Trumpism, fascism, and political realities in the United States

Paul Le Blanc
11 June, 2024


First published at Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.


Donald Trump represents a kind of politics that has powerfully transformed political realities in the United States, a kind of politics labeled by some as Trumpism. This useful label helps us understand that regardless of what happens to Donald Trump – whether he finally goes to prison or once again takes command of the U.S. Presidency, whether he lives for another decade or dies tomorrow – Trumpism will be with us for a long time. Before examining Trumpism, let us pause to consider the person with whose name this “ism” is identified.

One approach to this task might involve working our way through the alphabet. Beginning with the letter “a” – and setting aside rude and insulting expletives – we come upon the word “arrogant,” which certainly fits, although this quality is, sadly, not unique to Trump.

The qualities of Donald Trump certainly include dynamics reflecting The Three Bs – bigot, bully, and braggart. His bigotry reflects deep currents within the culture, the attitudes, and the psychological make-up of millions of people in the United States. He has shown that, when it suits him, he can assume a bullying stance and tone, whipping many into submission – intimidating some, delighting others. The bragging takes many forms: a “go-getter” who compulsively highlights his achievements but also claims to have gone further and gotten more than is actually the case; an ignorant man who glorifies his ignorance (“I don’t read books!”) while claiming to know far more than he knows; someone who exaggerates the esteem in which people hold him and takes credit for accomplishments that are not his own. One should add a fourth “b” – billionaire, adding luster and resources and authority to all that is involved in the narcissistic self-construction of the person who is Donald Trump.

Starting with the next letter of the alphabet, we can note that Trump is quintessentially, and very proudly, a capitalist, and there are thirty-four felony convictions which cause many to label him a crook.
Trump and Trumpism

Jumping ahead to another letter in the alphabet, there are many who insist that he is a fascist. Others question whether he is consistent and coherent enough to play the role of a Mussolini or a Hitler, insisting that the term is not useful in defining Trump. Some add that the term “fascist” has largely become a meaningless epithet – a freely-used insult applied to ideas and practices and people we find oppressive. Trump himself uses it (jumbling it with such words as “Marxists” and “Communists” and “terrorists” and “very bad people”) to denounce enemies lurking in the courtroom, in the mainstream news media, in the government, and in the Democratic Party.

How disciplined and single-minded is Trump as a political leader? He could hardly be compared favorably to a Churchill or a Reagan, let alone to a Mussolini or a Hitler. “By the spring of 2020,” according to New York Times chronicler Maggie Haberman, “it had become clear to many of his top advisors that Trump’s impulse to undermine existing systems and bend institutions to suit his purposes was accompanied by erratic behavior and levels of anger requiring others to try to keep him on track nearly every hour of the day.”1

It is instructive to consider the experience of Steve Bannon, one of the most focused far-right ideologues serving as a central advisor in the early phase of the Trump administration, as reported by Michael Wolff:


Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru – or inscrutable God.2

Over time, Bannon would become exasperated and disillusioned, realizing that the details of the right-wing “populist” agenda he envisioned “were entirely captive to Trump’s inattention and wild mood swings. Trump, Bannon had long ago learned, ‘doesn’t give a fuck about the agenda – he doesn’t know what the agenda is.’”3

One is struck by reports from Trump’s so-called press conference of May 31, 2024, after his felony convictions. Far from a defiant right-wing or fascist clarion call, “the thing was kind of a slog,” according to A.O. Scott of the New York Times. Scott adds: “Mr. Trump has never been an orderly orator or a methodical builder of arguments; he riffs and extemporizes, free-associates and repeats himself, straying from whatever script may be at hand.” Scott reports that “his manner was subdued” and “curiously flat: a rehash of the trial, with a few gestures toward the larger political stakes.” Rex Huppke of USA Today was less charitable, describing it as “a rambling, incoherent mess,” with Trump claiming that witnesses in his trial were “literally crucified,” that President Joe Biden wants to “stop you from having cars,” and that the judge who will sentence him on July 11 is “really a devil.” Hafiz Rashid of the New Republic commented: “At times, his words were hard to follow, as the first convicted felon former president went off on tangents with sentences with no clear end.”4

But what can be termed Trumpism transcends the personal limitations and dysfunctionality of this aging individual. Three essential elements hold together this broad entity that we are labelling Trumpism.

One element is armed and dangerous – the forces that came together to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which included the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, some of the more militant components of the Tea Party movement, latter-day partisans of the old Southern Confederacy, various Nazi and white supremacist groups. U.S. General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed the groups in a January 2021 notebook, with the comment, “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.” According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: “Some were the new Brown Shirts, a U.S. version, Milley concluded, of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party that supported Hitler. It was a planned revolution. Steve Bannon’s vision coming to life. Bring it all down, blow it up, burn it, and emerge with power.” These once-marginalized elements had come into the political mainstream, and had grown substantially, with the active encouragement of Donald Trump and others around him. But this cunning, avaricious, profoundly limited individual and his acolytes were hardly capable of controlling them.5

A second element essential to Trumpism’s make-up can be found in a quite different cluster of conservative entities and individuals drawn together in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 –The Presidential Transition Project. Founded in the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation has served as a center for conservative academics, intellectuals, and policy-makers since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Its newest effort is a volume of 900 pages, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, meant to serve as a policy-making guide for a second Trump administration. “This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.” It is worth noting that Trump is by no means the centerpiece of this document – rather, reference is made to “the next conservative President.” Trump is mentioned frequently and very respectfully, but the Heritage Foundation, its collaborators, and its program are framed as entities transcending this individual.6

(Also worth noting are a few odd wrinkles in this “Conservative Promise,” including a seeming overestimation of “the Left,” combined with an apparent borrowing of left-wing ideas – to be discussed in the final section of this analysis.)

The third essential element in Trumpism is today’s Republican Party. Leading figures and staffers of that party – as was the case with the conservative mainstream as a whole – did not begin as Trump supporters. One knowledgeable Republican operative, Tim Miller, describes what happened this way:


When the Trump Troubles began there wasn’t a single one in our ranks who would ever have said they were in his corner. To a person we found him gauche, repellent, and beneath the dignity of the public service we bestowed with bumptious regard. We didn’t take him seriously. … And you wouldn’t have caught us dead in one of those gaudy red baseball caps.

But, at first gradually and then suddenly, nearly all of us decided to go along. The same people who roasted Donald Trump as an incompetent menace in private served his rancid baloney in public when convenient. They continued to do so even after the mob he summoned stained the party and our ideals and the halls of the Capitol with their shit.7

Miller offers an insider’s view of a terrible cynicism permeating the Republican Party leadership, which contributed to Trump’s triumph within its ranks. Seeing the political arena as “a big game” through which – by winning – they “awarded themselves the status of public service, the Republican ruling class dismissed the plight of those we were manipulating, growing increasingly comfortable using tactics that inflamed them, turning them against their fellow man.” Miller and other operatives “advanced arguments that none of us believed” and “made people feel aggrieved about issues we had no intent or ability to solve.” He confesses that a quiet and unacknowledged racism was often employed. And “these tactics became not just unchecked but supercharged by a right-wing media ecosystem that we were in bed with and that had its own nefarious incentives, sucking in clicks and views through rage hustling without any intention of delivering something that might bring value to ordinary people’s lives.” Miller concludes:


Should it have come as a surprise that a charlatan who had spent decades duping the masses into joining his pyramid schemes and buying his shitty products would excel in such an environment? Someone who had a media platform of his own and a reptilian instinct for manipulation? Someone who didn’t hesitate to say the quiet part aloud?8

“Donald Trump cannot succeed alone,” mused Liz Cheney. “He depends upon enablers and collaborators.” Cheney, a lifelong conservative Republican and former Congressperson from Wyoming who resisted – more doggedly than most – Trump’s efforts to bully the Republican Party into supporting him, ended up lamenting that “we have now learned that most Republicans currently in Congress will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is. … I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our Republic.”9

Tim Miller identifies psychological reasons for this in discussing one of his friends. “Caroline has been sucked in by the cult,” he concludes. “She is obsessed with Trump and adores him, as incommodious as that may seem.” He sees a very dark dimension in this: “She’s the masochistic follower who feels a compulsion to be tested, abused and forced to prove they are deserving of the leader’s love over and over and over again.”10

Adam Kinzinger, former Republican Congressman from Illinois, reflects on the psychology of some of his colleagues, commenting: “More than they fear death, they fear being kicked out of a tribe, and they fear losing an identity.” The tribe is the Republican Party, and as for the identity: “You’re going to lose your identity as a member of Congress.”11According to Liz Cheney: “So strong is the love of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump.”12

Of course, the Republican Party has a long and complex history. Just as in the case of the other essential elements of Trumpism, it did not begin with Trump and will not end with him. He can be credited with playing the important role of helping to bring these elements together – but regardless of what happens to Trump, the larger phenomenon of “Trumpism” will be with us for some time to come.
Fascism of the past … and fascism in the making

One thing more. We are dealing with a global phenomenon noted by many different observers – involving powerful movements and, sometimes, governments in a diverse range of countries (Argentina, Brazil, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and more). A combination of terms describes what is happening – right-wing populism, authoritarian xenophobic ultra-nationalism, etc. – indicating its complex content. Sometimes the word “fascism” is applied, but the term quasi-fascism seems more apt. The prefix quasi- means “resembling” and “having some, but not all of the features of.” The term quasi-fascism, in the present moment, can be understood as “fascism in the making.”

Fascism has been much analyzed and debated – among scholars as well as among left-wing theorists and activists. Here we will restrict ourselves to touching, first, on one of the earliest explorations in 1923 by Clara Zetkin (a close comrade of Rosa Luxemburg and a pioneer of German Communism), followed by 1940 comments of Leon Trotsky.

