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Sunday, December 01, 2024

The Fascist Counter-revolution



Karl Korsch

 1940

First Published: in Living Marxism, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 1940, pp. 29-37
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;

What hope have we revolutionary Marxists, remnants of a past epoch, inheritors of its most advanced theories, illusions, ideologies-what hope have we left for a revolutionary turn of the sweeping counterrevolutionary movement of victorious fascism? The fate of France has finally proved that the old Marxist slogan of "world revolution" has in our epoch assumed a new meaning. We find ourselves today in the midst not of a socialist and proletarian but of an ultra-imperialistic and fascist world revolution. Just as in the preceding epoch every major defeat-the defeat of France in 1871, that of Russia, Germany, Hungary in 1905, 1917, 1918-resulted in a genuine revolution, so in our time each defeated country resorts to a fascist counterrevolution. Moreover, present-day war itself has become a revolutionary process, a civil war with an unmistakably predominant counterrevolutionary tendency. Just as in a horse race we do not know which horse will win but we do know that it will be a horse, so in the present war the victory of either party will result in a further gigantic step toward the fascization of Europe, if not of the whole European, American, Asiatic world of tomorrow.

I

There seem to be two easy ways for the "orthodox" Marxist of today to handle this difficult problem. Well-trained in Hegelian philosophical thought, he might say that all that is, is reasonable, and that, by one of those dialectical shifts in which history rejoices, socialism has been fulfilled by the social revolution implied in the victory of fascism. Thus Hegel himself at first followed the rising star of the French Revolution, later embraced the cause of Napoleon, and ended by acclaiming the Prussian state that emerged from the anti-Napoleonic wars of 1812-1815 as the fulfilment of the philosophical "idea" and as the "state of reason" corresponding to the given stage of its historical development.

Or, for that matter, our orthodox Marxist might not be willing, for the present, to go so far as to acknowledge the fascist allies of Stalin as the genuine promoters of socialism in our time. He would then content himself with feeling that the victory of fascism, planned economy, state capitalism, and the weeding out of all ideas and institutions of traditional "bourgeois democracy" will bring us to the very threshold of the genuine social revolution and proletarian dictatorship - just as, according to the teachings of the early church, the ultimate coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by the coming of the Anti-Christ who will be so much like Christ in his appearance and in his actions that the faithful will have considerable difficulty in seeing the difference.

In so reasoning, our orthodox Marxist would not only conform with the church but would also keep well in line with the precedents set by the earlier socialists and "revolutionary" Marxists themselves. It was not only the moderately progressive bourgeois ex-minister Guizot who was deceived by the revolutionary trimmings of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat of 1851 and, when he heard the news burst out into the alarmed cry, "This is the complete and final triumph of socialism." Even the leading representative of French socialism, P. J. Proudhon, was taken in by the violently anti-bourgeois attitude displayed by the revolutionary imperialist, and he devoted a famous pamphlet to the thesis that the coup d'etat of the Second of December did in fact "demonstrate the social revolution."[1]

Indeed, in many ways that counterrevolutionary aftermath of 1848 is comparable to the infinitely more serious and more extended counterrevolutionary movement through which European society is passing today after the experience of the Russian, the German, and the other European revolutions which followed in the wake of the First World War. Every party and every political tendency had to go through a certain period of bewilderment until it had adapted itself to a totally changed situation. Marx himself, although he utterly despised the imperialist adventurer because of his personal inadequacy, was inclined to believe in the revolutionary significance of the counterrevolutionary coup. He described the historical outcome of the two years of revolutionary defeat from 1848 to 1849 by the paradoxical statement that "this time the advance of the revolutionary movement did not effect itself through its immediate tragicomic achievements but, the other way round, through the creation of a united and powerful counterrevolution, through the creation of an antagonist by opposing whom the party of revolt will reach its real revolutionary maturity." And even after the fateful event he most emphatically restated his conviction that "the destruction of the parliamentary republic contains the germs of the triumph of the proletarian revolution." This is exactly what the German Communists and their Russian masters said 80 years later when they welcomed the advent of Nazism in Germany as a "victory of revolutionary communism."

This ambiguous attitude of Proudhon and Marx toward counterrevolution was repeated ten years later by Ferdinand Lassalle, a close theoretical disciple of Marx and at that time the foremost leader of the growing socialist movement in Germany. He was prepared to cooperate with Bismarck at the time when that unscrupulous statesman was toying with the idea of bribing the workers into acceptance of his imperialistic plans by an apparent adoption of the universal franchise and some other ideas borrowed from the 1848 revolution and the Second Empire. Lasalle did not live to see Bismarck at the end of the 70's, when he had subdued the liberals and the ultra-montane Catholic party, revert to his old dream of enforcing a kind of "tory-socialism" based on a ruthless persecution and suppression of all genuine socialist workers' movements.

