The Soviet declaration of war on 9 August forced Prime Minister Kantarõ Suzuki to call the first emergency meeting that same morning to discuss surrender. Emperor Hirohito’s 17 August rescript cited Soviet entry as ‘endangering the very foundation of the Empire’s existence’ – not the atomic bombs.

Patrick M. S. Blackett, the British Nobel Prize-winning physicist, provided the first systematic analysis in his 1949 book Fear, War, and the Bomb: Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy. Blackett argued that ‘the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the Second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress’.

Japan had already offered to negotiate peace terms with one condition: preservation of the emperor. A US invasion remained months away. The Soviet Union was preparing to enter the war on August 8. The US objective, Blackett explained, was to force Japanese surrender before the Soviets could advance into Manchuria and ensure that Japan surrendered to the US alone.⁸⁵

The United States killed 110,000–210,000 Japanese civilians to demonstrate atomic monopoly and secure exclusively US occupation of Japan, avoiding the four-power partition that complicated Germany. This was the first act of the Cold War, not the last act of the WAFW.

The Unbroken War: From Tokyo to Seoul

The moment fascism fell, the mask dropped. The Atlantic powers’ true strategic enemy had always been communism, not fascism. The WAFW was barely over before the killing resumed – now aimed directly at any nation choosing socialist development.

The timeline reveals the truth:

• August 1945: Japan surrenders.
• September–October 1945: Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese independence; the British release and rearm French troops in Saigon; and the US provides eight transport ships to ferry French troops to attempt to reconquer Vietnam.⁸⁶
• Greek Civil War (1946–1949): Britain, then the US, crush the communists; 158,000 dead.⁸⁷
• Jeju Uprising in South Korea (April 1948): US-backed forces massacre 14,000–30,000.⁸⁸
• Fall 1950: Full-scale US invasion of Korea begins.

Five years from ‘victory over fascism’ to genocidal war against socialism. No pause. No peace. The same B-29s that firebombed Tokyo were firebombing the northern half of Korea in the ‘Fatherland Liberation War’. The killing never stopped – it just changed targets.

Japan surrendered in September 1945. By 1950 – just five years later – the US was incinerating Korea to prevent reunification under socialist leadership. The war killed 4.5 million Koreans while the US lost only 54,246. This excludes the 197,653 Chinese People’s Volunteers who sacrificed their lives defending Korea from US genocide.⁸⁹

North Korea Bore the Genocidal Brunt

Western estimates show that between 1.5 and 2.5 million Koreans from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) were killed – 15.6% to 26.0% of their pre-war population. No official DPRK figures are publicly available, so we cannot provide the DPRK’s own accounting. Given the record, the DPRK is unlikely to be the sole case where Western tallies do not understate deaths.

The US dropped 635,000 tonnes of bombs and 32,557 tonnes of napalm on a country the size of Pennsylvania.⁹⁰ US General Curtis LeMay stated – and these are his exact words – ‘We… burned down every town in North Korea… we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population’.⁹¹

General MacArthur said: ‘The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20 million people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited’.⁹²

Sources: Shin (2001), Halliday and Cumings (1988); The Star-Ledger (1995); Vietnam Veterans of America (2025). See appendix for full methodology.

The US obliterated eighteen of the DPRK’s twenty-two major cities – with destruction in individual cities ranging from 65% to 100%, including the complete destruction of Sinanju and 95% of Sariwon.⁹³

With napalm and firestorms, there are no wounded – flesh burns, lungs sear, and everyone in the target area dies. The conventional bombing created countless more casualties – crushed under rubble, maimed by shrapnel, orphaned, and starving.

No nation in modern history has suffered such concentrated destruction.

China sent hundreds of thousands of volunteers to The War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. Among the dead was Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s son, killed in November 1950.

General Douglas MacArthur, the same man who had abandoned the Philippines in 1942, now ordered the Air Force to destroy ‘every installation, factory, city, and village’ north of the 38th parallel. The racist extermination tactics used against Japan now targeted any nation resisting capitalism.

Vietnam: The Pattern Continues

Vietnam confirmed the pattern. As France’s colonial war failed, the US seamlessly took over. From 1955 to 1975, Vietnam lost at least 3.1 million people – taken from various reports including those of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

This was not a ‘discrepancy’.

This was erasure.

US bombing: 7.66 million tonnes dropped across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – 3.6 times the tonnage dropped in all sectors of the WAFW. Deaths in Laos and Cambodia are not separately documented in available sources but are included in the regional devastation.

3.1 million Vietnamese. 58,000 US soldiers.

The ratio: 53:1.

The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all WAFW battlefields combined. Why? Because Vietnam’s example – successful resistance by a small nation against the world’s richest – threatened to inspire others.

When we calculate population percentages, the word ‘genocide’ becomes undeniable.

In the case of the DPRK, remember that 26% died. Remember that number when they speak of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

The pattern across three wars reveals systematic extermination. When 26% of a population dies, we call it genocide – unless the US is the génocidaire.

13. Manufacturing Memory

Hollywood transformed D-Day into the turning point in the WAFW, erasing Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. US textbooks portrayed Lend-Lease as charity rather than delayed support that arrived after the most decisive battles. The atomic bomb became the war winner, not the Soviet armies racing towards Japan. This served as preparation, not just propaganda. If the US public believed that they had saved the world from fascism, they could be mobilised to ‘save’ it from communism. The same corporations that had done business with Hitler now profited from containing socialism.

The Ideological Apparatus: Money and Methods

Academic complicity ran through specific institutions and individuals. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pumped tens of millions of dollars into the Congress for Cultural Freedom over seventeen years, waging what they called a ‘battle for men’s minds’.⁹⁴ Irving Kristol edited Encounter, Sidney Hook attended Berlin conferences – both received CIA funding through this network.⁹⁵ Hook promoted the ‘totalitarian twins’ thesis equating Stalin with Hitler. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., attending these same conferences, would later write The Vital Center (1949), arguing that US liberalism saved democracy, erasing at a minimum forty-five million Soviet and thirty-five million Chinese total casualties. Thomas Braden, who ran the CIA’s International Organisations Division, later confessed in the Saturday Evening Post: ‘I’m glad the CIA is “immoral”’ – boasting about buying an entire generation of intellectuals.⁹⁶

Those who documented socialist sacrifice faced systematic destruction. For example, William Appleman Williams faced repeated tenure denials, despite publishing in prestigious journals, for documenting US imperial expansion in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959). A survey of 2,451 social scientists conducted in the spring of 1955 revealed agents had contacted 61% of professors – not for investigation but for intimidation.⁹⁷

Parallel to this ideological suppression, the Pentagon’s overwhelming financial power created a structural dependency that fostered a new academic culture – one of service to the national security state. Throughout the 1950s, the Department of Defense (DOD) accounted for the vast majority of all federal research spending, peaking at 83.8% of the total budget. This capital was not merely granted; it was targeted. The Korean War mobilisation doubled R&D funding to $1.3 billion, establishing university-managed military laboratories like MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and Stanford’s Applied Electronics Laboratory. By 1960, these military contracts accounted for 40% of Stanford University’s entire operating budget, institutionalising a permanent dependency in the physical sciences.⁹⁸ The influence of DOD funding extended beyond the sciences. Academic ‘freedom’ meant Pentagon priorities – the architecture of intellectual capture. The message was clear: write about US heroism or lose your career.