The global quality of this development was captured in the opening sentence of Zetkin’s 1923 analysis: “Fascism is the concentrated expression of the general offensive undertaken by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat.”13It should be recalled that this particular “concentrated expression” was not embraced by the entire capitalist class – larger sections of the British bourgeoisie preferred support to Neville Chamberlin or Winston Churchill rather than Oswald Mosley, for example, and in the United States some elements from the capitalist class helped craft the New Deal program advanced by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But we cannot understand the realities of that time, and of our own, unless we engage with the global dimension stressed by Zetkin.

This global dimension is inseparable from another aspect of the reality that Zetkin identifies as a primary root of the fascist development, “the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois State.” She adds that “symptoms of this decay of capitalism were observed even before the [First World] War.” But the catastrophic war “shattered capitalist economy to its foundation.” The result was “not only … the colossal impoverishment of the proletariat, but also … deep misery for the petty bourgeoisie, the small peasantry and the intellectuals.” As Zetkin notes, “all these elements had been promised that the war would bring about an amelioration of their material conditions. But the very opposite has happened,” with not only the devastation of war, but also a sudden, massive proletarianization, combined with mass unemployment, among “the former middle classes.” She observes: “It was among these elements that Fascism recruited quite a considerable contingent.”14

According to Zetkin, “the second root of Fascism lies in the retarding of the world revolution by the treacherous attitude of the reformist leaders.” She is referring here to the massive Social Democratic parties and unions. It is worth considering at length what she describes:


Large numbers of the petty bourgeoisie, including even the middle classes, had discarded their war-time psychology for a certain sympathy with reformist socialism, hoping that the latter would bring about a reformation of society along democratic lines. They were disappointed in their hopes. They can now see that the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie, and the worst of it is that these masses have now lost their faith not only in the reformist leaders, but in socialism as a whole. These masses of disappointed socialist sympathisers are joined by large circles of the proletariat, of workers who have given up their faith not only in socialism, but also in their own class. Fascism has become a sort of refuge for the politically shelterless.15

This provides the analytical framework for Zetkin’s understanding of fascism. She makes a major point of distinguishing fascism from authoritarian right-wing violence such as that employed by forces around the reactionary military leader Miklós Horthy, savagely repressing Socialist and Communist workers in Hungary in 1919, replacing an abortive workers’ government with a right-wing dictatorship.

Zetkin insisted that this was not fascism: “Although the methods of both are similar, in essence they are different.” She explained: “The Horthy Terror was established after the victorious, although short-lived, revolution of the proletariat had been suppressed, and was the expression of vengeance of the bourgeoisie. The ringleaders of the White Terror were a quite small clique of former officers.” In contrast, fascism “is not the revenge of the bourgeoisie in retaliation for proletarian aggression against the bourgeoisie, but it is a punishment of the proletariat for failing to carry on the [socialist] revolution begun in Russia. The Fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wide elements of the population.”16

Zetkin offers a complex and expansive understanding of fascism’s meaning:


The bourgeoisie wants to reconstruct capitalist economy. Under the present circumstances reconstruction of bourgeois class domination can be brought about only at the cost of increased exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is quite aware that the soft-speaking reformist socialists are fast losing their hold on the proletariat, and that there will be nothing for the bourgeoisie but to resort to violence against the proletariat. But the means of violence of the bourgeois States are beginning to fail. They therefore need a new organisation of violence, and this is offered to them by the hodge-podge conglomeration of Fascism. For this reason the bourgeoisie offers all the force at its command in the service of Fascism. Fascism has diverse characteristics in different countries. Nevertheless it has two distinguishing features in all countries, namely, the pretence of a revolutionary programme, which is cleverly adapted to the interests and demands of the large masses, and, on the other hand, the application of the most brutal violence.17

Zetkin’s analysis became influential within the early Communist International, although it was gradually adulterated, dogmatized, and diluted in the years stretching from 1923 to the Comintern’s 1943 dissolution. But it is clearly evident in Leon Trotsky’s end-of-life effort to summarize the essentials in his 1940 discussion of political perspectives in the United States. The bottom-line for revolutionaries – which constituted a headline of this section of the document – adds up to eight words: “Fascism Will Come Only If We Fail.” But, of course, Trotsky has much more to say. Two excerpts, however, will be sufficient. Here is the first:


In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses; of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted – but there was no party capable of taking the power; as a reaction came fascism.18

Here is the second excerpt:


We must not identify war dictatorship – the dictatorship of the military machine, of the staff, of finance capital – with fascist dictatorship. For the latter there is first necessary a feeling of desperation of large masses of the people. When the revolutionary parties betray them, when the vanguard of workers shows its incapacity to lead the people to victory, then the farmers, the small businessmen, the unemployed, the soldiers, etc. become capable of supporting a fascist movement, but only then.19

The fascism described by Zetkin and Trotsky has not crystallized in the United States, but a plausible argument could be made that the converging elements of Trumpism represent fascism in the making.
The power, failure and future of the U.S. left

There are riddles to be solved. One involves precisely how the perspectives of Zetkin and Trotsky apply to the realities of the United States. Another involves the earlier mentioned “few odd wrinkles” in the Heritage Foundation’s “Conservative Promise” document of 2025. In solving these riddles, we will – hopefully – get a better sense of political realities in the United States, as well as the power, the failure, and the possible future of the U.S. Left.

We have already noted the global dimensions – no less the case now than was true in the time of Zetkin and Trotsky – of the issue we are dealing with. More than this, we are also seeing, in our time as in theirs, a decades-long crisis of capitalism which has generated capitalist policies detrimental to the living standards and to the quality of life for the laboring millions in multiple countries, including our own – the decades’ long restructuring of the economy associated with “globalization.” Catastrophic impacts of global environmental degradation, as well as imperialist violence on multiple fronts, are also in evidence.

On the other hand, at least superficially, the organized Left (whether headed by socialist or communist parties, militant trade unions, or whatever) is far from posing any revolutionary threat or even maintaining a credible presence – at least in Donald Trump’s homeland, the United States of America. This makes the Heritage Foundation’s “Conservative Promise” document seem an absurd, scare-mongering, slanderous exercise when (in the same breath as its complaints about the Democratic Party) it raises a hullabaloo about “the Left” and “the Marxists.”

Trotsky’s apparent promise was that we on the Left will have a shot at making a revolution before the threat of fascism becomes serious. This is how many of us understood the bald assertion that “Fascism Will Come Only If We Fail.” The possibility of Trumpism morphing into fascism would thereby be precluded. But this involves a serious misunderstanding of our history, which in a unique way does correspond to the development described by Zetkin and Trotsky. In an important sense, the scare-mongering conservatives of the Heritage Foundation have a point.

Over the past century, the organized Left has had powerful impact, influencing politics, laws, consciousness and culture within the United States. The labor movement, the waves of feminism, the anti-racist and civil rights movements, the struggles against the Vietnam war, the various student movements, and more – instrumental in bringing about far-reaching changes on the American scene over many decades – would not have been nearly as effective (and might not have come into existence) without the essential organizing efforts of left-wing activists.

This was accompanied by another development, however. Although a significant element among the left-wing activists insisted on the need for political independence from the pro-capitalist political parties, this was largely overpowered by a deep adaptationist trend. In the Red Decade of the 1930s, convergence between socialist-minded forces and a somewhat expansive social liberalism was especially accelerated, as the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) “stole” many reform components of the socialist program. This was done, as FDR insisted, to save capitalism during the angry Depression years – but also to ensure the continuing popularity and election of FDR. More than this, the bulk of the organized Left was absorbed into the New Deal coalition.20

Over half a century, six decisive pivots have made absorption of the organized Left into the Democratic Party almost complete. (1) The trade union movement of the 1930s – particularly the dynamically left-leaning new Congress of Industrial Organizations – formed a firm alliance with FDR’s New Deal Democrats. (2) A 1935 decision by the Communist International under Joseph Stalin to form a “People’s Front” alliance with liberal capitalists such as FDR, brought the dynamic U.S. Communists into the Democratic Party coalition. (3) At the start of the Cold War, the bulk of the organized labor movement (along with most moderate socialists) embraced the Democratic Party’s anti-Communist and liberal capitalist agenda, leading to a broad liberal capitalist “social compact” and consensus, from the late 1940s through the 1950s. (4) The civil rights coalition of the early 1960s became intimately entwined with the party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. (5) Through the 1970s and 1980s, much of the 1960s “new left” would commit to the reform wing of the Democratic Party. (6) As the twenty-first century began to unfold, new waves of young activists joined with older layers – amid radical-sounding promises and soaring hopes – to put Barak Obama in the White House.

From the early twentieth century, the organized Left had been a dynamic force of considerable significance in the United States. Among workers and the oppressed, it had mobilized effective struggles that won genuine victories. It inspired hopes for further effective struggles that would advance human rights, improve the lives of the working-class majority, and bring to birth a better world. Among the wealthy and powerful, of course, it inspired fear and rage.