There is no need to discuss the wholesale conversion of internationalists into nationalists and proletarian Social Democrats into bourgeois democratic parliamentarians during and after the First World War. Even such former Marxists as Paul Lensch accepted the war of the Kaiser as a realistic fulfilment of the dreams of a socialist revolution, and the about-face of the socialists they themselves glorified as a "revolutionization of the revolutionaries." There was a "national-bolshevist" fraction of the German Communist party long before there was a Hitlerian National Socialist Party. Nor does the military alliance that was concluded "seriously and for a long time" between Stalin and Hitler in August 1939, contain any novelty for those who have followed the historical development of the relations between Soviet Russia and imperial, republican, and Hitlerian Germany throughout the last twenty years. The Moscow treaty of 1939 had been preceded by the treaties of Rapallo in 1920 and of Berlin in 1926. Mussolini had already for several years openly proclaimed his new fascist credo when Lenin was scolding the Italian Communists for their failure to enlist that invaluable dynamic personality in the service of their revolutionary cause. As early as 1917, during the peace negotiations in Brest Litovsk, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been aware of the dreadful danger that was threatening the proletarian revolution from that side. They had said in so many words that "Russian socialism based on reactionary Prussian bayonets would be the worst that still could happen to the revolutionary workers' movement."

It appears from this historical record that there is indeed something basically wrong with the traditional Marxian theory of the social revolution and with its practical application. There is no doubt, today less than at any former time in history, that the Marxian analysis of the working of the capitalist mode of production and of its historical development is fundamentally correct. Yet it seems that the Marxian theory in its hitherto accepted form is unable to deal with the new problems that arise in the course of a not merely occasional and temporary but deep-rooted, comprehensive, and enduring counterrevolutionary development.

II

The main deficiency of the Marxian concept of the counterrevolution is that Marx did not, and from the viewpoint of his historical experience could not, conceive of the counterrevolution as a normal phase of social development. Like the bourgeois liberals he thought of the counterrevolution as an "abnormal" temporary disturbance of a normally progressive development. (In the same manner, pacifists to the present day think of war as an abnormal interruption of the normal state of peace, and physicians and psychiatrists until recently thought of disease and more especially the diseases of the mind as an abnormal state of the organism.) There is, however, between the Marxian approach and that of the typical bourgeois liberal this important difference: they start from a totally different idea about just what is a normal condition. The bourgeois liberal regards existing conditions or at least their basic features as the normal state of things, and any radical change as its abnormal interruption. It does not matter to him whether that disturbance of existing normal conditions results from a genuinely progressive movement or from a reactionary attempt to borrow revolution's thunder for the purpose of a counterrevolutionary aggression. He is afraid of the counterrevolution just as much as of the revolution and just because of its resemblance to a genuine revolution. That is why Guizot called the coup d'etat "the complete and final triumph of the socialist revolution" and why, for that matter, Hermann Rauschning today describes the advent of Hitlerism as a "revolt of nihilism."

As against the bourgeois concept, the Marxian theory has a distinct superiority. It understands revolution as a completely normal process. Some of the best Marxists, including Marx himself and Lenin, even said on occasion that revolution is the only normal state of society. So it is, indeed, under those objective historical conditions which are soberly stated by Marx in his preface to the "Critique of Political Economy."

Marx did not, however, apply the same objective and historical principle to the process of counterrevolution, which was known to him only in an undeveloped form. Thus, he did not see, and most people do not see today, that such important counterrevolutionary developments as those of present-day fascism and nazism have, in spite of their violent revolutionary methods, much more in common with evolution than they have with a genuine revolutionary process. It is true that in their talk and propaganda both Hitler and Mussolini have directed their attack mostly against revolutionary Marxism and communism. It is also true that before and after their seizure of state power they made a most violent attempt to weed out every Marxist and Communist tendency in the working classes. Yet this was not the main content of the fascist counterrevolution. In its actual results the fascist attempt to renovate and transform the traditional state of society does not offer an alternative to the radical solution aimed at by the revolutionary Communists. The fascist counterrevolution rather tried to replace the reformist socialist parties and trade unions, and in this it succeeded to a great extent.

The underlying historical law, the law of the fully developed fascist counterrevolution of our time, can be formulated in the following manner: After the complete exhaustion and defeat of the revolutionary forces, the fascist counterrevolution attempts to fulfil, by new revolutionary methods and in widely different form, those social and political tasks which the so-called reformistic parties and trade unions had promised to achieve but in which they could no longer succeed under the given historical conditions.

A revolution does not occur at some arbitrary point of social development but only at a definite stage. "At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing production-relations (or property-relations) within which they hitherto moved. From being forms of development, those relations turn into fetters upon the forces of production. Then a period of social revolution sets in." And again Marx emphasized, and even to a certain extent exaggerated, the objectivistic principle of his materialist theory of revolution according to which "a formation of society never perishes until all the forces of production for which it is wide enough have been developed." All this is true enough as far as it goes. We have all seen how evolutionary socialism reached the end of its rope. We have seen how the old capitalistic system based on free competition and the whole of its vast political and ideological superstructure was faced by chronic depression and decay. There seemed no way open except a wholesale transition to another, more highly developed form of society, to be effected by the social revolution of the proletarian class.

The new historical development during the last twenty years showed, however, that there was yet another course open. The transition to a new type of capitalistic society, that could no longer be achieved by the democratic and peaceful means of traditional socialism and trade unionism, was performed by a counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian yet objectively progressive and ideologically anti-capitalistic and plebeian movement that had learned to apply to its restricted evolutionary aims the unrestricted methods developed during the preceding revolution. (More particularly, both Hitler and Mussolini had learned much in the school of Russian Bolshevism.) Thus, it appeared that the evolution of capitalistic society had not reached its utter historical limit when the ruling classes and the reformistic socialists-those self-appointed "doctors at the sickbed of capitalism" -reached the limits of their evolutionary possibilities. The phase of peaceful democratic reforms was followed by another evolutionary phase of development-that of the fascist transformation, revolutionary in its political form but evolutionary in its objective social contents.