Harvard requires two European languages for European history PhDs. For Chinese history: fourth-year modern Chinese, second-year literary Chinese, and third-year Japanese. The Japanese requirement was not neutral – US graduate students in Chinese studies were routinely sent to Kyoto for training, required to approach Chinese history through Japanese scholarly frameworks. To document China’s suffering, Western scholars first had to master the language of its invader.

Even scholars who clear these barriers produce systematic undercounts. Rana Mitter – Oxford’s leading China specialist with full linguistic access – estimates only 15 to 20 million Chinese deaths.⁹⁹ Chinese government documentation records 24.05 million deaths between 1931 and 1945, with 35 million total casualties, including both dead and wounded.¹⁰⁰ The pattern reveals erasure beyond language: methodological choices, source selection, and what counts as credible evidence.

Encyclopaedia Britannica – for over two centuries, the gold standard of Anglo-American knowledge production – reveals imperial historiography through what it counts and what it erases. Their WWII casualty table lists 1.31 million military deaths for China but provides no entry for civilian deaths or total deaths – just blank spaces.¹⁰¹ By contrast, Poland shows 5.675 million civilian deaths and 5.8 million total. Yugoslavia: 1.2 million civilian deaths, 1.505 million total. Even defeated Germany gets entries: 0.78 million civilian deaths, 4.2 million total. China – the nation that fought longest (1931–1945) – receives blanks where more than 24 million civilian deaths belong.

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s sardonic footnote: ‘The figures for China comprise casualties of the Chinese Nationalist forces during 1937–1945, as reported in 1946, and do not include figures for local armies and communists. Estimates of 2.2 million military dead and 22 million civilian deaths appear in some compilations but are of doubtful accuracy’. The gap represents not a counting error but decades of coordinated erasure.

The Appeasement Fiction: How Collusion Became Confusion

Western historiography transformed Neville Chamberlain’s calculated collusion with Hitler into a tale of naïve ‘appeasement’ – well-meaning but misguided efforts to avoid war. This fiction serves a purpose: if Chamberlain merely misjudged Hitler’s intentions, British strategy appears as honourable failure rather than anti-communist conspiracy. The documentary record destroys this myth.

Two days before meeting Hitler, Chamberlain wrote to King George VI stating his aim: an ‘Anglo-German understanding’ with Germany and England as ‘the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against communism’, acknowledging Hitler was determined ‘to proceed further East’.¹⁰² Over three September 1938 meetings, this strategy was formalised. At Godesberg on 22–23 September, Hitler made the deal explicit. As recorded by official German translator Dr Paul Schmidt, Hitler told Chamberlain: ‘we will not stand in the way of your pursuit of your non-European interests and you may without harm let us have a free hand on the European continent in central and South-East Europe’.¹⁰³

Chamberlain did not protest. The meeting ended, Schmidt noted, ‘in a completely friendly tone’. Britain’s ambassador to Germany later wrote: ‘Nor would the world have failed to acclaim Hitler as a great German if he had known when and where to stop: even, for instance, after Munich and the Nuremberg decrees for the Jews’.¹⁰⁴

As Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster observed, Chamberlain’s government sought ‘not so much to “appease” Nazi Germany, as to collude with it, in the hope that Germany would turn its guns eastward, toward the USSR’.¹⁰⁵ The transformation of documented collusion into the ‘appeasement myth’ represents another deliberate erasure – this time not of socialist sacrifice but of Western complicity in enabling fascism’s eastward expansion.

The Cultural Front: Propaganda as History

The Pentagon’s collaboration with Hollywood – documented in more than 2,500 productions – ensures that people in the United States learn history through films like Saving Private Ryan (1998) rather than through scholarship.¹⁰⁶ While Soviet films such as Come and See (1985) were effectively restricted to a maximum of one hundred theatres, Pentagon-approved films reached thousands of theatres.¹⁰⁷ Every suppressed Soviet film meant millions never learned that the Red Army destroyed ten Wehrmacht soldiers for every one the Western Allies faced. When Enemy at the Gates (2001) depicted Soviet soldiers sharing rifles – pure fiction according to Russian historians – it reached more viewers than all Soviet war films combined.¹⁰⁸ The Pentagon does not need to ban truth when it can drown it in well-funded lies.

The same erasure methodology operates across all socialist casualties. Vietnam documents 3.1 million deaths from 1955 to 1975; Western historians acknowledge 2 million. Guenter Lewy deflated US military body counts by 30% while dismissing Vietnamese government figures as ‘politically inflated’. The perpetrators become the accountants of their crimes.

History in Stone: Sanitising Fascism

The anti-communist crusade required more than erasing socialist victories; it required sanitising fascism. Nearly 1,500 monuments honouring Nazi collaborators now stand across 25 countries. In Germany and Austria, there are over 110. In the US – the supposed victor – there are 36.¹⁰⁹

First, their crimes were pardoned. Then, they were put on pedestals.

14. The Formula for Impunity: Capital, Science, and the Cold War

US Capital and the Nazi War Machine

The scale of US corporate collaboration with Nazi Germany demands closer examination. By 1941, 250 US corporations had embedded capital directly into the Nazi war machine’s industrial infrastructure.

Henry Ford’s involvement went beyond ideological support. With approval from Ford’s Dearborn executives, the company’s French subsidiary produced trucks for the German military even after Pearl Harbor, prompting a US criminal investigation under the Trading with the Enemy Act that was suppressed after Edsel Ford’s death in 1943.

After the war, accountability was sidelined as Ford rehired its Nazi-era German manager – who had used slave labourers from the Buchenwald camp – as a consultant in 1950.

IBM’s collaboration was personally managed by its president, Thomas J. Watson, who travelled to Germany multiple times and accepted a special medal from Hitler in 1937. Watson oversaw the customisation of IBM’s technology specifically for Nazi requirements, establishing a German subsidiary, Dehomag, to service the Reich’s needs while maintaining direct control. IBM’s Hollerith punch card machines – the forerunner to the computer – automated the Holocaust itself. The technology allowed the Nazis to efficiently identify Jewish populations through census data, manage the logistics of train transports to the death camps, and track prisoners within the camps themselves. IBM technicians serviced the machines on-site – nearly every camp, including Auschwitz, had a Hollerith Department. The five-digit numbers tattooed on inmates’ arms corresponded directly to the IBM punch card system used to manage them. Watson only returned his Nazi medal in 1940 under public pressure, but IBM’s machines kept running in the camps until liberation.

International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), under president Sosthenes Behn – one of the first US executives to meet with Hitler on 3 August 1933 – entered into cartel agreements with the German firm Siemens & Halske and, as late as 1943, held a 29% stake in the aircraft manufacturer Focke-Wulf – whose planes killed Allied aviators and soldiers. A 1942 US government report noted Behn’s ‘unusual ability to get along with fascist governments and particularly with Nazi Germany’. After the war, the US government compensated ITT $27 million for Allied bomb damage to its German factories – paying US corporations for facilities that had produced weapons to kill US soldiers.¹¹⁰

General Motors’ Opel subsidiary became the Wehrmacht’s primary truck manufacturer. Opel’s Rüsselsheim plant produced the Opel Blitz truck, the primary transport vehicle used by the Wehrmacht in its invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. The Brandenburg plant alone produced 130,000 Blitz trucks by 1944. GM’s chief executive for overseas operations, James D. Mooney, received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler in 1938. Throughout the war, GM’s plants used forced and slave labour supplied by the Reich. The financial manipulation was sophisticated: unable to repatriate profits after 1941, GM declared Opel ‘abandoned’ and claimed a $22.7 million tax write-off under special legislation Roosevelt signed in October 1942 – even while Opel continued producing for the Wehrmacht. After the war, GM regained control of its valuable German facilities and resumed operations. The company profited from pre-war collaboration (1933–1941), wartime tax benefits, and post-war recovery of industrial assets.