By the end of the century, through the process we have traced, the organized Left had largely evaporated. Some of its rhetoric, many of its values, and much of its reform agenda (often in diluted form) could be found in the Democratic Party. Yet a sincere and practical commitment to replace the economic dictatorship of capitalism with the economic democracy of socialism was no longer on the table. Nonetheless, among the wealthy and powerful there were those who still felt fear and rage, and also a deep determination to recover lost ground.21

The analyses of Zetkin and Trotsky can be adapted to this quite different context. “Soft-speaking reformist socialists are fast losing their hold on the proletariat,” according to Zetkin in the 1920s, particularly because “the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie.” A hundred years later, in the United States, a highly compromised “working-class vanguard” in the trade unions (AFL-CIO) and in the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party had, arguably, shown “its incapacity to lead the people to victory,” particularly as the global capitalist economy entered an extended period of crisis. The reformists’ capitalist partners – initially so generous – felt compelled to restructure the economy at the expense of the working class, and the reformists felt able to do little more than adapt. As “too big to fail” corporations crashed the economy in 2008-2009, the newly elected radical-reformer, Barak Obama, hurried to bail out the corporate elite at the expense of the working-class majority. In such a situation – as security, stability, and the quality of life give way to social and economic catastrophe – masses of people who were disillusioned with this variant of the so-called “Left” were inclined, inevitably, to look for alternatives among right-wing demagogues.

The demagogues can be as crude as Trump, but they can be as polished as the Heritage Foundation. This brings us to another odd wrinkle in the “Conservative Promise” document. We have seen the logic of its “overestimation” of the Left. But more than once, it sounds a seemingly left-wing note, as in this radically flourished description of the American Revolution:


The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.” It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.22

The seemingly left-wing note is sounded again and again. “Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them,” we are told. “They centralize power up and away from the American people.” The Conservative Promise adopts the tone of many a left-wing agitator: “America’s corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated – self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty. They certainly do not trust the American people, and they disdain the Constitution’s restrictions on their ambitions.” Taking advantage of the fact that so much of the so-called “Left” has unified with the Democratic Party elite’s pro-capitalist liberalism, the document announces that “socialists … are almost always well-to-do,” insisting that “the Left does not believe that all men are created equal – they think they are special,” adding: “Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions, our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a step closer to disappearing.”23

Despite the radical-democratic flourishes of The Conservative Promise, however, the bottom line is a defense of unrestrained capitalism. The primary goal of the President of the United States, we are told, should be to unleash “the dynamic genius of free enterprise,” because in countries where there is “a high degree of economic freedom, elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge.” According to The Conservative Promise, the elitism, corruption, greed, and contempt for ordinary people prevalent in the political sphere is miraculously absent in the economic sphere. Capitalist “free enterprise” is very wonderful indeed: “People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens.”24

From certain things The Conservative Promise says, and from what it fails to say, one can only assume that the document’s authors would welcome whatever support can be rendered to the realization of this glowing vision by forces that mobilized on January 6, 2021 to keep Donald Trump in office – Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, right-wing militias, white nationalist contingents, etc.

There is definitely a fascist potential in the current situation – some of the elements appear to have been crystallizing before our eyes. Whether or not this crystallization is completed, it seems clear that a different pathway is required for the Left than that of being trapped in an accommodation with capitalism, especially in this extended period of capitalist crisis and catastrophe. Revolutionaries will do what they can to rebuild and renew an orientation, a set of struggles, a movement and organization, consistent with the insights of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, and of the many others who recognized that we face the fateful choice of genuine socialism or horrific barbarism.

Underlying crises, deep-felt oppressions, and repressed rage have periodically resulted in amazing activist explosions – such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Black Lives Matter upsurges, tilting political realities qualitatively leftward. This energizes and expands the numbers of those on the activist Left. Of course, such developments inevitably also deepen the fear and increase the determination of those on the Right – there’s no stopping that. Partisans of Trumpism will always use such things for their own purposes.

The problem is that the mass leftward rage and energies – which cannot be sustained indefinitely – presently have nowhere to go, once the dust settles, except in one of two directions: either apathetic quiescence or reformist channels. Those channels are compromised by corporate liberalism and have proved incapable of transcending the economic system that generates the crises, oppressions, and rage. The creation of something better and more effective than that appears to be on the agenda.251

Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), p. 429.
2

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018), pp. 115-116.
3

Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2019), p. 29.
4

A.O. Scott, “What Donald Trump Didn’t Say After His Trial,” New York Times, June 1, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/books/review/donald-trump-speech-verdict.html; Rex Huppke, “Guilty Trump’s Press Conference Was a Disaster,” USA Today, May 31, 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/05/31/trump-verdict-press-conference-republicans-replacement-election/73923859007/; Hafiz Rashid, “Trump Loses It Like Never Before in Wildly Incoherent Press Conference,” The New Republic, May 31, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/post/182142/trump-incoherent-post-guilty-verdict-meltdown-press-conference. For the full press conference, see: “Former President Trump Conference Following Guilty Verdict,” C-Span, May 31, 2024, https://www.c-span.org/video/?536064-1/president-trump-press-conference-guilty-verdict
5

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021), pp. 273-274; Matt Prince, “What is President Trump’s Relationship with Far-Right and White Supremacist Groups?,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-09-30/la-na-pol-2020-trump-white-supremacy; Aram Roston, “The Proud Boys Are Back: How the Far-Right is Rebuilding to Rally Behind Trump,” Reuters, June 3, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/.
6

Spencer Chretien, “Project 2025,” The Heritage Foundation, Jan. 31, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025; Project 2025 - The Presidential Transition Project: Policy Agenda, including the text of Paul Dans and Steven Groves, ed., Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, https://www.project2025.org/policy/. For critical evaluations, see: E. Fletcher McClellan, “A Primer on the Chilling Far-Right Project 2025 Plan for 2nd Trump Presidency,” Lancasteronline, June 3, 2024, https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/a-primer-on-the-chilling-far-right-project-2025-plan-for-2nd-trump-presidency-column/article_ef88858e-1e9b-11ef-9e81-bf8485299455.html; Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “Project 2025: The Far-Right Playbook for American Extremism,” https://globalextremism.org/project-2025-the-far-right-playbook-for-american-authoritarianism/. The quotation describing who composed to Project 2025 document is in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 2-3.
7

Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (New York: Harper, 2022), p. xii.
8

Miller, p. xx.
9

Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2023), pp. 2, 366.
10

Miller, p. 245.
11

“Former Rep. Kinzinger Reflects on GOP and Future of Democracy in ‘Renegade,’” (interview with Geoff Bennett), PBS News Hour, Nov. 1, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/former-rep-kinzinger-reflects-on-gop-and-future-of-democracy-in-renegade
12

Cheney, p. 2.
13

Clara Zetkin, “Fascism (August 1923),” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/08/fascism.htm
14

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
15

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
16

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
17

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
18

Leon Trotsky, “American Problems” (August 7, 1940), Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-1940 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 337.
19

Trotsky, “American Problems,” p. 338.
20

Details and documentation on the Red Decade can be found in Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 153-198, with aspects of subsequent years touched on in pp. 221-258.
21

This is traced in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton 2009), summarized in Paul Le Blanc, “The Triumphant Arc of US Conservatism,” Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 179-186.
22

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 14.
23

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 8, 10, 15, 16
24

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 14, 15
25

For efforts to define possibilities, see: Paul Le Blanc, “The Third American Revolution: How Socialism Can Come to the United States,” in Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith, eds., Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 249-261; Paul Le Blanc, “Pathways for Building a Revolutionary Party,” International Socialism, issue 164, 17 October 2019, https://isj.org.uk/pathways-for-building-a-revolutionary-party/; Paul Le Blanc, “Bernie Sanders, US Politics, and Socialism Today,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, August 13, 2019, https://links.org.au/paul-le-blanc-bernie-sanders-us-politics-socialism-today; Paul Le Blanc, “The Rise, Fall, and Aftermath of the Sander Challenge,” Irish Marxist Review, Volume 9, Number 27, 2020; Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023), pp. 177-186.

Ian Angus’s ‘The War Against the Commons’: A vital new history of the bloody rise of capitalism

Steve Leigh
12 June, 2024


First published at Firebrand.


In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Occurring at different times in different regions around the world, primitive accumulation is the stage of history during which the ruling class took wealth from the lower classes — unjustly, usually by force or by theft — in order to accumulate the capital they would need to become the capitalist class.

The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is an excellent new book on this history from Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus. It is a beautifully written examination of the rise of capitalism and the destruction of peasant livelihoods as the centuries-old social relations of feudalism were abandoned for a new mode of production. Though it largely focuses on the transformation of feudalism into capitalism in England and Scotland, it has many implications for socialist organizing and for environmentalism today.

Angus’s book is especially valuable for the way it sharply refutes the reactionary thesis of “the tragedy of the commons.” It also provides substantial clarity on Marx’s views of, as he put it, “so-called primitive accumulation.”
The rise of capitalism required the war on the commons

In The War Against the Commons, Angus argues that for hundreds of years, peasants had successfully managed common land to the benefit of all. They democratically decided on its use and did not over-exploit it as the reactionary thesis contends. Often peasants repartitioned the private strips of land around the common area to give every family enough land to survive.

Of course this was not some agrarian utopia. Under feudalism, landlords ruthlessly exploited the masses of peasantry, either as serfs, who were kept in bondage, or as free farmers who were still very much tied to the land. Peasants paid rent or performed service on the lord’s demesne (the lord’s private land, attached to their manor), or both. Peasants’ rights were limited and were at the whim of the lord when it came to justice. During times of war they might be called on to fight and die for the lord’s material interests.

But in return for that exploitation, peasants were allowed the collective use of common areas. The commons were absolutely essential to the livelihoods of the peasants.

Beginning with the rise of the market economy in the 15th century, landlords were under more pressure to raise revenue. As Angus writes, “Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”

There were several related strategies employed by the landlords during this period of primitive accumulation: raising rents, enclosing the commons and adding it to their demesnes, consolidating farms into larger units, and replacing farming with sheep raising. The latter required less labor and created higher profits. Overt time, the economic differentiation of the peasantry — some peasants growing more wealthy while others slipped further into poverty — aided the landlords’ efforts.