The decisive reason that the capitalistic formation of society did not perish after the collapse of the First World War is that the workers did not make their revolution. "Fascism," said its closest enemy, "is a counterrevolution against a revolution that never took place." Capitalistic society did not perish, but instead entered a new revolutionary phase under the counterrevolutionary regime of fascism, because it was not destroyed by a successful workers' revolution, and because it had not, in fact, developed all the forces of production. The objective and the subjective premises are equally important for the counterrevolutionary conclusion.

From this viewpoint all those comfortable illusions about a hidden revolutionary significance in the temporary victory of the counterrevolution, in which the earlier Marxists so frequently indulged, must be entirely abandoned. If counterrevolution is only extremely and superficially connected with a social revolution by its procedures, but in its actual content is much more closely related to the further evolution of a given social system, and is in fact a particular historical phase of that social evolution, then it can no longer be regarded as a revolution in disguise. There is no reason to hail it either as an immediate prelude to the genuine revolution, or as an intrinsic phase of the revolutionary process itself. It appears as a particular phase of the whole developmental process, not inevitable like revolution yet becoming an inevitable step within the development of a given society under certain historical conditions. It has reached its up-to-now most comprehensive and important form in the present day fascist renovation and transformation of Europe, which in its basic economic aspect appears as a transition from the private and anarchic form of competitive capitalism to a system of planned and organized monopoly capitalism or state capitalism.

III

It would be the greatest folly and, for people even slightly imbued with the great discoveries of Marx in the field of the social sciences, a total relapse into a pre-materialist and pre-scientific manner of thought if one were to expect that the historical progress from competitive capitalism to planned economy and state capitalism could be repealed by any power in the world. Least of all can fascism be defeated by those people who, after a hundred years of shameless acquiescence in the total abandonment of their original ideals, now hasten to conjure up the infancy of the capitalist age with its belief in liberty, equity, fraternity, and free trade, while at the same time they surreptitiously and inefficiently try to imitate as far as possible fascism's abolition of the last remnants of those early capitalist ideas. They feel a sudden and unexpected urge to celebrate the French Revolution's fourteenth of July and at the same time dream of destroying fascism by adopting fascist methods.

In opposition to the artisan and petty-bourgeois spirit of early utopian socialism, the first word of scientific and proletarian socialism stated that big industry and the machine age had come to stay, that modern industrial workers had to find a cure for the evils of the industrial age on the basis of a further development of the new industrial forces themselves. In the same manner the scientific and proletarian socialists of our time must try to find remedies for the wrongs of monopoly capitalism and fascist dictatorship on the basis of monopoly and state capitalism itself. Neither free trade (that was not so free for the workers after all) nor the other aspects of traditional bourgeois democracy - free discussion and free press and free radio - will ever be restored. They have never existed for the suppressed and exploited class. As far as the workers are concerned, they have only exchanged one form of serfdom for another.

There is no essential difference between the way the New York Times and the Nazi press publish daily "all the news that's fit to print"-under existing conditions of privilege and coercion and hypocrisy. There is no difference in principle between the eighty-odd voices of capitalist mammoth corporations-which, over the American radio, recommend to legions of silent listeners the use of Ex-Lax, Camels, and neighbourhood groceries, along with music, war, baseball and domestic news, and dramatic sketches-and one suave voice of Mr. Goebbels who recommends armaments, race-purity, and worship of the Fuehrer. He too is quite willing to let them have music along with it-plenty of music, sporting news, and all the unpolitical stuff they can take.

This criticism of the inept and sentimental methods of present-day anti-fascism does not imply by any means that the workers should do openly what the bourgeoisie does under the disguise of a so-called antifascist fight: acquiesce in the victory of fascism. The point is to fight fascism not by fascist means but on its own ground. This seems to the present writer to be the rational meaning of what was somewhat mystically described by Alpha in the spring issue of Living Marxism as the specific task of "shock-troops" in the anti-fascist fight. Alpha anticipated that even if the localized war-of-siege waged during the first seven months of the present conflict were to extend into a general fascist world war, this would not be a "total war" and an unrestricted release of the existing powers of production for the purpose of destruction. Rather, it would still remain a monopolistic war in which the existing powers of production (destruction) would be fettered in many ways for the benefit of the monopolistic interests of privileged groups and classes. It would remain that kind of war from fear of the emancipatory effect that a total mobilization of the productive forces, even restricted to the purpose of destruction, would be bound to have for the workers or, under the present-day conditions of totally mechanized warfare, for the shocktroopers who perform the real work of that totally mechanized war.

This argument of Alpha’s can be applied more widely and much more convincingly. First of all we can disregard for the moment (although we shall have to return to it at a later stage) the peculiar restriction of the argument to the "shock-troops" and to the conditions of war. The whole traditional distinction between peace and war, production and destruction, has lost in recent times much of that semblance of truth that it had in an earlier period of modern capitalistic society. The history of the last ten years has shown that ever since, in a world drunk with apparent prosperity, the American Kellogg Pact outlawed war, peace has been abolished. From the outset Marxism was comparatively free from that simple-mindedness which believed in an immediate and clear-cut difference between production-for-use and production-for-profit. The only form of production-for-use under existing capitalistic conditions is just the production-for-profit. Productive labor for Marx, as for Smith and Ricardo, is that labor which produces a profit for the capitalist and, incidentally, a thing which may also be useful for human needs. There is no possibility of establishing a further distinction between a "good" and a "bad," a constructive and a destructive usefulness. The Goebbelian defense of the "productivity" of the labor spent on armaments in Germany by referring to the amount of "useful" labor spent in the United States for cosmetics had no novelty for the Marxist. Marx, who described the working class in its revolutionary fight as "the greatest of all productive forces" would not have been afraid to recognize war itself as an act of production, and the destructive forces of modern mechanized warfare as part of the productive forces of modern capitalistic society, such as it is. He, like Alpha, would have recognized the "shock-troops" in their "destructive" activity in war as well as in their productive activity in industry (armament and other industries-war industries all!) as real workers, a revolutionary vanguard of the modern working class. Historically it is a well-established fact that the soldier (the hired mercenary) was the first modern wage-laborer.