The suppression of this history constitutes another pernicious form of erasure – this time concerning the systemic integration of US capital into the Nazi war machine. Not one US corporate executive faced prosecution for operating concentration camp factories or automating the Holocaust. Instead, they collected compensation for bomb damage and tax write-offs for their ‘losses’. This evidence refutes the claim that President Franklin Roosevelt was merely constrained by public opinion; it documents a state policy that protected these powerful corporate interests. The formula was established: profit from building fascism’s capacity for genocide, then profit from fascism’s defeat.

Recruiting the Enemy: Nazi Industrialists and Scientists

While Nazi scientists received US laboratories, Nazi industrialists received US protection. Alfred Krupp – whose slave labourers built the Wehrmacht’s arsenal – walked free in 1951, his fortune restored by US decree.¹¹¹ The Quandt dynasty, enriched by concentration camp labour, became BMW billionaires.¹¹² Hermann Josef Abs, Hitler’s banker who financed Auschwitz, became an adviser to West Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.¹¹³ Ferdinand Porsche, who used Buchenwald slaves to build the Ferdinand (later Elefant) tank destroyers, saw his family’s empire flourish under US occupation.¹¹⁴

Operation Paperclip (1945–1959) brought more than 1,500 Nazi war criminals to the United States, including SS members who used slave labour and conducted human experiments.¹¹⁵ They received laboratories while scholars documenting Soviet sacrifice were blacklisted.

Not one Nazi industrialist – nor any of their US corporate collaborators – faced justice at Nuremberg for operating concentration camp factories.

Japanese War Crimes: The Architecture of US-Enforced Impunity

Japan’s war criminals received far greater protection. Whereas the Allies prosecuted 199 major German war criminals – 24 at Nuremberg and 177 in subsequent trials – they prosecuted only 25 Japanese war criminals at Tokyo. The disparity reveals deliberate design.

The prosecution patterns expose the design. While 5,700 Japanese war criminals faced Allied tribunals, US official Saltzman ended these in 1949, declaring ‘no further trials’. Though 920 were executed, this was foreign justice imposed by victim nations.¹¹⁶ Germany was forced to investigate 90,000 individuals and established domestic courts, prosecuting tens of thousands.¹¹⁷ Japan investigated zero domestically. Japan prosecuted zero domestically. The US occupation preserved Japan’s war-criminal bureaucracy, making self-prosecution impossible.

The organisational immunity granted to Japan exceeded even this individual protection. At Nuremberg, the Allies declared four organisations criminal: the SS, Gestapo, SD, and Nazi Party Leadership Corps. Membership alone became grounds for prosecution. For Japan, the Allies declared zero organisations criminal. Not the Kempeitai, the military police that tortured POWs. Not the Special Higher Police, which arrested 65,000 for political crimes. Not Unit 731, whose 3,607 members conducted human experiments. This wholesale organisational immunity ensured that systematic crimes could never be prosecuted as systematic.

The Tokyo Trial architecture neutered crimes against humanity as a distinct category. Unlike Nuremberg’s clear distinctions, the 5,700 Japanese ‘Class B and Class C’ prosecutions were merged into a single category, with no separate Class C indictments or verdicts issued, erasing crimes against humanity as an independent charge and avoiding precedents applicable to Western colonial rule.

The financial disparity completed the racial hierarchy: while Germany paid $86.8 billion in Holocaust reparations through 2018, with direct compensation to victims, Japan paid $2.6 billion total through state-to-state deals with mandatory waivers blocking individual compensation. The ‘comfort women’ (ianfu) – 200,000 to 400,000 enslaved – saw zero prosecutions of those responsible. Chinese POWs suffered 99.9% mortality while Western POWs faced 27% mortality under the same captors. The legal architecture did not just reflect racial hierarchy; it codified it.

From War Criminals to Japan’s Ruling Elite

Unit 731 exemplified both the depths of Japanese war crimes and the completeness of US complicity. The unit’s 3,607 members called prisoners maruta (logs) while conducting experiments on them that defied human comprehension.¹¹⁸ They performed vivisections without anaesthesia, infected prisoners with plague and cholera, froze limbs to study frostbite until they sounded like boards when struck, subjected prisoners to pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, used them as living targets for germ bombs and flamethrowers, and cut open pregnant women to observe foetal infection. Prisoners had a maximum life expectancy of one month; technicians fed them dumplings laced with typhoid, injected them with snake venom and prussic acid, replaced their blood with horse blood, then carefully documented their deaths before burning the bodies in oil-fuelled crematoria.

On 6 May 1947, MacArthur radioed Washington: Unit 731 commander Shirō Ishii would provide the ‘complete story’ if granted ‘documentary immunity’. The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee deemed this data ‘the only known source’ of human experimentation results – research the US could not duplicate due to ‘scruples’. Fort Detrick paid 150,000–200,000 yen for the data – what General Charles Willoughby called ‘a pittance’ – and collected 8,000 pathology slides from over 200 cases of human experimentation. Fort Detrick incorporated this blood data into its biological weapons programme.

The racial calculus was explicit. The US executed two Japanese physicians at Yokohama for vivisecting US pilots – they were not even Unit 731. Yet all 3,607 Unit 731 members who killed 3,000 in experiments and 200,000 through biological weapons – overwhelmingly Chinese – received immunity.¹¹⁹ US lives: prosecution. Asian lives: immunity and payment.

When the Soviets prosecuted twelve captured Unit 731 members at Khabarovsk in 1949 – exposing the human experiments on Chinese, Korean, and Soviet prisoners in sworn testimony – Western governments, including the US, dismissed the trial as Soviet propaganda.

The career trajectories of Unit 731 personnel demonstrate how immunity became advancement. Commander Ishii became a medical consultant to the US Army. His deputies founded Green Cross Pharmaceuticals. Yoshimura Hisato, who conducted frostbite experiments, became president of Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine and received the Order of the Rising Sun from Emperor Hirohito. These men trained the next generation of Japanese doctors. The Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial executed seven of twenty-three Nazi physicians for identical experiments. Japanese experimenters became medical educators.

The transformation of war criminals into political leadership followed the same pattern. Nobusuke Kishi administered forced labour in North China: four million enslaved, 40% mortality. At the Fushun Coal Mine, 25,000 of 40,000 workers were replaced yearly after being worked to death. MacArthur released him from Sugamo Prison on 24 December 1948 – the day after Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s execution. The message: some war criminals hang, others rule. The CIA orchestrated Kishi’s rise: by 1957, he was prime minister, having rammed through the US-Japan Security Treaty. Nine years from war criminal to prime minister. His grandson Shinzo Abe served as prime minister for over 3,188 days, Japan’s longest tenure.¹²⁰

The financial architecture of impunity proved equally systematic. Yoshio Kodama plundered $175 million through opium trafficking – the CIA called him ‘a professional liar, gangster, charlatan, and outright thief’ yet kept him on the payroll. His stolen wealth funded the Liberal Democratic Party. Ryoichi Sasakawa, ‘the world’s wealthiest fascist’, transformed wartime loot into Japan’s gambling monopoly, funding right-wing causes globally through his Nippon Foundation.