The peasant class did not just go along with these land grabs and forcible changes to the previous social arrangement. They continually resisted these attacks that denied their livelihood, and peasant revolts broke out from time to time throughout this entire process.

These revolts peaked at particular times, sometimes culminating in revolutionary situations, such as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381. More often they involved re-taking common lands by tearing down fences and hedgerows. In the 1640s, these peasant revolts intersected with the English Revolution and Civil War.

According to Angus, the peasant revolts did not fuel either side of the Civil War exclusively. Though the Parliamentarians at first seemed to take the side of the peasants against the Royalists, in the end the consolidation of power by Parliament furthered the accumulation of land in the hands of the landlords.

The most radical elements during this period were the Diggers, who tried to extend communal ownership of land both physically and through political organizing.

At the beginning of the war against the commons, the English Crown tried to restrain enclosures. They feared depopulation that would deny the needed soldiers for war; and they also feared social unrest.

Thus, the Crown passed laws to slow down the enclosure process. But landlords, who often controlled the local justices of the peace, prevented effective enforcement of these laws. Over time, Crown resistance to land consolidation and enclosure waned as the new capitalist relations dominated the economy more and more.

Angus also examines the role of the “commonwealth men” who were theoretically against capitalist development, but also opposed peasant resistance to the rising power of capitalism. They were similar to the “feudal socialists” whom Marx and Engels denounced in the Communist Manifesto — the aristocrats who railed against the exploitation of the new capitalist order and attempted to sway the proletariat to their side, while still holding deeply reactionary views. “What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat,” they wrote, “as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.”

Despite the peasant revolts, the dominant trend was toward enclosure and consolidation as rural residents were expelled from the land. Many became vagabonds who tried to survive by begging and stealing. Over time, the peasants who were kicked off the land became the basis of the working class that capitalism needed in industry. Thus, primitive accumulation created the proletarian class even as it destroyed feudalism.

During this era, rural people with small cottages entered the capitalist system directly by working for capitalists as weavers or in other trades under the “putting-out system.” Under this system, merchants would sell raw materials to cottagers who would work it up into products. Merchants would then buy the finished product back at a fixed rate, rather than pay a wage.

Marx called this the “formal subsumption” of labor to capital as opposed to the “real subsumption” of wage labor.
Wage labor was the last resort

When peasants were expelled from the land, wage labor was the last resort for survival. Thus, people saw wage labor as another form of slavery. As Marx wrote in Capital:


A new class of wage-laborers was born in England when great masses of men were suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.

Under feudalism, they had largely controlled their own labor. The work day was governed by the weather, seasons, and other natural conditions. Under capitalism, labor was controlled by the clock and working hours were longer.

To enforce wage labor, the state now dominated by capitalism used draconian methods, including actual slavery. “Poaching” was outlawed for the poor who needed food, but hunting was allowed for the rich who did not need it. For a period, England enforced the death penalty for hundreds of offenses, including poaching and petty theft, and also made regular use of transportation to the colonies in Australia and elsewhere.

The destruction of the old rural economy unleashed more people than the rising capitalist economy could absorb. Even if there was not enough wage work available, vagabonds were punished for not working for a master. The creation of capitalism was based on the horrific oppression of ordinary people.

This process of consolidating capitalism in England took hundreds of years, from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The practice of enclosure persisted well into the 19th century in England. In Scotland, it happened much faster after the English conquest; the results were equally bloody but much more condensed in time.

Apologists for capitalism contend that it made agriculture much more efficient. Angus thoroughly refutes this, showing that many of these improvements arose during the period of peasant management of the commons.

Angus also shows that caloric intake declined as capitalism rose. “Most industrial workers and agricultural laborers were malnourished,” he writes.

“They were less healthy and died younger than their ancestors a century earlier.” According to Angus, “The expansion of the capitalist world system caused a dramatic and prolonged process of impoverishment on a scale unprecedented in recorded history.”
The destructive birth of capitalism

Importantly, Angus explains Marx’s critical views of the war against the commons. Too many would-be Marxists stress the progressive nature of the rise of capitalism. Marx, on the other hand, saw it as a destructive process, even though it ultimately developed the productive forces that would allow the working class to take power and establish communism. As Marx famously put it, “Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Marx preferred to discuss the war against the commons as “original expropriation” rather than primitive accumulation. Marx ultimately felt that “primitive accumulation” was too neutral a term — which is why he often qualified the phrase as so-called primitive accumulation.

Too many people miss Marx’s sarcasm when discussing this issue. Marx made it clear that capitalists stole their wealth from others rather than amassing it through hard work or intelligence, as the capitalist myth would have it. When workers no longer have access to the means of production, they end up having to work for those who stole it from them.

A large part of this original theft came from colonization. Angus explains the process of wealth seizure in the colonies as a further basis for the accumulation of capital in England. The effects on the native population of the Western Hemisphere and on enslaved Africans are well-known. As Marx wrote in Capital: “The veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”

He goes on:


The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent , the beginnings of the conquest and looting of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Thus the issues raised by this history are directly relevant to anticolonial and antiracist struggles today.
Debates on the left and the ongoing relevance of the history of accumulation

According to Angus, the war against the commons continues to this day. He believes Marx saw expropriation as a continual basis of capitalism, not just a contained process occurring at its dawn. Though capitalism now dominates the world economy, the dispossession of the world’s peasantry continues. Capital still accumulates through expropriation.

This bears on current political controversies on the left. David Harvey, for example, focuses in his writings on current “accumulation by dispossession.” Harvey seems to downplay the importance of the basic process of mature capitalism: accumulation by exploitation — in other words, not paying workers the full value of what they produce. Angus does not explicitly endorse Harvey’s position but does argue the importance of the continuation of expropriation of peasant land.

This is an important emphasis which solidifies our understanding: “Since the late 1900s, capital’s continuing war against the commons has dispossessed millions of peasant families in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”

Modern-day peasant resistance to being forced off their land is certainly a struggle that the left should support. Peasants can be allies with workers in the war against capitalism — Marx agreed with this approach. Angus notes the positive attitude Marx had toward the peasant communes in Russia. He thought they could become the basis of a transformation to communism — but importantly only if connected to the international working-class revolution. Marx rejected a utopian view of the peasant commune.

Nor does Marx’s attitude mean that Marxists support the preservation of peasant property even after the working-class revolution. The goal is still collective control of the whole economy, including land, by the population as a whole.

In spite of the need for Marxists to defend the remaining commons, the current context is important. In the period that Angus focuses on in early modern England, capitalism was still forming. Most of the world was pre-capitalist. The seizure of the commons was absolutely essential to the rise of capitalism.

Today, the situation has been transformed. The world economy is now universally capitalist. Even the remaining peasant agriculture is largely commercial and integrated into the capitalist market. Subsistence agriculture, which was the essence of agriculture during the rise of capitalism, is now more marginal.

Over the last 141 years since Marx’s death, much of the common land has been taken by capitalists. The expropriation of peasant land today is a transfer of wealth among participants in the capitalist system. It is no longer the destruction of a pre-capitalist mode of production to make way for capitalism. Today, expropriation is an important supplement to exploitation, but only a supplement.

Contra Harvey, the main emphasis of anticapitalists today needs to be resistance against the exploitation of workers, and opposition to the oppression that divides workers. The form of a worker-peasant alliance will differ from country to country, but defense of peasants should be integrated into the working-class revolution rather than being seen as a separate struggle.

Angus argues that Marx and Engels were more flexible and less dogmatic than later Marxists are. He discusses how Engels was reluctant to give advice to Russian activists because of ignorance of Russian politics. Angus also says that Marx and Engels supported assassination as a political strategy in Russia even while opposing it in Britain.

This attitude is an important corrective to dogmatism. Marxists need to understand the political and economic situation before pronouncing on it. We must learn before we can teach! However, the world has transformed in the last 140 years. The spread of the capitalist system across the world means that Marx’s strategies for the capitalist countries in the 1880s are more applicable across the world today than they were in his time. Although we need to understand the specifics of each situation, the broad contours of the focus on working-class struggle are applicable everywhere. The Communist Manifesto’s famous conclusion, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains,” is even truer today than when Marx and Engels wrote it.

This shift is shown by the changing strategy of Russian Marxists, including the Bolsheviks, before the Revolution. As capitalism developed in Russia in the early 20th century, they moved away from Marx’s positive attitude to the Narodniks, who were oriented to the peasantry. Instead, they focused on organizing the industrial working class.

Finally, Angus raises the very important issue of overcoming the division between the town and country. Marx and Engels were very clear on the importance of spreading the population rather than having it concentrated in cities. They saw this as similar to the abolition of class division. In The Housing Question (1878), Engels wrote, “The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers.”

The War Against the Commons is a brilliant examination of the rise of capitalism. It smashes some of the bases of capitalist ideology, and vindicates the possibility of democratic control of the earth. It makes a valuable contribution to current debates on the left, connecting anticapitalism to defense of the environment. It shows that capitalism has always been opposed to ecological sanity — for example demonstrating the direct connection between capitalism and fossil fuels, especially coal.

For all these reasons, it is a must-read for socialists and for all who care about the future of humanity and the planet.


Steve Leigh (he/him) is a founding member of Firebrand and the Seattle Revolutionary Socialists. He has been an active Marxist since 1971 and was a founding member of the International Socialist Organization. He was a shop steward in SEIU for 35 years and is a member of the retirees chapter of SEIU 925. Read more from Steve on his blog.