Thus, the old Marxian contradiction between the productive forces and the given production relations reappears in the warlike as well as in the peaceful activities of modern fascism. With it there appear again the old contrast between the workers, who as a class are interested in the full application and development of the productive forces, and the privileged classes, the monopolists of the material means of production. More than at any previous time the monopoly of political power reveals itself as the power to rule and control the social process of production. At the same time this means, under present conditions, the power to restrict production-both the production of industry in peace and destructive production in time of war-and to regulate it in the interest of the monopolist class. Even the "national" interest that was supposed to underly the present-day fascist war waged by Hitler and Mussolini is revealed by the war itself and will be revealed much more clearly by the coming peace as being ultimately an interest of the international capitalist and monopolist class. Much more clearly than at the end of the First World War it will appear that this war is waged by both parties-by the attacking fascists as well as by the defending "democrats"-as a united counterrevolutionary struggle against the workers and the soldiers who by their labor in peace and war prepared and fought the truly suicidal war.

What, then, is the hope left for the anti-fascists who are opposing the present European war and who will oppose the coming war of the hemisphere? The answer is that, just as life itself does not stop at the entrance of war, neither does the material work of modern industrial production. Fascists today quite correctly conceive the whole of their economy-that substitute for a genuine socialist economy-in terms of a "war economy" (Wehrwirtschaft). Thus, it is the task of the workers and the soldier to see to it that this job is no longer done within the restrictive rules imposed upon human labor in present-day capitalist, monopolist, and oppressive society. It has to be done in the manner prescribed by the particular instruments used; that is, in the manner prescribed by the productive forces available at the present stage of industrial development. In this manner both the productive and the destructive forces of present-day society-as every worker, every soldier knows-can be used only if they are used against their present monopolistic rulers. Total mobilization of the productive forces presupposes total mobilization of that greatest productive force which is the revolutionary working class itself.

Notes

[1] Oeuvres Completes de Proudhon, vol. VIII, Paris, 1868.

[2] First article on Class Struggles in France, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, January, 1850.

[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, February, 1852.

[4] Ignazio Silone, School of Dictators, 1938.

[5] Living Marxism, vol. V, no. I, pp. 44-58.

Karl Korsch Archive

Rasti Delizo (Solidarity of Filipino Workers): ‘US imperialism has been accelerating its attempts to impede China’s strategic rise’

By Rasti Delizo & Federico Fuentes

Published date 19 January, 2026\

Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst, veteran Filipino socialist activist and former vice-president of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP, Solidarity of Filipino Workers).

In the first of a three-part series, Delizo talks to Federico Fuentes from LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal about what underpins US-China tensions and the dangers posed for the Asia-Pacific region.

Growing US-China tensions in the Asia-Pacific region are causing concern. How should we understand the growing rivalry even while the two economies are so integrated?

Fundamentally, the increasingly intense US-China rivalry that broadly defines this first half of the 21st century is the logical consequence of global capitalism’s permanent process of capital accumulation amid universal conditions of uneven and combined development.

In this mode of production, the leading monopoly capitalist states compete with each other, principally to gain huge economic windfalls through political-security engagements and manoeuvres. They aim to safeguard their steadily rising control of international markets, with endless extraction and transfer of surplus value from non-monopoly capitalist states at the global periphery.

This capitalist logic compels the imperialist core to guarantee financial superprofits for their respective oligarch-owned national monopolies. To protect their huge net appropriation of surplus value, these imperialist powers deploy their superior military forces to secure geostrategic aims. This is the historic materialist basis for inter-imperialist conflicts and wars since the last century.

These profit- and power-seeking thrusts are chiefly pursued through international competitions to increase the dominance of their spheres of influence. This largely occurs through a perennial (re)partitioning of “territorial divisions” of labour based on particular production processes inside systemically dominated countries and regions. This combined approach aims to enhance the foreign policy agendas of powerful capitalist states.

To achieve this, the imperialist great powers wage strategic struggles for supremacy over the world order’s key correlated domains, including major geographical spaces. These cover the vital functions, activities and concerns relating to crucial economic-political-social-cultural-diplomatic-military-technological fields.

The imperialist states not only aim to sustain advantages already held by their own domestic monopolies operating within foreign markets, but exclusively deploy their military capabilities to thwart adversaries and gain a security monopoly to protect their market interests in parts of the world. This foreign policy dialectic typifies imperialist behaviour.

This materialist nature and long enduring status of the capitalist global system innately characterises and shapes the international setting’s volatile equilibrium. Accordingly, it is these inter-imperialist dynamics that frequently throw the worldwide correlation of class forces into disarray and put them onto a defensive footing.