The zaibatsu corporations – Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Nissan, Sumitomo – exploited 40,000 Chinese prisoners and hundreds of thousands of Koreans. Their executives died as honoured billionaires. Matsutaro Shoriki, a Class A war criminal, founded Nippon Television while shaping public memory for generations.

Enforcing Historical Denial

The architecture of impunity required more than protecting war criminals – it demanded enforcing historical denial. Japan has never issued a full apology to Asian victims. China, with 24 million dead, received no formal unqualified apology. Indonesia lost 3.4 million, Burma 345,000, Malaya 100,000 in Sook Ching (purge) operations, the Philippines 765,000 – all without direct acknowledgement.

The 1995 Murayama Statement was merely personal; the Diet’s resolution avoided admitting guilt.¹²¹ School textbooks minimise these crimes. Nippon Kaigi’s 40,000 members work systematically to overturn ‘the Tokyo Tribunal’s view of history’. A nation that enshrines war criminals and censors their victims cannot claim contrition.

MacArthur’s immunity for Hirohito created the foundation for all denial. The emperor who bore command responsibility for Unit 731 was guaranteed immunity before trials began. This created a legal black hole: if the supreme commander was immune, no organisation could be criminal, no chain of command could be traced. Hirohito died in 1989, never questioned about the millions killed under his command.

The Yasukuni Shrine honours 1,066 war criminals, including 14 Class A criminals. Seven prime ministers have worshipped there since 1978 – Koizumi six times. The Yushukan Museum displays the Thai-Burma Railway locomotive, celebrating Japanese engineering while erasing 90,000 Asian labourers who died building it. At Harbin’s Unit 731 Museum, victims preserve evidence perpetrators deny. Germany criminalises Holocaust denial; Japan’s establishment suppresses war crimes acknowledgement. Historians documenting atrocities face death threats. Comfort women memorials trigger diplomatic protests.

MacArthur architected impunity as policy, ensuring war criminals became Japan’s ruling elite, choosing anti-communist stability over justice for millions of Asian dead.

War criminals became cabinet ministers. Their victims became blank spaces in encyclopaedias.

15. The Memory Hole: Admitting the Real War

On 29 March 2025, US Defence Secretary Hegseth stood at Iwo Jima, celebrating yesterday’s enemy as today’s friend. Japan and America fought as rival empires, not ideological opponents. Their shared enemy was always socialism.

The historical revision accelerates. At the 2023 G7 Hiroshima Summit, the atomic bombing was recast – no longer US mass murder of civilians but a warning about Russian and Chinese nuclear threats. The victims of US nuclear weapons became props in propaganda against nations that have never used them. Japan’s prime minister stood where 140,000 died and pointed at Beijing and Moscow, not Washington.

Within five years of Hiroshima, MacArthur was rearming Japan. Within six years, the San Francisco Treaty excluded China and the Soviet Union – two nations that actually defeated Japanese fascism. Now, Hegseth announces Japan as a warfighting headquarters against Chinese Communist aggression. This timeline reveals the truth: a temporary conflict between imperialist states (1941–1945) and a permanent war against socialism that began in 1917 and continues for more than a century.

The West’s historical erasure operates on multiple levels. The first is a near-total silence in the popular sphere, where the foundational facts of the war – that the Soviet Union destroyed 80% of the Wehrmacht and China tied down the Japanese army at a cost of 27 million and 24 million dead respectively – are simply absent.

Beyond this public silencing, a more subtle academic erasure occurs. Even when a high death toll – perhaps 50 million – is technically acknowledged, it is frequently buried in obscure, supposedly neutral texts and presented as data stripped of perpetrator, responsibility, and the context of a socialist victory. Simultaneously, the most comprehensive research from victim nations is actively minimised through a grotesque demand for bookkeeping from the graveyards, allowing their casualty reports to be dismissed as politically inflated while the perpetrators control the historical ledger. This is how empires lie – by making the dead disappear twice. First, they kill and maim them. Then they deny they ever existed. The gap between Western admissions and reality is not an error, oversight, or methodological difference. It is a deliberate, systematic, and ongoing act of erasure.

The full accounting, therefore, requires restoring this lost context and human cost. The calculation is derived by summing two main groups of silenced victims:

• The full human cost of the WAFW, including both the socialist victors and the colonised victims whose suffering is ignored:
  • Soviet Union: 40–45 million casualties (dead and wounded)
  • China: 35–50 million casualties (dead and wounded)
  • Colonised peoples (Asia and Africa): 11.2 million dead
• The victims of the anti-communist genocides that followed, and whose murders are minimised or forgotten:
  • Koreans killed: 4.5 million
  • Southeast Asians killed (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia): 3.1–5.1 million
  • Indonesians killed (1965–1966): 1–2 million

The sum of these figures reveals the true scale of what is hidden behind the West’s neutralised data and public silence: a total of 90–115 million human beings rendered invisible. This conservative tally does not even include the victims of terror by US-backed regimes from Chile to Guatemala, nor those murdered during six centuries of uninterrupted imperial barbarism across the African continent. Every uncounted casualty serves empire. Every genocide minimised protects the guilty.

16. The Architecture of Betrayal: Cairo to San Francisco

Post-War Betrayals Were Scripted before the War Ended

The Cairo Declaration (27 November 1943) promised Korea would become ‘free and independent’ – Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang signed this while Korean forced labourers died in Japanese mines.¹²² The Atlantic Charter (1941) guaranteed ‘no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’.¹²³ However, Prime Minister Churchill clarified to Parliament less than a month later that this principle applied only to ‘states and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke’ and explicitly excluded the subjects of the British Empire.¹²⁴ The Potsdam Declaration (26 July 1945) demanded Japan’s complete demilitarisation and China’s territorial restoration. Roosevelt’s ‘Four Policemen’ concept envisioned the UN under the control of four great powers: the US, Britain, the USSR, and China. Every promise would be systematically broken.

The reversal began immediately. In August 1945, Dean Rusk – a mere colonel – drew the 38th parallel line dividing Korea, the nation promised independence.¹²⁵ By 1950, the US was incinerating the Korea it had pledged to free. The Atlantic Charter’s territorial integrity? The US would eventually establish 902 foreign military bases across 98 countries and territories.¹²⁶

After the WAFW, the US military occupied Okinawa – the Ryukyu Kingdom that Japan had forcibly annexed in 1879. The Potsdam Declaration limited Japanese sovereignty to its main islands and ‘such minor islands as we determine’ but made no provision for Ryukyuan self-determination. The US simply replaced Japan as the occupying power, maintaining control until 1972 when it transferred administrative authority back to Japan – again without consulting the Okinawan people. US bases remained, occupying 18% of the island today, where 70% of all US forces in Japan are concentrated.¹²⁷ Japan’s demilitarisation? MacArthur created the Police Reserve (later known as the Self-Defence Forces) in 1950, just five years after the bombing of Hiroshima.