Anti-Imperialism then & now: On the principles of anti-imperialism in view of changes in world capitalism

Michael Pröbsting
14 June, 2024


It is an axiom for Marxists that imperialist powers, their rivalry, and their wars are one of the key characteristics of the final stage of capitalism, which has been consequently called “the epoch of imperialism”. It is therefore only coherent that the struggle against imperialist aggression and wars has always been an elementary feature of the revolutionary program in modern times.

While this has been true since the onset of the imperialist epoch at the beginning of the 20th century, it would be mistaken to imagine that the concrete application of these principles and the relevance of its individual elements remain always one and the same. In fact, the concrete application of this program depends on the specific characteristics of a given historic period within this epoch.

In this essay we shall, after a brief summary of the principles of anti-imperialism, elaborate how these principles were applied in different periods in the past and, most importantly, how they need to be applied today. Finally, we will discuss the underlying changes in modern capitalism that influence the concrete application of the anti-imperialist program and the consequences of these changes for Marxist strategy.
Principles of anti-imperialism

Here, we will limit ourselves to briefly summarise the principles of anti-imperialism, since we have elaborated on this in detail in two books and other works.1 Since imperialism is a central feature of modern capitalism, the struggle against it is an elementary feature of working-class policy. In other words, it is the application of the Marxist program and the general methods of the class struggle to the terrain of anti-chauvinist and anti-militarist struggle.

The Marxist program against imperialism is based on the axiom that the working class is by its very nature an international class. As such, its interests are in sharpest contrast to those of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Just as the workers of a given enterprise have no common interests with their boss, so the working class has no common interests with the ruling class of a given imperialist state. Quite the opposite: just as workers want to weaken, defeat and expropriate the owners of “their” corporation, so too do workers of a given imperialist country desire to weaken, defeat and overthrow their ruling class. At the same time, workers in one enterprise share common interests with their colleagues in other companies, which is why they jointly organise in trade unions. The same is the case with workers in one country, as they fundamentally share the same class interests as their colleagues abroad.

Marxists recognise that imperialist capitalism is characterised by the global domination of a handful of Great Powers as well as a number of monopolies. Such a system contains irreconcilable contradictions that necessarily provoke crises, tensions and wars. We therefore refute the pacifist illusion that capitalism could somehow overcome such antagonisms and establish a peaceful capitalist world order — a concept first elaborated by Karl Kautsky and later adopted by social democrats and Stalinists. The only way to abolish death and destruction at the hand of poisonous militarism is to smash the Great Powers, overthrow the ruling capitalist and establish a world federation of workers and peasant republics via the socialist world revolution.

For these reasons, workers in imperialist countries utilise every conflict in which their class enemy is involved to advance their interests and strengthen their fighting power. Historically, this program has been associated with the formula of revolutionary defeatism2 which the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, once defined as follows: “What is meant by the term defeatism? In the whole past history of the party, defeatism was understood to mean desiring the defeat of one’s own government in a war with an external enemy and contributing to such a defeat by methods of internal revolutionary struggle.”3

In the epoch of imperialism, Marxists differentiate between three categories of states: imperialist, (semi-)colonial and (degenerated) workers states. Without understanding the existence of these three fundamental types of class states, it is impossible for socialists to find a correct orientation in the imperialist epoch: “To teach the workers correctly to understand the class character of the state — imperialist, colonial, workers’ — and the reciprocal relations between them, as well as the inner contradictions in each of them, enables the workers to draw correct practical conclusions in situation.”4

Corresponding to such different categories of states, Marxists basically differentiate between two types of wars: wars of oppression and wars of liberation. Wars of oppression are conflicts between two reactionary camps in which the working class does not support either side. Examples for such are conflicts between imperialist states or reactionary civil wars. Wars of liberation can be the struggle of a (semi-)colonial country against an imperialist power; of a nationally oppressed people against the dominating nation; of a progressive camp in a civil war; or of a (degenerated) workers state. In such conflicts, socialists unambiguously support the anti-imperialist or anti-reactionary camp:


Capitalist brigands always conduct a 'defensive' war, even when Japan is marching against Shanghai and France against Syria or Morocco. The revolutionary proletariat distinguishes only between wars of oppression and wars of liberation. The character of a war is defined, not by diplomatic falsifications, but by the class which conducts the war and the objective aims it pursues in that war. The wars of the imperialist states, apart from the pretexts and political rhetoric, are of an oppressive character, reactionary and inimical to the people. Only the wars of the proletariat and of the oppressed nations can be characterized as wars of liberation.5

Different types of wars require different strategies. In conflicts between imperialist states (as well as in conflicts between equally reactionary camps), the principles of international working-class solidarity require socialists to oppose both camps. They must refuse to side with their own ruling class as well as with that of the opposing imperialist camp. Likewise, socialists totally reject any chauvinist propaganda of the ruling class. Instead of supporting their “own” ruling class, they propagate intransigent class struggle (following the famous phrase of Karl Liebknecht in World War I “The main enemy is at home”). This strategy implies in the case of war, as formulated by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in 1914, that revolutionaries strive for the “transformation of the imperialist war into civil war”; that is, advance the proletariats’ struggle for power under the conditions of war. Such a program is the only way to unite the international working class on an internationalist basis and break any “patriotic” unity of workers with “their” imperialist bourgeoisie as well as their lackeys inside the workers movement.

In conflicts between the imperialist bourgeoisie and oppressed peoples, Marxists call on workers and popular organisations around the world to act decisively in the spirit of revolutionary anti-imperialism and working class internationalism. They must unconditionally support the oppressed people against the imperialist aggressors and fight for the defeat of the latter. They need to apply the anti-imperialist united front tactic — this means siding with the forces representing these oppressed people, without giving political support to their respective leaderships (usually petty bourgeois nationalists or Islamists; sometimes even semi-colonial bourgeois states). Socialists in imperialist countries are obligated to fight merciless against the social-chauvinist supporters of Great Power privileges as well as the cowardly centrists who abstain from actively supporting the struggle of the oppressed. Socialists support the Anti-Imperialist Patriotism of the oppressed and help them to develop a socialist, internationalist consciousness. Only on the basis of such a program is it possible for socialists to create the conditions for trust and unity of the workers and poor peasants of the oppressed people with progressive workers in the imperialist countries. Only on such a fundament is it possible to unite the international working class on an internationalist basis. Only with such a strategy is it possible for communists to replace the vacillating petty-bourgeois leaderships of the oppressed masses.6
The relevance of different aspects of the anti-imperialist program in different historic periods

While the above-mentioned principles of anti-imperialism are always relevant in the epoch we are living in, their concrete application depends on the concrete form of the capitalist world order and its inner contradictions. Let us give a brief overview.

In the first period of the imperialism epoch before 1914, tensions between imperialist powers (mainly Britain, France, Germany, Russia, US and Japan) were the dominating feature of the world situation. As is well known, these tensions resulted in the devastating World War I between 1914-18. While the large majority of the Second International capitulated and failed to fight consistently against all imperialist powers, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin organised an internationalist minority — which became the nucleus of the Communist International founded in March 1919 — on the basis of the program of revolutionary defeatism.

Another feature of the pre-1914 period, albeit less pronounced as it would become later, were colonial wars of the imperialist powers — mainly but not exclusively by Britain and France — against the popular uprisings of people of the South. As examples we refer to the anti-British insurrections by the Dervish Movement in Somalia and the Mahdist rebels in Sudan in late 19th century; the uprising of the Herero and the Namaqua against the German rulers in 1904-07; and the so-called Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899-1901.

In the period 1914-45, all types of conflicts took a particularly sharp expression. This period saw two world wars — the first being a conflict between imperialist powers while the second was a combination of inter-imperialist conflicts (US, Britain and France against Germany, Italy and Japan), a conflict between an imperialist power and a degenerated workers state (Germany against the Soviet Union), and national liberation wars (for example, China against Japan and the partisan wars in German-occupied Europe). In addition, there were also a number of other national liberation wars (the Rif War led by Abd el-Krim against Spain and France in 1921-26, the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925, Japan against China from 1931, Italy against Ethiopia in 1935-36) as well as civil wars (Spain 1936-39) in this period.

In all these conflicts, revolutionaries — first the Bolsheviks and the Communist International, and later its successor, Trotsky’s Fourth International — took a defeatist position in inter-imperialist conflicts against both camps but supported the oppressed nations, the Soviet Union and anti-fascist Spain in their wars of liberation.

The period after World War II — more precisely, from the onset of the Cold War in 1947/48 — until the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91 bore several different features compared with the previous period. While inter-imperialist rivalry did not disappear, it became a secondary feature. The reasons for this were, on one hand, the Cold War between the imperialist powers and the Stalinist states (most importantly the USSR) that pushed the former to join forces; on the other, because WWII had resulted in the clear and undisputed absolute hegemony of US imperialism within the capitalist camp. In addition, this period also saw a number of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles that resulted in some important defeats for the Western powers (Vietnam War, Algeria).

The period between 1991 and 2008 — the year of the Great Recession — was characterised by the disappearance of Stalinist workers states and the absolute hegemony of US imperialism. Other imperialist powers — Western Europe, Japan and reemerging Russia under Putin — were too weak to effectively challenge Washington. However, this period — in particular in its late phase — saw the beginning of the decline of the US hegemony. The most important wars in this period were national liberation struggles, such as those of the Iraqi and Afghan people against the US and its allies as well as of the Chechen people against Russia. Other important wars were those in the Balkans in the 1990s. In all these wars, Marxists supported the wars of liberation against imperialist and reactionary aggressors.