Undoubtedly, this dilemma is already a disruptive phenomenon that strongly underpins today’s confrontational US-China relationship, particularly through their strategic domains in the immense Asia-Indo-Pacific area.

This is the case even as their entwined economies remain connected and financially integrated as part of the globalised architecture and structures of the almost half-century-old neoliberal capitalist project. This is another paradox of the modern international order, whose superstructure is propped up by the overarching imperialist world system.

The systemic and conjunctural international context acutely propels rising hostilities between Washington and Beijing as the top imperialist powers. These ramifications are defined, determined and driven by universally destructive conditions that are primarily generated by the still decaying phase of monopoly-finance capitalism. For as long as the epoch of capitalist imperialism lingers, the blowbacks from its negative features keep damaging and impairing global humanity’s wellbeing.

The deepening of capitalism’s contradictions are causing harsh shifts in the capitalist global order, with catastrophic consequences. The degeneration of the world’s status quo is unquestionably due to the crumbling neoliberal capitalist project, built on a globalised infrastructure of exploitative-oppressive mechanisms.

Yet, and in a coherent way, all of these processes are still geared towards bracing the world system’s imperialist core and its incessant siphoning off of superprofits — via unequal exchange mechanisms — from dependent countries of the semi-colonial and maldeveloped periphery.

The paramount capitalist powers — US imperialism (still the world’s foremost imperialist state) and Chinese social-imperialism (the US’s direct strategic contender) — are now mutually locked in an intensifying transglobal competition.

But was there a critical trigger for this confrontation?

The answer flows from the intrinsic tendency of capitalism to negate many of its own gains and contradictions over time. Indeed, the bourgeois socioeconomic system consistently induces a long drawn-out sublation of its own antagonisms. As a result, this dialectical materialist process further impels an overall progression of capitalism’s productive forces by elevating the system into its more advanced stages.

This international process of negating negative economic conditions (to enhance world capitalism) began in the early 1990s. The US — having overcome its prime adversary of the now dissolved Soviet Union — launched potent measures to create a neoliberal post-Cold War global economic regime to widen its international base of capital accumulation. Feeling a false triumph over capitalism’s historic ideological enemy, US capital became highly motivated to seek out and amass even more superprofits from beyond its shores by 1992.

Among its decisive moves was helping develop China as a major world economy. By that time, China already contained the world’s largest population, estimated at about 1.143 billion — and, thus, was a mammoth market in itself. However, its economic standing in the early 1990s still ranked outside of the world’s core of top ten capitalist economies.

US imperialism sought to dominate China’s blossoming capitalist economy. Washington intended to monopolise the Asian giant’s internal growth processes together with its maturing development agenda. Within a decade, US foreign policy had steered Beijing’s integration into the neoliberal globalisation framework, inserting China’s rising economy into the World Trade Organization (WTO) by December 2001.

Another key aim of US foreign policy was remoulding China into yet another bourgeois-democratic state; this was premised upon the latter’s alignment with US capitalism’s economic interests. China was to be assimilated into the Washington-led “liberal international order” — a collection of states upholding US imperialism’s narrative of a so-called “rules-based international order” (to justify US imperialism’s global hegemony).

US foreign policy trajectory rested on a conviction that Chinese capitalism’s advance would inevitably raise China into a highly prosperous society, with more liberal political rules and social values by the early decades of the 21st century.

For at least a quarter-century — from 1992 until around 2017 — US capital exploited (and monopolised) its sway over China’s party-directed state capitalism. The US’s domestic market was opened to Chinese products to boost China’s economic growth and expansion.

At the same time, the US massively increased its own exports of financial capital plus higher quality commodities, particularly advanced technologies, to China’s internal market (while keeping US high-tech designs in the hands of US-owned technological monopolies).

There was also an acute trend of US manufacturing firms offshoring their production to China during this era, due to China’s depressed wages, generous state-subsidies and lower currency valuation. Greenlit by Washington, the World Bank provided further market-oriented technical advice to Beijing — as a result of China insertion into the worldwide ecosystem of neoliberal globalisation — to fast-track its capitalist maturation.

All of these economic adjustments and financial modifications led to a higher concentration of capitalist production and capital for China’s development paradigm. A fundamental result was that China became the centre of gravity for international capital by the early 2010s, while swiftly accelerating its military capabilities.

As US capitalism strove to assist with upgrading China’s capitalist potential over at least two consecutive decades — to help overcome the latter’s earlier economic disadvantages and weaknesses — the US economy conversely suffered a major economic decline. In contrast to China’s ascendancy in the past decade, significant areas of the US economy have regressed and waned.

US imperialism now suffers from some fundamental defects impacting its long-term national economic growth. These deficiencies encompass among others: widening income-based social inequalities, swelling public sector debts, a decades-long shrinking of its manufacturing sector, a diminishing agricultural capacity and sustainability, and conceivable challenges to the dollar as the world’s premier reserve currency since the end of the Bretton Woods monetary regime in 1971.

Moreover, the lingering atrophy of the US’s manufacturing and industrial base, since at least the 1980s and ’90s, is linked to the aftermath and impacts of the free trade features of neoliberal globalisation.

So, as the tension-riven US-China linkage proceeds, its symbiotic relationship manifests a unique form of an international “negation of the negation”. In essence, the intensification of the world economy’s neoliberal globalisation process, at least with the end of the Cold War in 1991, produced a new interstate dynamic. This international relations dialectic led to one powerful bourgeois state imparting some of its economic competencies to an ascending state; but it led to China rapidly gaining innovative economic capabilities that, in time, transformed it into a pathbreaking global power.