The San Francisco Exclusion

The Treaty of San Francisco (8 September 1951) crystallised the betrayal through calculated exclusion. Neither Beijing nor Taipei was invited, despite China having borne 35–50 million casualties defeating Japan. The USSR attended but refused to sign.¹²⁸ Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko protested that the treaty would turn Japan into ‘an American military base’ while excluding China, ‘one of the main victims’.¹²⁹ When he attempted to secure a discussion, US-orchestrated parliamentary manoeuvres ruled him ‘out of order’. The question of China’s participation was simply dismissed. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles received ‘paeans of praise’ from twenty delegations for engineering this exclusion – the same Dulles who would later threaten ‘massive retaliation’ and push the world to nuclear brinkmanship. The US negotiated peace with Japan by excluding the two nations that sacrificed the most in defeating it. This was not oversight – it set the security architecture of post-war East Asia.

The United Nations (UN), designed for collective security through great power cooperation, was immediately circumvented. The US exploited the Soviet absence during the Security Council vote on Korea then created alternatives to bypass Soviet vetoes. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), established in 1949, and other parallel structures operated outside UN authority. By calling Korea a ‘police action’, the US established precedent for endless interventions without Security Council approval. The same semantic manipulation is used today in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

Three wars. One pattern.

The final accounting shatters imperial mythology: those with overwhelming wealth inflicted maximum violence on those who had the least – and still lost. Socialist forces with minimal wealth mobilised maximum humanity – and won.

Today’s ‘new Cold War’ against China and Russia (independent, not socialist) follows the same script. The faces change, the imperialism remains. When Western media demonise China while ignoring its lifting of 800 million from poverty, when it portrays Russia as aggressive while NATO expands to its borders, we see the same propaganda machinery that erased the truth about who defeated fascism.

17. Conclusion: The World Anti-Fascist War within the Century-Long Struggle

The WAFW was not humanity’s ‘good war’ against evil, after which peace prevailed. It involved one chapter in imperialism’s century-long assault on socialism that began with the 1917 Russian Revolution and continues today.

The liberal fiction of three competing systems – democracy, fascism, and communism – obscures the truth: fascism is capitalism in crisis, its mask dropped. The real struggle was never between three systems but between two: socialism and capitalism, with fascism as capitalism’s emergency response to revolutionary threat.

The colonial metropoles supported fascism’s rise – from Churchill praising Mussolini to US corporations building Hitler’s war machine – because fascism was the solution to defeat any emergence of socialism in the weakest links of the imperialist chain and to destroy the Soviet experiment. Only when fascism threatened the interests of Western imperialist powers did they reluctantly join the socialist powers they had hoped to see destroyed.

The numbers expose the truth with brutal clarity.

The Soviet Union and China – controlling less than one-sixth of global economic output – destroyed over 80% of fascist military power while suffering 59.8% of all WAFW deaths. They won the war. Roosevelt and Churchill positioned themselves to win the peace. This was not a coincidence, strategy, or clever timing. This was betrayal – planned from the beginning, executed with precision, covered with propaganda that continues to this day – as the West celebrates D-Day while minimising Moscow and Stalingrad, honours Churchill while hiding his Bengal genocide, and claims victory while those who actually won lie in unmarked graves by the millions.

But this war never strategically ended. It simply changed form. In 1931, Japan invaded China. In 1941, Germany invaded the USSR. In 1950, the US invaded Korea. In 1955, the US took over France’s war in Vietnam. No pause between ‘defeating fascism’ and attacking socialism – because defeating socialism was always the decisive goal.

The same arithmetic of sacrifice continued. Korea: 4.5 million deaths, while the US lost 54,246. Vietnam: 3.1 million deaths by Vietnamese documentation, while the US lost 58,000. Indonesia: 1–2 million murdered in 1965–1966 through death lists provided by the governments of Australia and the United States.¹³⁰ For Africa there have been six centuries of uninterrupted imperial barbarism, starting with the slave trade and colonial genocide. This year also marks seventy years since the 1955 Bandung Conference, when twenty-nine African and Asian nations declared their refusal to be pawns in the Cold War while demanding genuine independence from both colonial rule and emerging neocolonial domination.

Today, anti-communist and colonial genocide has stretched from Korea’s mountains and Indonesia’s islands to Congo’s mines, Chile’s copper fields, and Gaza – the target never changes. Each nation pays in blood for the crime of seeking real independence. The weapons improve; the genocide remains constant. Any nation attempting truly independent development faces the choice: submit to capital or face imperialist assault.

As the US-led military bloc now accounts for over 75% of the world’s total military spending, as NATO expands despite promises, and as sanctions strangle any nation asserting sovereignty – from Cuba to the Sahel – imperialism promotes the same war by other means.¹³¹ The ‘rules-based international order’ means the same thing as the ‘civilising mission’: submit or be destroyed.

When Western leaders invoke the World Anti-Fascist War to justify aggression, remember who actually fought and died. They claim to defend democracy, yet they allied with fascism until forced to fight. They promise to protect human rights while they let millions burn, preserving their strength.

The Soviet and Chinese peoples saved humanity not through wealth but through sacrifice; not through superior resources but through superior strategy; not through the preservation of capital but through the mobilisation of the masses.

Socialist peoples and leadership can defeat imperialism in any form – fascist then, hyper-imperialist now – despite every material disadvantage. That victory required genius, courage, and unimaginable sacrifice. It also proved something imperialism cannot accept: ordinary people, organised and led with brilliance, can defeat any empire. Mao crystallised this truth in On Protracted War (1938): ‘The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people’. Not in GDP percentages or military budgets, not in colonial extraction or industrial capacity, but in the mobilised masses who refuse to kneel. The arithmetic proved him right: those with 8% of world GDP defeated those with 30–32%. The formula remains unchanged – when the people are organised, no empire can stand.

We live in times of change not seen in a hundred years. It has been a century since the first socialist state established the precedent that a world beyond capital was achievable. Today, for the first time since 1900, the eight richest imperialist countries have fallen from 57.3% of world GDP to 29.9% – their economic stranglehold weakening as the Global South rises. We draw inspiration from all our martyrs. We will not allow their sacrifice to be in vain. History is on our side.

That is why they lie about who won the war.

That is why we must tell the truth.

Appendix: Data, Sources, and Methodology

This appendix provides a comprehensive overview of the data sources, calculations, and methodological principles underpinning this study. It is intended to offer transparency and a centralised resource for readers seeking to understand the foundational evidence for the article’s central arguments. The appendix is divided into three sections:

• Data Tables and Sources for Figures: the summary tables as they appear in the article
• Methodological Notes: explanations of how data were calculated and interpreted, including key comparative data tables
• Verbatim Data Source Excerpts: key data tables reproduced directly from primary sources for full transparency

Section 1: Data Tables and Sources for Figures

Section 2: Methodological Notes

GDP and Population Data Methodology

All GDP and population data in this article follow a systematic source hierarchy to ensure consistency and maximise data coverage.

GDP Data

All GDP values are expressed in 1990 International Geary-Khamis dollars for cross-country comparability. Primary GDP figures are sourced from Harrison (1998). Where Harrison does not provide coverage, data are supplemented from Maddison (2010). Alternative sources are used only when both primary sources lack the required data.