The current historic period, which started in 2008, is characterised by the decay of capitalism reflected in economic stagnation, humanitarian and ecological catastrophes, wars and revolutionary crises. In such a period we see basically two types of conflicts: on one hand, there has been a massive acceleration of inter-imperialist rivalry, mainly as a result of the rise of China and Russia as imperialist powers challenging the old Western imperialists; on the other hand, national liberation wars (for example in Afghanistan until 20217, the Ukraine’s war of national defence since February 20228 or the current Gaza War against Israel’s genocide9) or progressive civil wars (in Syria against the Assad tyranny since 2011,10 in Burma/Myanmar since the military coup in 202111) are crucial features of the world situation.12

Important changes in the social-economic physiognomy of imperialist capitalism

There have been several important changes in the social-economic physiognomy of imperialist capitalism in the last hundred years that Marxists have to take into account to understand the character of the current period and the corresponding tasks for the class struggle. Since we have already analysed these developments in much detail we limit ourselves to a brief summary and references to our studies.

First, there has been a dramatic shift of capitalist value production and, correspondingly, of the international working class. At the time of Lenin and Trotsky, the (semi-)colonial countries in the South were still capitalistically backward and industrial production was mostly located in imperialist countries in North America, Western Europe and, to a lesser degree, in Japan. Correspondingly, most of the international working class lived in these imperialist states. However, this has massively changed in the past decades. In 1950 34% of the global industrial workers lived in the South; in 1980 this share has risen to about 50%; and in 2013, 83.5% of all industrial workers lived in semi-colonial countries and emerging imperialist China. In total, about three-quarters of global wage labourers live outside of the Western imperialist countries.13

Correspondingly, the majority of capitalist value production no longer takes place in Western imperialist countries, as the ruling class painfully noticed with all the disruptions of global supply chains in the past years. While the US, Japan, Germany, France, Britain and Italy accounted for about 55% of world’s manufacturing in 1985, this share had declined to less than 30% by 2018.14 (See Table 1)

Table 1. Regional Shares of Global Industrial Value Added in 201915



Region Share

China 24.9%

United States 16.6%

Northeast Asia 8.8%

Japan 6.4%

South Korea 2.4%

Western Europe 8.7%

Southeast Asia (ASEAN) 4.8%

Oceania 1.6%



This changes basically reflect two processes. On one hand, China has emerged as a new imperialist power which is challenging the long-term hegemony of the US.16 This is manifested in the fact that China has become the leading country — together with the US — in the global ranking of the largest corporations in the world (as calculated by the Fortune Global 500 list in Table 2). We see the same picture when it comes to the global ranking of billionaires. (See Table 3) And while China is still behind the US in military expenditures, it has already become the world’s No. 2 (U.S. 916 vs. China 296 billion U.S. Dollar).17

Table 2. Top 10 Countries with the Ranking of Fortune Global 500 Companies (2023)18



Rank Country Companies Share(in%)



1 United States 136 27.2%

2 China (without Taiwan) 135 27.0%

3 Japan 41 8.2%

4 Germany 30 6.0%

5 France 23 4.6%

6 South Korea 18 3.6%

7 United Kingdom 15 3.0%

8 Canada 14 2.8%

9 Switzerland 11 2.2%

10 Netherlands 10 2.0%



Table 3. China and U.S. Lead the Hurun Global Rich List 202119



2021 Share of “Known” Global Billionaires 2021



China 1058 32.8%



U.S. 696 21.6%



On the other hand, this process reflects the increasing dependence of imperialist powers on industrial production in the Global South. Hence, the super-exploitation and control of semi-colonial countries becomes increasingly important for Great Powers. This is even more the case than official figures suggest (usually calculated in US dollars) because these distort the picture as through various mechanism — unequal exchange, currency manipulation, internal calculations within multinational corporations, etc. — the value produced in imperialist countries is overestimated while the share produced in semi-colonial countries is underestimated.20

Another important difference between the period in which Lenin and Trotsky were living in and the period after WWII is the transformation of most colonies into semi-colonies; that is, countries which are formally political independent but continue to have a dependent and super-exploited position in the imperialist world order.

Furthermore, there has been a massive process of globalisation in terms of the global integration of production and trade. Between the end of WWII and the Great Recession in 2008, the ratio of goods trade to global output (Gross Domestic Product) had constantly increased from about 10% to nearly 50%. Since then, this share has slightly decreased but still vacillates between 41% and 48%.21

However, with the acceleration of inter-imperialist rivalry, trade between the Western and Eastern Great Powers is decreasing while it increases within the respective blocs. A recently published study of leading economists of the IMF writes:


We find that, like during the Cold War, trade and investment between blocs is decreasing, compared to trade and investment within blocs. While the decoupling remains small compared to that earlier episode, it is also in its early stages and could worsen significantly if geopolitial tensions persists and restrictive trade policies continue to mount.22

We already predict this development more than a decade ago when we noted:


As a result there will be a tendency towards forms of protectionism and regionalisation. Each Great Power will try to form a regional bloc around it and restrict access for the other Powers. By definition, this must result in numerous conflicts and eventual wars.23

Finally, another important change in the period since WWII has been the expansion and consolidation of the labour aristocracy in the imperialist countries. As Lenin explained, this is the top layer of the working class (certain sectors of highly-paid skilled workers) which has been bribed by the bourgeoisie with various privileges. The financial sources to pay off the labor aristocracy in the imperialist countries, and thereby to undermine its working-class solidarity, are derived from the extra profits which the monopoly capitalists obtain by super-exploiting the semi-colonial countries as well as migrants in the imperialist metropolises. Unfortunately, the labour aristocracy — along with its twin, the labor bureaucracy — plays a dominating role inside the trade unions and the reformist parties in the imperialist countries. On an ideological level, these layers play an important role in transmitting aristocratic prejudices (Islamophobia, chauvinism, support for Zionism, etc) to wider layers of the popular masses directed against oppressed people and the lower strata of the proletariat, such as migrants. We call this phenomenon aristocratism.24
Consequences for Marxists

In this final chapter, we shall summarise some consequences of these changes for Marxist strategy.

1) Revolutionary anti-imperialism is of crucial importance in the current period since both inter-imperialist rivalry as well as imperialist aggression and national liberation struggles are key features of the world situation. It is impossible to be a communist without a consistent position of revolutionary defeatism against all Great Powers and without unconditional support for the struggles of the oppressed peoples.

2) Internationalism in theory and practice is essential for Marxists because the world economy is more integrated than ever and because major challenges of humanity — from the climate crisis to armament and migration — are by their very nature global issues. Advocating cross-border class struggles and the international organisation of the working class are therefore imperative to fight catastrophic capitalism. Most importantly, Marxists have to advance the unification of the proletarian vanguard and build a revolutionary world party.

3) Those building the international workers movement and a new revolutionary world party must not be content with working in the old imperialist countries in Western Europe and North America. We must rather have a focus on the semi-colonial countries and new powers, such as China, since it is these regions where the vast majority of the global proletariat is located.

4) Revolutionary work in the old imperialist countries in Western Europe and North America must have a focus on the masses of the working class in contrast to the privileged and aristocratic layers at the top or the academic middle class milieu. This includes in particular migrants who face a double oppression (as workers and as a national minority) and who are also transmitting belts to the countries of the Global South. Revolutionaries need to work within the labour movement for unity of native and migrant workers and advocate an anti-imperialist program of solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed.

5) Such an orientation goes hand-in-hand with the conscious struggle of revolutionaries against aristocratic prejudices within the workers movement and the so-called left. Such a struggle must not be waged only on a theoretical-propagandistic level but also, and more importantly, by advocating concrete practical solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles in the south and anti-chauvinist resistance in the imperialist countries.

These are some conclusions which we can draw from comparing the conditions of anti-imperialist struggles in past and present. We look forward to exchanging views with other socialist organisations and activists on this issue and joining forces in the common struggle to bring down the imperialist monster.

Michael Pröbsting is a socialist activist and writer. He is the editor of the website http://www.thecommunists.net/ where a version of this article first appeared.1

See Michael Pröbsting: Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Great Power Rivalry. The Factors behind the Accelerating Rivalry between the U.S., China, Russia, EU and Japan. A Critique of the Left’s Analysis and an Outline of the Marxist Perspective, RCIT Books, Vienna 2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/anti-imperialism-in-the-age-of-great-power-rivalry/ (see chapter XII to XXII); by the same author: The Great Robbery of the South. Continuity and Changes in the Super-Exploitation of the Semi-Colonial World by Monopoly Capital Consequences for the Marxist Theory of Imperialism, RCIT Books, 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/great-robbery-of-the-south/ (see chapter 12 and 13)
2

For a summary of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency’s (RCIT) understanding of revolutionary defeatism see e.g. Theses on Revolutionary Defeatism in Imperialist States, 8 September 2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/theses-on-revolutionary-defeatism-in-imperialist-states/
3

L. Trotsky, G. Zinoviev, Yevdokimov: Resolution of the All-Russia Metal Workers Union (1927); in: Leon Trotsky: The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-27), pp. 249-250
4

Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War: Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution. Adopted by the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 19-26, 1940, in: Documents of the Fourth International. The Formative Years (1933-40), New York 1973, p. 327, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/emergconf/fi-emerg02.htm
5

Leon Trotsky: Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam (1932), in: Trotsky Writings 1932, p. 153
6

For an overview about our history of support for anti-imperialist struggles in the past four decades (with links to documents, pictures and videos) see e.g. an essay by Michael Pröbsting: "The Struggle of Revolutionaries in Imperialist Heartlands against Wars of their 'Own' Ruling Class. Examples from the history of the RCIT and its predecessor organisation in the last four decades", 2 September 2022, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/the-struggle-of-revolutionaries-in-imperialist-heartlands-against-wars-of-their-own-ruling-class/
7