As such, US capitalism became debilitated to a significant extent while Chinese capitalism — eliminating its erstwhile economic features and weaknesses — was energised. The resulting synthesis of this momentous global shift is the advent of a new period of international struggles and conflicts.

This time around, the result of this still evolving new global content displays yet another pivotal inter-imperialist contest, primarily between Washington and Beijing. Today’s unprecedentedly changing global order is a direct product of the epoch of the imperialist-dominated capitalist world system.

This fast arising great power conflict plays out across the global order’s twin arenas of geoeconomic and geopolitical competition. In this manner, Washington and Beijing’s distinct but antagonistic geostrategies now aggressively compete against each other to attain a relatively greater hegemony over the globalised capitalist system and its interconnected geographic spaces. They seek to constantly expand their respective spheres of influence and domination to control the most important regions of our planet for their very absolute great power agendas.

In fact, their imperialist foreign policies are resolutely geared toward coopting and coercing foreign states in furtherance of the great power’s nationally defined core strategic interests.

Their central objectives include: a) gain and extend market access within and beyond the national frontiers of a contiguous range of countries; b) sway the domestic policies of foreign regimes and eventually convert them into puppet-states; c) firmly secure long-term military basing rights plus regular troop-visit arrangements in exchange for security guarantees on a pretext of “potential internal and external threats”; and, d) integrate these countries into existing and newly-created regional economic and security alliances controlled by the imperialist powers.

These conjoined measures comprise the basic components of any imperialist great power’s “sphere of influence and control”. Operationally fused together across regions, these spheres of influence augment the force projection capabilities of any imperialist foreign policy at the international level.

So, in effect, these imperialist spheres of influence act as strategically developed geographical buffer zones sandwiched between contending great powers. Already, most of the countries within these buffer zones passively act as tripwire-states to heighten the geopolitical aims of world imperialism.

The materialist context of this global setting now reflects an intensification of the US-China dyadic conflict. When amplified, it expresses a fresh inter-imperialist struggle on the world stage.

This is not unlike previous worldwide imperialist tensions and confrontations, which twice led to universal catastrophes in the first half of the 20th century (but with a varied set of dynamics). As an international phenomenon, the Washington-Beijing rivalry clearly reveals that it is yet once more a mere by-product of the imperialist world system’s integral contradictions.

What then is specifically behind US military strategy in the region?

We have to understand Washington’s prevailing international strategy to better understand its military posture toward Beijing.

As the driving force of its overarching foreign policy, US imperialism’s economic-based grand strategy has always been predicated by an overall national security outlook shaped by certain historical periods. The US’s national security-obsessed foreign policy perspective remains impelled by its leading monopoly capitalist position within the global system of capital accumulation.

On this basis, several key aspects have buttressed US foreign policy since 1945. This set of integral elements centre on asserting Washington’s global imperatives to sustain US capital.

These include the following: a) retaining the US’s profitable dominance over the capitalist world economy; b) safeguarding its nuclear deterrence capabilities; c) maintaining its diplomatic leadership role across various intergovernmental and regional organisations; d) employing its military powers to achieve unilateral political-security objectives; and, e) aggressively pursuing policies of containment and degradation of the international Communist movement, global working-class forces and their allies.

When this array of external policy measures are projected onto a specific geographic area, they materialise into a coherent geostrategy.

In this regard, we will also need to recognise how US foreign policy reflects Washington’s National Security Strategy (NSS) framework. Being a periodically reevaluating national security vision set by the White House, the NSS analyses, assesses and evaluates existing and/or potential global security threats and challenges to the US’s strategic interests.

Likewise, the US’s NSS thrusts overlap with a parallel national defense strategy (NDS) set by the Department of War. Acting in a supplementary manner to the NSS, the NDS concentrates on the US military’s operational role in addressing the US’s declared global menaces.

The NDS also provides strategic goals and parameters to the US’s armed forces via a National Military Strategy (NMS). In turn, the NMS — determined and managed by the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — develops the requisite military plans for achieving strategic objectives set forth by the NDS in support of the NSS. The synergised NSS-NDS-NMS national security policy configuration is effectively the US’s geostrategy.

This somewhat teleological approach not only seeks to advance US foreign policy’s aims. Its geostrategy is equally intended to foil and counteract emergent international risks, which could jeopardise the US’s global hegemonic status. Therefore, this geostrategic mode of US foreign policy pursues a unified integration of “all facets of US power needed to achieve the nation’s security goals”.

US imperialism’s geostrategy for the Asia-Indo-Pacific is further primed by the 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS) document. This anti-Beijing policy framework emphasises Washington’s central economic-political-security concentration on this area’s two colossal maritime zones — the Indian and Pacific oceans — which flank China.

The IPS asserts that “the United States is an Indo-Pacific power” that “has long recognized the Indo-Pacific as vital to our security and prosperity”. The IPS states, “the US is determined to strengthen our long-term position in and commitment to the Indo-Pacific”.

Furthermore, the IPS affirms, “the US is committed to an Indo-Pacific that is free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient”. To realise this goal, the US “will strengthen our own role while reinforcing the region itself”.

The IPS — in convergence with the overarching NSS-NDS-NMS scheme of US foreign/national security policy — intensifies the current US geostrategy to surmount China’s soaring powers. Yet, there remains a contextual reality behind Washington’s scope of external security issues and concerns. Perceived international perils and predicaments — seen as barriers to the US’s manoeuvre space — are clearly identified by various fractions of its capitalist ruling-class elites.