The 1941 world GDP total is estimated using the following methodology: beginning with Maddison’s 1940 world total ($4,547 billion), we calculated the weighted average growth rate (4.6%) for countries with continuous 1940–1941 coverage (representing 73.7% of 1940 world GDP) and applied this rate to derive the 1941 global estimate based on 1940 world GDP data. Calculation: $4,547 billion × 1.046 = $4,759 billion.¹³²

For China, only the 1938 GDP figure is available; its 1941 GDP and share of world GDP are estimates.¹³³

Population Data

Population figures primarily derive from the Maddison 2010 database, which provides the most comprehensive coverage for the countries and time periods examined. While Harrison (1998) utilised an earlier version of Maddison’s dataset (now unavailable), this article uses the 2010 revision for consistency. Where Maddison lacks coverage, alternative sources or interpolation methods are employed. Specifically, USSR population data for 1941 and 1946 are sourced from Statista (2025), with values for 1942–1945 derived through linear interpolation.¹³⁴

We acknowledge that linear interpolation during wartime represents a simplified assumption that does not capture actual demographic disruptions; these figures should be considered rough estimates only.

Note

All interpolated or derived values represent methodological compromises necessitated by gaps in the historical record. Where territorial boundaries changed during the period under study, we use the boundaries as defined by the primary source for each respective year.

Note on Casualty Calculations for the World Anti-Fascist War

This study documents deaths only. Our total of 85.3 million deaths falls at the high end of Western ranges, primarily due to our acceptance of comprehensive national research projects from the nations that suffered most.

• USSR: The figure of 27 million Soviet deaths is from Andreev et al. (1993).¹³⁵
• China (1931–1945): We assert that the WAFW began with Japan’s invasion of Northeast China in 1931. Our total of 24.05 million Chinese deaths is a comprehensive figure derived from multiple components, based primarily on the research of Bian (2012). The calculation is as follows:
  • Direct deaths (1937–1945): about 20.6 million
  • Indirect deaths (1937–1945): about 3 million (primarily from war-induced famine and displacement)
  • Estimated deaths (1931–1937): about 450,000 (an educated estimate, as official figures for this period are unavailable, based on numerous documented incidents during the initial invasion and occupation of Northeast China)
  • Total calculated deaths: about 24.05 million¹³⁶
• India: The calculation of Indian deaths during the WAFW centres on two primary components: military casualties (87,000) and the Bengal Famine of 1943 (3 million) (Sen, 1977). While Indian deaths totalled 3.087 million, we use the consolidated figure of 3 million for analysis.¹³⁷ This rounding does not materially affect any of our calculations – India’s deaths remain 3.5% of global deaths and the Lend-Lease aid per death remains $1,189. Using the round figure of 3 million maintains consistency with our conservative methodological approach while acknowledging that famine deaths, not military casualties, constitute the overwhelming majority of Indian losses.

African Deaths in the World Anti-Fascist War

The assessment of African casualties during the WAFW presents unique challenges due to incomplete colonial record-keeping and historical marginalisation of African losses. This section establishes a conservative baseline of 1.6 million deaths, with a reasonable range of 1.6–2.0 million when accounting for undocumented losses.

Primary Source Documentation

The Ethiopian government’s 1945 memorandum to Allied powers recorded 760,300 deaths during the Italian invasion and occupation (1935–1941), comprising:¹⁴¹

1. 275,000 battlefield deaths
2. 300,000 deaths from war-induced famine and forced displacement
3. 185,300 deaths from massacres, executions, concentration camps, and chemical warfare

This documentation, reported in Del Boca (1969), p. 275, represents the most rigorous national accounting from the African theatre.

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History provides consolidated estimates for the remainder of the continent:¹⁴²

• 475,000 African military personnel deaths (including colonial troops in European and Asian theatres)
• 500,000 civilian deaths from war-related causes (excluding Ethiopia)

These figures synthesise recent scholarship on North African campaigns, colonial troop deployments, and civilian casualties.

Methodological Notes

Consistent with our definition of the WAFW (1931–1945), we include the Italo-Ethiopian War beginning in 1935 as part of global anti-fascist resistance. The documented baseline of 1.74 million deaths derives from primary sources (Ethiopian government) and peer-reviewed academic syntheses (760,300 Ethiopian + 975,000 other African).

Colonial records systematically undercounted African deaths, particularly forced-labour mortality, localised famines, reprisal killings, and scorched earth campaigns. Based on analogous gaps in Asian theatre documentation, a 10–15% adjustment factor could account for these exclusions, yielding an upper bound of 2 million deaths.

Conservative Approach: Using 1.6 million

We deliberately adopt the most conservative figure of 1.6 million African deaths – the absolute lower bound – for several reasons:

• Documentary rigour: This figure requires minimal extrapolation from documented sources and accounts for potential overlap between categories, making it highly defensible on evidentiary grounds.
• Strategic understatement: Using the lowest defensible estimate ensures our broader argument about sacrifice distribution cannot be dismissed as inflated. If anything, we understate African losses.
• Comparative context: Even at 1.6 million deaths – our most conservative estimate – African losses exceeded the combined military deaths of the United States and United Kingdom (847,000 total), demonstrating the profound disparity between who paid the price and who claimed victory.

The actual death toll was almost certainly higher, likely approaching 2 million when accounting for systematic colonial undercounting. However, our methodological conservatism strengthens our central argument: even using minimum estimates, the erasure of African sacrifice from WAFW narratives represents a grave historical injustice.

Death Calculations: Korean and Vietnam Wars

• North Korea (1950–1953): 5–2.5 million deaths. The upper bound derives from Halliday and Cummings (1988): ‘Over 2 million North Korean civilians died and about 500,000 North Korean soldiers’.¹⁴³ This aligns with US Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s admission of killing ‘twenty percent of the population’.
• South Korea (1950–1953): 5–2 million deaths. Shin (2001) notes: ‘Underreporting of war deaths and inadequate death-registration systems following the war render this estimate less than half of reported war-related losses, which are likely to have been between 1.5 and 2 million’.
• Total Korean Peninsula (1950–1953): 3–4.5 million deaths, representing 10–15% of the pre-war population.
• Vietnam (1955–1975): Current Vietnamese government figures document 3.1 million deaths, with some earlier demographic studies reaching as high as 5.1 million.¹⁴⁴

Note: Vietnamese and US deaths calculated as percentage of their respective 1965 populations (midpoint of 1955–1975 war period) to account for demographic changes over the twenty-year conflict. Using a single reference year provides consistent baseline for comparison while acknowledging populations fluctuated throughout the war.

Lend-Lease Aid Calculation

The Department of State (1945) reports total Lend-Lease aid to the British Empire as $30.26921 billion (p. 14, table 2) but does not provide breakdowns for individual Commonwealth nations. To estimate aid distribution among the United Kingdom, British India, Australia, and New Zealand, we developed the following methodology:

Step 1: Calculate Export Proportions Using Table 25 (pp. 42–43)

We calculated each destination’s share of total British Empire Lend-Lease exports, which is $17,954,911. Therefore, for the United Kingdom, the share is: $13,842,043 ÷ $17,954,911= 77.1%.

Step 2: Apply Proportions to Total Aid

We then applied these percentages to the total British Empire aid and rounded them to thousand dollars.¹⁴⁶ Therefore, for the United Kingdom, the estimated aid is: $30,269,210,000 × 77.1% = $23,335,549,000.