We have compiled a number of RCIT articles on the imperialist defeat in Afghanistan on a special sub-page on our website: https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/asia/collection-of-articles-on-us-defeat-in-afghanistan/
8

We refer readers to a special page on our website where numerous RCIT documents on the Ukraine War and the current NATO-Russia conflict are compiled: https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/compilation-of-documents-on-nato-russia-conflict/.
9

We refer readers to the special pages on our website where all RCIT documents on the 2023-25 Gaza War are compiled, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/compilation-of-articles-on-the-gaza-uprising-2023/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/compilation-of-articles-on-the-gaza-uprising-2023-24-part-2/.
10

The RCIT has published a number of booklets, statements and articles on the Syrian Revolution which can be read on a special sub-section on our website: https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/collection-of-articles-on-the-syrian-revolution/.
11

We refer readers to a special page on our website where all RCIT documents on the military coup in Burma/Myanmar are compiled: https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/asia/collection-of-articles-on-the-military-coup-in-myanmar/.
12

See also Michael Pröbsting: Marxist Tactics in Wars with Contradictory Character. The Ukraine War and war threats in West Africa, the Middle East and East Asia show the necessity to understand the dual character of some conflicts, 23 August 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/marxist-tactics-in-wars-with-contradictory-character/
13

For a discussion of the shift in the global proletariat with sources see e.g. Michael Pröbsting: Marxism and the United Front Tactic Today. The Struggle for Proletarian Hegemony in the Liberation Movement in Semi-Colonial and Imperialist Countries in the present Period, RCIT Books, 2016, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/book-united-front/ (chapter III); by the same author: The Great Robbery of the South. Continuity and Changes in the Super-Exploitation of the Semi-Colonial World by Monopoly Capital Consequences for the Marxist Theory of Imperialism, RCIT Books, 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/great-robbery-of-the-south/ (pp. 69-80)
14

Marceli Hazla: The trap of industry-driven development, Poznan University of Economics 2023, p. 15
15

Wing Chu, Yuki Qian: RCEP: Asia as the Global Manufacturing Centre, Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2 December 2021, p. 1
16

For our analysis of capitalism in China and its transformation into a Great Power see e.g. the book by Michael Pröbsting: Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Great Power Rivalry. The Factors behind the Accelerating Rivalry between the U.S., China, Russia, EU and Japan. A Critique of the Left’s Analysis and an Outline of the Marxist Perspective, RCIT Books, Vienna 2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/anti-imperialism-in-the-age-of-great-power-rivalry/; see also by the same author: “Chinese Imperialism and the World Economy”, an essay published in the second edition of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (edited by Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope), Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020, https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-91206-6_179-1; "China: An Imperialist Power … Or Not Yet? A Theoretical Question with Very Practical Consequences! Continuing the Debate with Esteban Mercatante and the PTS/FT on China’s class character and consequences for the revolutionary strategy", 22 January 2022, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/china-imperialist-power-or-not-yet/; "China‘s transformation into an imperialist power. A study of the economic, political and military aspects of China as a Great Power" (2012), in: Revolutionary Communism No. 4, http://www.thecommunists.net/publications/revcom-number-4; "How is it possible that some Marxists still Doubt that China has Become Capitalist? (A Critique of the PTS/FT), An analysis of the capitalist character of China’s State-Owned Enterprises and its political consequences", 18 September 2020, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/pts-ft-and-chinese-imperialism-2/; "Unable to See the Wood for the Trees (PTS/FT and China). Eclectic empiricism and the failure of the PTS/FT to recognize the imperialist character of China", 13 August 2020, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/pts-ft-and-chinese-imperialism/; "China’s Emergence as an Imperialist Power", in: New Politics, Summer 2014 (Vol:XV-1, Whole #: 57). See many more RCIT documents at a special sub-page on the RCIT’s website: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/china-russia-as-imperialist-powers/.
17

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: Trends in World Military Expenditure, SIPRI Fact Sheet, April 2024, p. 2
18

Fortune Global 500, August 2023, https://fortune.com/ranking/global500/2023/ (the figures for the share is our calculation)
19

Hurun Global Rich List 2021, 2.3.2021, https://www.hurun.net/en-US/Info/Detail?num=LWAS8B997XUP
20

See on this The Great Robbery of the South, p. 67
21

Gita Gopinath: Geopolitics and its Impact on Global Trade and the Dollar, IMF, 7 May 2024, https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/05/07/sp-geopolitics-impact-global-trade-and-dollar-gita-gopinath
22

Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Andrea F. Presbitero, and Petia Topalova: Changing Global Linkages: A New Cold War? IMF Working Papers WP/24/76, April 2024, p. 14
23

The Great Robbery of the South, p. 390
24

For a discussion of the issue of aristocratism see e.g. our book by Michael Pröbsting: Building the Revolutionary Party in Theory and Practice, (Chapter III, iii), https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/rcit-party-building/

Russia’s delinking from the West: The great equalizer

Dmitry Pozhidaev
13 June, 2024


Russia is becoming more equal, at least as far as the income inequality is concerned. To remember, during and after its transition to the market economy in the 1990s, Russia scored the dubious record of being one of the most unequal countries in the world, second to only to South Africa and on par with (or sometimes even ahead of) the US. Yet, Russia started diverging from the US around 2014, steadily reducing its inequality measured by the Gini coefficient.

This trend has accelerated since 2022, the real incomes of the poor deciles growing faster than those of the rich deciles. In fact, real incomes grew inversely to the position of the income decile: the poor the decile, the higher its income growth. Analyzing this trend, Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva of the Carnegie Foundation writes that among those who are “winning” from the current situation are the millions of Russians in blue-collar and gray-collar jobs whose professions were long considered low paid and low status.

It is difficult not to notice that this income equalization trend coincides with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the start of the full-blown war in Ukraine in February 2022, and the introduction of massive Western sanctions. So, what has been causing this drive to greater income equality in Russia?
War Keynesianism

The most frequent explanation among mainstream economists is the transition to a war economy (also known as war Keynesianism), which started in Russia around 2014. Surely, the sanctions (or the threat of sanctions) did play a role and hastened this transition, but this is not the whole story. The traditional story of war Keynesianism goes like this. During wartime, governments often implement significant fiscal and monetary measures to mobilize resources, fund military operations, and maintain economic stability. Increased government spending and mobilization of resources often lead to higher employment and wages, particularly for lower-income groups. The US during World War 2 is a textbook example: Wartime spending and mobilization led to significant economic growth and a reduction in income inequality. The period saw increased wages for many workers and a narrowing of the income gap.

These developments are well documented and analyzed in the recent CEPR brief “Russian economy on war footing: A new reality financed by commodity exports” authored by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Iikka Korhonen and Elina Ribakova. The study notes increased public procurement in the regions with large concentrations of machine-building industries; an increase in transport infrastructure investment in some poor regions in Russia’s Far East, as Russia tries to redirect its foreign trade more towards China; a rise in bank deposits in the poorer regions, which have sent proportionally more people to the military; and an increase in real salaries, first in sectors receiving state orders and then in other sectors as they have struggled to attract workers.

But the question that is not adequately addressed is not why the poor are getting more (this is somewhat obvious) but why and how the rich are getting less. Why all of a sudden has the Russian growth turned pro-poor?
Russia’s delinking from the capitalist center

Viewed from the Marxist perspective, the Russian war economy represents a clear case of a peripheral country delinking from the center. Whereas the Western sanctions are usually hailed as a (relatively) effective mechanism to isolate Russia from the world economy, their other side is not discussed as much. Decoupling Russia from the capitalist center (represented by the “collective West”) also implies decoupling the West from Russia. The Marxist economist Samir Amin writing 50 years ago stressed that a break with the world market is the primary condition for development. Developing the periphery requires setting up self-centered national structures that break with the world market. More recently, the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky argued the same point in the context of Russian history after 1917: its meteoric rise in the 1920-30s was due to its decoupling from the world markets and its gradual decline from the 1970s onwards due to its reintegration in the world economy.

The relations between the center of the system and its periphery are relations of domination, unequal relations, expressed in a transfer of value from the periphery to the center. This transfer of value, governed by the fundamental law of capital accumulation under capitalism, makes possible a larger improvement in the reward of labor at the center and reduces, in the periphery, not only the reward of labor but also the profit margin of local capital. The main channel of this transfer is unequal exchange when higher values produced in the periphery (as determined by the socially necessary amount of labor) are exchanged for lower values produced in the center.

There are three main channels of surplus transfer (including surplus value and nonproductive incomes and state revenues). This channel operates, firstly, through a system of the international division of labor and foreign trade rigged by the center to ensure maximum surplus transfer. The center keeps the periphery further from the technology frontier, causing the periphery to engage in production with low value addition (often raw materials, such as minerals), in relation to which the center usually exercises monopsonistic power. At the same time, in collusion with the comprador bourgeoisie, the center keeps the rewards of the peripheral labor below its productivity, which allows higher rates of profit for foreign capital as well as part of the domestic bourgeoisie. Secondly, in addition to transfers via unfavorable (for peripheral countries) terms of trade, the center transfers the surplus produced in the periphery via profit repatriation and purchases of advanced technologies in the metropole to continue its extractive economic activities in the periphery. This is helped by the purchase of economic values below their value in the course of privatization in the periphery. Third, because foreign capital takes the commanding heights in the periphery, domestic capital does not find enough economic application in the home country, resulting in significant outflows of capital to the center where it is invested. The last channel of value extraction is the international financial system, which is rigged against the periphery. The center uses cheap credit at home to extend expensive loans to the private and public sectors in the periphery. The cost of these loans is above the normal risk premium, incorporates the higher rates of labor exploitation, and results in a debilitating loan service burden for developing countries.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia became a textbook case of a peripheral country. It demonstrated the explicit characteristics of dependence one by one: current account deficit, deindustrialization, almost total dependence on Western exports (not only luxuries and technological goods but also foodstuff and basic necessities), foreign investments (mostly in extractive industries), massive outflows of domestic capital to foreign jurisdictions, high private and public indebtedness, and ultimately a decrease in the labor share of national income and pauperization of the working class.