This relatively tiny minority presides over the continued growth of US imperialism’s economic and financial monopolies. In consequence, the top echelons of the US’s combined national security-external relations apparatus are obliged to carry out the reactionary impositions of US foreign policy, under the edict of US monopoly-finance capital.

The US’s foreign policy agenda is primarily monopolised by an interconnected military-industrial-legislative-intelligence think tank complex directed by the country’s oligarchic elites. Preserving the US’s general class character, specifically the need to secure the socioeconomic wellbeing of its reigning oligarchs, will define US imperialism’s evolving external policy framework and attitude toward China.

Even so, the US’s foreign policy-national security elites still affirm China as an adversarial strategic competitor. In similar terms, Washington views Beijing as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”

These US foreign policy positions mirror the strategic guidelines framed by the US’s operating NSS. Steered by the axioms of its geostrategic framework, the 2022 US NSS directly names China — followed by Russia — as US imperialism’s topmost strategic competitors, which need to be dually targeted. However, as of early September 2025, the US’s official national defense strategy still remains under review, pending final approval.

On September 5, just one week before the longstanding name of the US Department of Defense was officially reverted to its original title, the “Department of War”, the first draft of a Trump 2.0 National Defense Strategy paper was completed. Based on some initial news reports, the new US NDS 2025 [which was finalised by December, after this interview was conducted — FF] is set to replace some of the major aspects of the Biden-era NSS-NDS–NMS geostrategy.

According to these reports, the Donald Trump regime’s NDS 2025 will see a “major” and “radical” shift in the US’s comprehensive defense strategy. If these reports are correct, then the forthcoming NDS 2025 is set to align with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, on account of a reprioritised focus for the US’s national security posture.

As such, the impending post-2025 US geostrategy will expect to refocus its geographical concentration. The US will emphasise the need to defend its strategic interests within the Western Hemisphere (comprising North, Central and South America, and including the Caribbean and parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans), as US imperialism’s primary sphere of influence and dominance. This hemisphere contains Brazil, Cuba, Greenland, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, national territories that the Trump regime has negative designs on.

This potential change of course for US foreign relations will mean a reinvigoration of the US’s centuries-old Monroe Doctrine. In aiming to further dominate and exploit selectively targeted countries in the Western Hemisphere, this newfangled adventure seeks to monopolise the area’s ample lands, peoples and accompanying raw minerals.

Yet, despite its probable (and seemingly impending) foreign policy U-turn, US imperialism will continue to target China and Russia. Washington will intensify its endeavours at denying Beijing and Moscow’s respective strategic expansions across their primary spaces of manoeuvre around the Eastern Hemisphere’s Eurasian zone.

How is the US developing its military alliance, potentially in preparation for a war with China?

US imperialism is already gearing up to execute whatever latest geostrategy it decides upon given the volatile world situation. More specifically, US military prowess is expected to be harnessed against any discernible threats emanating from China’s rising military presence throughout the Asia-Indo-Pacific region.

Washington’s envisaged moves will aim to preserve the US’s economic regime of capital aggregation by securing US imperialism’s sustained superprofits from among the dominated peripheral economies. Furthermore, should a belligerent scenario break out in the future, the US will apply its military forces to thwart Chinese imperialism’s own militarist activities within this zone of the world.

In concrete terms, US imperialism’s bolstering geostrategy remains zeroed in on China’s naval and air presence across the Indian Ocean, the Southeast Asian Sea (also known as the South China Sea), and the Pacific Ocean.

To enhance its geopolitical posture, US imperialism has built upon its security alliances across the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. These regional security mechanisms — major components of Washington’s IPS — include AUKUS (Australia–United Kingdom–United States), the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the US), and the two trilateral security cooperation partnerships for this area (one involving Japan, South Korea and the US; the other involving Japan, the Philippines and the US).

In the absence of a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)-type multilateral security arrangement in the Asia-Indo-Pacific, Washington acts as the security “hub” to all of its “spokes” in the region. US imperialism endures as the undisputed geostrategic commander of its puppet-states operating within the former’s widening military-sphere of influence in the eastern zone of the Eastern Hemisphere.

US imperialism’s designated military unit for any possible warfare with its Chinese counterpart(s) across this region is the United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM). USINDOPACOM is the largest of the US’s six geographic commands.

With an area of operational responsibility (AOR) spanning the Indian and Pacific oceans — including landmass and archipelagic spaces of East Asia — the USINDOPACOM’s AOR covers about 38 countries, enveloping 52% of the earth’s surface and abode to more than 50% of the world’s population.

The USINDOPACOM comprises a unified fighting force containing combined component and sub-unified commands embodying air, naval, marine, and army units.

How do you view China’s role in the region and actions towards the US and regional neighbours?

For context, US imperialism initially attempted to contain China’s fast-growing sway around East and Southeast Asia in November 2011 via then-President Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia’. This came in the wake of China’s relatively rapid recovery after the September 2008 global capitalist crisis.

Being endogenous to the capitalist system, the Great Recession — an international financial meltdown that induced a long-term worldwide economic recession — was caused by a severe economic conjunction several years in the making. It was a confluence that combined the latest crisis of overproduction with risky practices linked to US capitalism’s vulnerable financialised structures.

Amid such a global economic landscape, many national economies got battered by this capitalist calamity. However, China was able to swiftly execute a state-led economic rebound through a mix of large-scale stimulus packages, expansionary monetary measures and a boosting of domestic consumption capacities.