Note: Ceylon (Sri Lanka) is included with India in both the source data and our calculations, as the two were administratively linked in US Lend-Lease accounting.

Methodological Limitations:

1. This method assumes aid distribution matched export distribution, which may not reflect actual patterns.
2. Some aid may have been distributed through channels not captured in export data.
3. Military equipment transfers may have followed different allocation patterns than general supplies.

Definitional Note of British Empire

This study employs two distinct definitions of ‘British Empire’ corresponding to their historical usage by the respective governments:

British Definition (Used for Population Data)

For the 1941 population calculations in figure 1 we use the British government’s official definition of the British Empire, which included:

1. Dominions: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Newfoundland (separate from Canada until 1949)
2. The Indian empire: India (including present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), Burma, and Ceylon
3. Colonial empire: colonies, protectorates, and mandated territories across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Pacific, and Mediterranean regions

This comprehensive definition encompasses all territories under British sovereignty or protection, regardless of their degree of self-governance.

United States Definition (Used for Lend-Lease Aid)

For Lend-Lease aid distribution calculations in figure 3, we necessarily adopt the US Department of State’s administrative classification from 1945. The US definition treated the British Empire as follows:

This definition affected how aid was allocated and reported in official US documentation.

The distinction is critical: while the British definition was used for understanding the Empire’s total population and resources, the US definition determined the actual flow and accounting of wartime aid. Our calculations for per capita aid and per death valuations in figure 3 reflect these US administrative categories, not British imperial self-conception.

Calculation of the Eight Richest Imperialist Countries (1900 and 2024)

The comparison stating that ‘the eight richest imperialist countries have fallen from 57.3% of world GDP to 29.9%’ required specific methodological decisions for both historical consistency and political categorisation.

2024 Calculation

The eight richest imperialist countries are identified through GDP ranking among nations classified as imperialist powers. The eight countries are: the US, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Canada. Note that the GDP for these eight countries and world total are in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) sourced from World Bank World Development Indicators, last updated July 2025.

1900 Calculation

The eight powers in 1900 – the US, United Kingdom, German Empire, French Empire, Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan – were all engaged in imperial expansion or colonial administration. Using Maddison (2010) as our primary source, we confronted two specific issues:

1. Austria-Hungary: The Maddison 2010 database does not provide unified data for Austria-Hungary, as the empire had dissolved by the database’s construction. To reconstruct the 1900 Habsburg Empire’s economic weight, we summed the GDP figures for:
   1. Austria
   2. Hungary
   3. Czechoslovakia (as the Czech lands were part of Austria-Hungary in 1900)

This aggregation provides the closest approximation to the actual Austria-Hungarian Empire’s economic output.

2. Poland: Maddison (2010) provides Poland’s GDP for 1900, despite Poland not existing as an independent state (having been partitioned between Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary since 1795). To accurately reflect the 1900 distribution among the partitioning powers, we allocated Poland’s reported GDP as follows:
   1. 60% to the Russian Empire (reflecting Russia’s control of Congress Poland, the largest partition)
   2. 30% to the German Empire (reflecting Prussia’s control of Greater Poland and Pomerania)
   3. 10% to Austria-Hungary (reflecting Austrian control of Galicia)

These percentages approximate the territorial and population distribution of the Polish partitions.

Note on Political Categorisation

The exclusion of Russia from the 2024 list and its inclusion in the 1900 list reflects changed historical circumstances and our analysis of contemporary global power structures. This methodological decision ensures consistency in tracking the economic weight of imperialist powers across time.

The resulting calculation shows these eight imperialist powers controlled approximately 57.3% of world GDP in 1900, compared to the current eight richest imperialist countries’ 29.9% share in 2024.

Section 3: Verbatim Data Source Excerpts

This section reproduces key data tables from foundational sources to provide maximum transparency for the statistical claims made in this article.

Data Used to Generate Figure 1. Economic capacity and population (1941)

Data Used to Generate Figure 2. Late to the fight: troops as a percentage of population (1939–1945)

Data Used to Generate Figure 3. Western calculations on the relative value of a life: Lend-Lease distribution (1941–1945)

Data Used to Generate Figure 4. The economics of delay: military spending commitments

Reader’s Guide to the Four-Layer Endnotes

Part I: How to Read the Four-Layer Endnotes

The Four-Layer Structure of Each Endnote

Each endnote contains multiple layers of information, though only three are visible to readers.

What Each Layer Means

• Layer 1: Context – interpretive framing that explains why this evidence is important
• Layer 2: Verifiable claim – specific facts that can be independently verified
• Layer 3: Sources – where to verify the facts with exact page numbers
• Layer 4: Evidence – research methodology that exists in the database but is not published

Note on claim numbering: Claims are numbered X001, N002, and so on, but the numbering is not consecutive (e.g., 1, 9, 47). This reflects an iterative multi-team research approach in which some claims were merged, moved, or deprecated during the writing process. The gaps are normal.

Example Endnote:

Following the Data Trail: A Simple Example

Main text states: ‘China suffered 24.05 million deaths’

Endnote provides: Basic sources and context

Appendix explains:

• How the 24.05 million was calculated
• Why it differs from Western estimates
• Which sources were used and why

The following section provides methodological context for academic readers.

Part II: Methodology and Principles

Understanding the Research Methodology

This document uses a forensic historiography approach – investigating gaps and erasures in historical records rather than simply accepting established narratives. The endnotes reflect this methodology through a system that separates interpretation from facts and prioritises evidence from the nations that suffered the losses.

Key Methodological Innovations

1. Investigating Erasure, Not Just Recording Events

The research identifies two types of erasure:

• Undercounted deaths – millions missing from mainstream accounts
• Ignored evidence – facts that exist in archives but rarely appear in mainstream histories

2. Temporal Reframing

By starting the World Anti-Fascist War (WAFW) in 1931 (Japan’s invasion of China) rather than 1939, the methodology reveals eight years of resistance erased by Western periodisation.

3. Transparency Through Layers

Unlike traditional footnotes that mix everything together, this endnotes system:

• Separates interpretation from facts
• Documents methodology (even if not published)
• Enables verification at multiple levels
• Shows when sources conflict and explains choices

Critical Reading Questions

As you read, consider:

1. Whose voices are centred? Notice when documentation from victim nations takes precedence over that of external observers.
2. What is being recovered? Many of the facts presented existed in archives but were omitted from mainstream narratives.
3. Why do numbers differ? When you see conflicting estimates, the appendix explains which was chosen and why.
4. What remains unknown? The methodology acknowledges when records were destroyed (as in Burma) and evidence cannot be recovered.

Source Prioritisation and Why It Matters

The Source Hierarchy: A Holistic Approach

This research systematically considered various sources:

1. Primary sources from victim nations – Chinese government surveys, Soviet archives, Vietnamese records
2. Scholarship from affected countries – historians with access to local archives and languages
3. International investigations – UN reports, war crimes tribunals
4. Western sources citing primary evidence – academic works properly documenting original sources
5. Western sources for comparison – to establish what mainstream narratives claim

Why This Prioritisation?