Living standards started improving in the early 2000s. This improvement, which laid the foundation of Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy is believed to be largely due to two factors: (1) increased world prices of oil and gas (which jumped from $17 per barrel in 1999 to $50 in 2005 and $109 in 2012) and (2) improved political stability, economic reforms and better security conducive to increased economic activity. The latter development also included a transition from laissez-faire crony capitalism to a more tightly controlled state capitalism as will be discussed below. Yet, Russia’s structural dependence on the West continued without much change.

How has the situation changed after 2014, particularly since February 2022? As a result of Russia’s disconnection from international financial markets in 2022, the flow of foreign loans has dried up. But consequently, as reported by the Russian Central Bank, Russia’s external debt (on a decreasing path since 2014) decreased in 2023 even further by 17.7%, since the end of 2022. Indebtedness of general government to non-residents decreased by 29.1% as a result of the decrease in debt on sovereign debt securities denominated in both Russian rubles and foreign currency.

As foreign companies started closing their operations and withdrawing from Russia with the start of the war in Ukraine, profit repatriations reduced significantly. In 2023, according to the Russian Central Bank, the negative balance on investment income has halved: both income accrued in favor of non-residents and income received by residents from foreign investments have decreased. The largest role was played by the negative balance of income on direct investment, including as a result of a reduction in the degree of participation of direct investment investors in domestic business, as well as a reduction in the amounts of dividends declared by Russian companies. Net incurrence of liabilities by residents, after experiencing a negative shock in 2022, in 2023 shrank to the lowest level since 2015.

Delinked from the international capital markets and subject to international sanctions and expropriations, Russian capitalists started repatriating their foreign investments. In addition, the volume of cross-border transfers from Russia in 2023 decreased by 35% compared to the previous year. According to recent research by Frank RG, 2023 saw approximately $35 billion of “new money” returned and retained in the economy. For comparison, $35 billion is as much as the net profit of the entire banking sector last year. And that’s double the projected federal budget deficit for 2023.

According to the Central Bank, the amount of rubles held in Russian bank accounts climbed 19.7 percent to 7.4 trillion in 2023 (nearly three times what it was in 2022), buoyed by high interest rates. In particular, there has been growth in the category of deposits worth between 3 million and 10 million rubles (both in terms of their total value and in the number of people holding such deposits).

All these developments minimize surplus transfer to the center and result in higher capital accumulation inside Russia. But it does not automatically imply an improvement in the lot of the poor and less inequality: capitalists may horde the new money or use it for luxury consumption. Yet, Russian capitalism is subject to the same law of accumulation as global capitalism in general. With the closure of investment outlets abroad and the uncertainty about domestic monetary trends (growing inflation), Russian capitalists are encouraged to invest in the domestic economy. The new investment opportunities are the result of two developments: the departure of foreign capital, which reduces the competition, and increased military contracts, which include not only military hardware but also all kinds of essentially non-military equipment used by the military.
Transition to state capitalism

This notwithstanding, capitalists theoretically could still appropriate the same (or even greater) amount of surplus value (although the latter is obviously difficult in a very tight labor market). Here comes the other trend, briefly mentioned above, the transition to state capitalism, which offsets this possible behavior. As is known, one of the defining characteristics of state capitalism is a high share of state-owned enterprises. Since Putin flagged the return of strategic enterprises to state control as a priority for prosecutors in January 2023, the number of re-nationalizations has already ticked into double digits. According to the Russian Prosecutor General, in the military-industrial complex alone, 15 strategic enterprises with a total value of over 333 billion rubles (about $4 billion) have been returned to the state by March 2024. In several cases, these re-nationalizations involved assets privatized over 30 years ago. Old safeguards, like Western sanctions or friends in high places, no longer work.

These court-mandated asset seizures are not isolated cases, but part of a broader strategy impacting the oil and gas sector, infrastructure facilities, enterprises related to the military-industrial complex, the chemical industry, and agriculture. But even when enterprises continue to function as nominally private, the status of their owners has changed as a result of “soft” re-privatization. In such cases senior management of companies are removed and replaced by a new generation of Putin allies without the use of courts – de-privatizing the organizations in all but name. As Chatham House’s expert Nikolai Petrov argues, oligarchs and other members of the economic elite are being reduced to roles equivalent to that of “red directors” during the Soviet Union – that is, managers rather than owners of property, and without independent political power. These “directors” have but a limited claim on the profits of enterprises under their management, and their personal consumption is monitored and controlled much more tightly than during the age of laissez-faire capitalism.

True, Russia’s foreign trade is still based on the export of hydrocarbons (a large share of which is still destined for the Western core via intermediaries, such as India and Turkey). Russia’s pivot to China is much discussed and often derided as a new vassal dependence. Yet, being part of the periphery itself, China may look favorably at Russian attempts at self-centered development in areas other than extractive industries. Indeed, Russia has technologies, experiences and information that China may value. China, through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), could offer alternative sources of finance and investment. Russia’s pivot does not mean switching one dominant center (the West) for another (China). As Mikhail Korostikov of the Carnegie Foundation argues, the relationship between Russia and China is by no means perfect, but the shared interests of both countries’ leaderships and the strategic logic of the confrontation with the West create a solid foundation for reasonably equal cooperation.

State capitalism does not automatically imply pro-poor development. But in the case of Russia, it is coupled with de-linking from the center, which offers more opportunities for capital accumulation. At the same time, the surplus accrued to capitalists decreases and the surplus available to the state increases through “hard” and “soft” re-nationalization. State capitalism is not inherently superior to market capitalism when it comes to the allocation of resources or income redistribution. But it does have a better potential to mobilize and direct resources to a limited number of objectives in a crisis situation (to serve as a mission-oriented government, to borrow Marianna Mazzucato’s term). This is what happens now in Russia as the country mobilizes more and more for the achievement of its war objectives.

The new tax reform announced by Putin envisages a progressive personal income tax scale to replace the flat 13% PIT tax. The tax rate will increase from 15 to 22 percent depending on the income. The reform is expected to bring the state an additional 16.8 trillion rubles (about $190 billion) in the next 6 years. During the same period, the state intends to collect another 11.1 trillion rubles (approximately $125 billion) from the business as the corporate income tax will increase from 20% to 25%. The Russian Left insisted on these changes for many years. Ironically, it has happened now, triggered by the war. Be as it may, until now Russia remained the only G20 country with a flat income tax rate. This reform would have been hailed as an important step to greater income equality if it had happened in any other country and under different circumstances. Whereas the immediate objective of the reform is to increase the fiscal space for the war effort, it will also contribute to better equality between the regions and different income groups as the current trend indicates.

At the same time, the current level of Russian economy’s militarization remains limited. According to the US Central Intelligence Agency, the military burden on the Soviet economy, reckoned as a share of GNP, rose from 12 percent in 1970 to 18 percent in 1980 and probably reached 21 percent by the end of its existence. The Swedish Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates Russia’s total military expenditure in 2024 at 7.1 percent of GDP in 2024 (for comparison, it was 5.4 percent in 2015). It is nowhere near the Soviet level and the Russian economy is more resilient and less dependent than the Soviet economy. Russia’s delinking from the imperialist center plays an important role in strengthening this resilience due to increased capital accumulation and decreased value transfer. Hence, Russia has the potential to run this kind of military Keynesianism for many years in a symbiotic relationship with state capitalism. Keynes himself wrote about his General Theory that the book’s argument was “much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state” than to a democracy. Hence, Russia has the potential to run this kind of military Keynesianism for many years in a symbiotic relationship with state capitalism. Keynes himself wrote about his General Theory that the book’s argument was “much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state” than to a democracy.
Uncertain future

But this future is not without a challenge in the long run. While state capitalism facilitates and enables the war economy, Marxists argue that military expenditures only temporarily boost capital accumulation through demand creation. Military spending can exacerbate the contradictions within capitalism by increasing the state’s role in the economy without addressing underlying issues of surplus value extraction and capital accumulation. Janos Kornai argued many years ago that state intervention “softens” budget constraints. As a result, unproductive activities can persist because there is external support to cover deficits. These activities do not necessarily add real value to the economy. In addition, Moscow needs crude prices to stay around the current $90 a barrel; a slump to, say, $60 could make things difficult. Ultimately, the possibility of a significant military escalation with the West is looming larger than life and can totally change the calculus. The future is uncertain: as we have observed, the redlines are set and crossed again and again in this war.

One thing is known: we don’t really know what will happen in the long run, except that we’re all dead, as Keynes quipped (and this may happen even sooner than we think in case of a sharp escalation leading to the use of nuclear weapons). One can reasonably suggest however that the situation of decoupling and reorientation will persist, at least in the medium run. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently said that there would be no cooperation with the West for at least one generation. In economics, the exact time span for a generation can vary, but it is often considered to be around 20 to 30 years.

Dmitry Pozhidaev has spent the past 25 years as a development practitioner in the Balkans, former Soviet Union, Africa and Asia. He blogs at Elusive Development.