Victim nations had better direct access to the information needed to document their own losses. The figure of 24.05 million Chinese deaths comes from historian Bian Xiuyue of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, whose 2012 book documents approximately 23.6 million deaths from 1937 to 1945, plus the author’s estimate of 450,000 deaths from 1931 to 1937. Separately, the Chinese government’s decade-long survey documented 35 million total casualties (including both dead and wounded). When comprehensive victim-nation research shows 24.05 million deaths while Western estimates show only 14–20 million, the discrepancy reveals systematic undercounting in mainstream historiography. The methodology prioritises rigorous scholarship and surveys from affected nations over external estimates.

Strategic Use of Perpetrator Admissions

When perpetrators admit damaging facts, these serve as conservative baselines. For example, when British Colonial Office records admit a 10% mortality rate in Nigerian tin mines, the actual rate was likely higher. Even the minimum admissions reveal severe exploitation.

Understanding Conservative Estimates

Throughout this work, the methodology generally uses conservative estimates from victim nations’ own documentation, though the approach varies based on available evidence and attribution challenges. This means:

• The actual human cost was likely higher than stated.
• Even these minimum figures reveal systematic erasure.
• Conservative numbers typically strengthen arguments, but the selection process reflects evidentiary complexities.
• When ranges exist, the methodology varies by case: for Africa, using 1.6 million (from a 1.6–2.0 million range) reflects the challenge of determining which deaths are primarily attributable to the war versus other causes – a question that remains understudied despite almost equal likelihood of higher numbers; for Indochina, using 1.5 million reflects documented undercounting; for the Philippines, using 765,000 (a midpoint) balances sources suggesting even higher figures.

The Substantive Innovation: Connecting Buried Evidence

Beyond the methodological innovations, this research assembles scattered and minimised evidence into a coherent pattern that reveals the West’s strategies.

Corporate Complicity

• IBM’s Thomas Watson befriended US President Franklin D. Roosevelt while receiving Hitler’s medals and automating the Holocaust with punch card systems.
• General Motors claimed tax write-offs for Wehrmacht truck factories while producing vehicles that invaded the Soviet Union.
• Two hundred and fifty US corporations operated in Nazi Germany as late as 1941.

Protection of War Criminals

• Churchill’s secret memos ordered protection of Italy’s highest-ranking war criminals, including Badoglio.
• General Douglas MacArthur freed all 3,607 Unit 731 members who tortured prisoners to death, paying them for their data.
• Nobusuke Kishi went from war criminal to prime minister in nine years with CIA orchestration.

Strategic Calculations

• The atomic bombings targeted Soviet and Chinese influence more than Japan – which was already defeated.
• The Second Front was systematically delayed by 730 days while the Soviet Union bled.
• Lend-Lease aid reveals a racial calculus: whites received $442 per person; non-whites received $4.40 per person – a 101:1 ratio.

The Death Rate Arithmetic

• Socialist forces: 59.8% of all WAFW deaths
• Colonised peoples: 13.1% of deaths
• Anglo-Americans: 1% of deaths
• This pattern continued through Korea (92% Korean/Chinese deaths) and Vietnam (98% Southeast Asian deaths)

These documented facts, usually scattered across specialised archives and minimised in mainstream histories, are brought together here with full citations. The endnotes don’t just provide sources – they reveal a systematic pattern of complicity that mainstream narratives work to obscure.

Understanding the Appendix Structure

The appendix provides complete transparency through three sections:

Section 1: Data Tables and Sources for Figures

Clean presentation of the data as it appears in the main text, with source attribution.

Section 2: Methodological Notes

Detailed explanations of:

• How calculations were performed
• Why certain sources were chosen over others
• How conflicting estimates were resolved
• What assumptions were made and why
• Conservative estimation principles

Section 3: Verbatim Data Source Excerpts

Original tables reproduced exactly as they appear in primary sources, allowing readers to verify all calculations themselves.

Part III: Research Infrastructure and Technical Infrastructure: Industrial-Strength Citation Management

For researchers interested in replicating the methodology or understanding the full scope of findings.

Abstract

This section documents a novel research infrastructure combining Zotero with supplemental software and development practices to manage more than 200 claims and more than 400 citations across a globally distributed research team. The system enforces the same four-layer separation of concerns defined in Part I (here presented from a workflow perspective: interpretation, facts, sources, methodology) while maintaining complete verification trails.

System Architecture

Core Components

1. Zotero as Data Layer

• Case items – store claims with four-layer structured notes
• Book Section items only – every citation requires specific page numbers
• Map items – shared research reports and methodology documentation
• Flat repository structure – sequential numbering (80WAFW-001 through 80WAFW-999)

2. Four-Layer Separation

• Layer 1: Context (interpretive) → published
• Layer 2: Verifiable claim (factual) → published
• Layer 3: Sources (citations) → published
• Layer 4: Evidence (methodology and verification) → archived

3. Verification Infrastructure

• Software-assisted initial verification (pattern detection at scale)
• Mandatory paired human review (catches systematic biases)
• Colour-coded tracking (green, orange, yellow, red flags)
• Consensus requirement before approval
• Full audit trail in Layer 3

Key Technical Innovations

Book-Sections-Only Architecture for Books

Every book citation is a complete Book Section with full metadata. Benefits:

• Self-contained records (no dependency failures)
• Bibliography creation software code automatically de-duplicates
• Simpler export/import pipelines
• Each citation links to multiple claims via the Extra field

Structured Note Templates

Every case item requires a note with an exact structure:

• Claim ID: X001
• Claim name: [descriptive]
• Claim context: [Layer 1 – interpretive]
• Verifiable claim: [Layer 2 – factual]
• Claim sources: [Layer 3 – citations]
• Claim evidence: [Layer 4 – methodology]
• Verification note: [paired review documentation]
• Additional information: [optional]

Software Pipeline

Export Infrastructure

• Zotero → CSV (v63 script): Extracts four-layer structure, generates Chicago-style notes formatting
• CSV → Word (VBA v64): UTF-8 handling, DOCX fallback, publication-ready endnotes

Version Control Strategy

• Dedicated backup machine with snapshots
• Collection-level RDF exports
• Deprecation collections (never delete)
• External metadata tracking in spreadsheets, json and markdown files.

Review Process

• Software-assisted systems enable four rounds of review of claims and citations to address the many conflicting facts and interpretations. Each round included extensive review by researchers.

Implementation Requirements

Technical Stack

• Zotero 6+ with Better BibTeX
• Node.js for export scripts
• Excel or LibreOffice for CSV manipulation
• Word with VBA support
• Cloud storage for PDF repository

Conclusion

This methodology demonstrates how historical research can benefit from software development best practices while maintaining scholarly rigour. The four-layer architecture enables teams to challenge established narratives through systematic, transparent, and reproducible research.

Key Takeaways for Researchers:

• Separation of concerns (interpretation, facts, sources, methodology) improves clarity
• Structured data enables verification at scale
• Multiple stages of review catch systematic biases
• Comprehensive source evaluation strengthens claims
• Complete audit trails defend controversial findings

The infrastructure investment pays dividends when defending research that challenges dominant historiography.

Endnotes

Bibliography

Research for this document has been conducted collectively for over a year and has received contributions from many scholars and socialist practitioners. This document was compiled with data and charts provided by Global South Insights (GSI), with editing and coordination by Gisela Cernadas, Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, Tica Moreno, and Deborah Veneziale. The data and charts for Part IV of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.

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