At the same time, Beijing managed to win the economic and political confidence of its immediate neighbours, including Japan, South Korea and the majority of the ASEAN’s (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member states, while increasing its investments and market shares in those countries.

Astonished by the Chinese economy’s capacity to overcome the Great Recession’s fallouts, while politically swaying many from the region, US capital felt exposed and threatened. Deeming a clear and present danger to its seriously weakened domestic conditions, US imperialism was compelled to regain its pre-2008 great power supremacy over the globalised capitalist system.

Soon afterward, the US assumed a new foreign policy stance to rebalance itself on the world stage. As a consequence, the main orientation of Washington’s external policy thrust was now aimed at counteracting Beijing’s emergent global ascendancy.

The US’s Pivot to Asia track was intensified during Trump’s first term in the White House and upheld, with certain adjustments, under Biden’s rule. The 2022 NSS actively guided US foreign policy’s grand strategy planning toward China.

As Washington toughened its anti-China stance, Beijing increasingly became aggravated with the former, obliging it to develop its own geostrategy to thwart the US’s expanding aims and powers in the Asia-Indo-Pacific theatre.

China’s external policy framework for an alternative mode of international relations is guided by the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) thrust in creating its “Community of a Shared Future for Mankind”.

Responding to the unfolding dynamics of its external strategic setting, and just less than three years after the US embraced its foreign policy shift toward Asia (to contain China), Beijing developed its own regional security agenda. Viewed as an “Asian security vision”, it featured concepts underpinning “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security”.

Beijing’s newly forged regional security outlook was presented by President Xi Jinping before the Fourth Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Shanghai, China in May 2014.

After this was positively received by various Asian countries, China’s president reiterated his Asia-centred security agenda before the 86th Session of the INTERPOL General Assembly in Shanghai in September 2017. Following this reiteration, and broadening its scope to conform to a global perspective, Xi’s global security concept became China’s “new security vision” for at least the next half-a-decade.

US imperialism has been accelerating its attempts to impede China’s strategic rise. Since 2011, Washington’s deliberate shots and stabs against Beijing have relentlessly mounted. This situation forced China to react with a more developed security concept to guide its foreign policy: its Global Security Initiative (GSI).

Delivered by Xi before the Bo’ao Forum for Asia in April 2022, the GSI is a conceptual policy framework designed to advance Chinese imperialism’s national security agenda by means of an international focus opposing US imperialism’s longtime predominance in the Asia-Indo-Pacific.

The GSI is essentially a bid by China to vigourously chip away at and displace the hegemonic US-led security architecture spread across the Asia-Indo-Pacific, together with the latter’s concomitant regional political-security regime of pro-Washington puppet-states.

In addition to the GSI, China’s latest outward drive is the Global Governance Initiative (GGI). Both of these initiatives, which share a political-security nexus, further complement China’s two other multilateral enterprises: the Global Development Initiative (GDI) and Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI).

Xi proposed the GGI on September 1, 2025 during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Plus Meeting in Tianjin, China. The GGI can be considered a correlated foreign policy concept (and linked to the GSI), anchored around key international political-security concerns. The GGI enhances the GSI in terms of China’s core strategic interests at the international level.

As a synergised and externally oriented security policy approach, the fused GSI-GGI framework provides China with a contemporary grand strategy. Flowing from this is the possibility for Beijing to materialise an associated geostrategy that can actively counter Washington’s anti-China geostrategy.

Common principles that accentuate China’s paired GSI and GGI concepts are: a) advance the creation of a multipolar world order on the basis of multilateralism (and not US unilateralism); b) abide by the international rule of law (not a US-defined rules-based international order); c) uphold the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter while building “a more just and equitable global governance system” (not the hegemonism and power politics of Washington); and, d) advance a “people-centred approach” so as to “better safeguard the common interests of all countries” (and not the interests of a few states led by US imperialism).

Beijing’s increasingly assertive foreign policy gears China to escalate its “external struggles” (in the field of global diplomacy) to fight “unilateralism, protectionism, hegemonism, bullying and foreign interference, sanctions, and sabotage.”

This multi-pronged range of geopolitical strategies attempts to hide behind the facade of a “global governance” agenda in targeting US imperialism. The basic intention of China’s GSI-GGI geostrategy is to frustrate and cripple the US’s Indo-Pacific Strategy within the broader Asia-Pacific region.

To operationalise its new-crafted geostrategy, China also has a relatively new Foreign Relations Law (FRL). Passed in June 2023, the country’s first-ever FRL guarantees the leading role of the CPC in the overall design, formulation, planning, coordination and execution of Chinese foreign policy. By firmly bracing its foreign policy direction, especially toward the US imperialist-led bloc, Beijing’s FRL buttresses its combined GSI-GGI geostrategic framework.

To guarantee this effort, the FRL purposely affirms China’s “right” to implement “countermeasures” against foreign-bred actions that “violate international laws and fundamental norms of international relations”, including those that “undermine China’s sovereignty, security, or development interests.”

China’s 2023 FRL provides Chinese foreign policy with an added layer of legal justifications to pursue Beijing’s geostrategy to eventually supplant US imperialism’s hegemonic bourgeois-democratic international order.

What is China’s attitude towards multilateral institutions? What role does it see for itself inside such institutions that have often been dominated by US imperialism, but which Trump is today turning his back on?

Beijing strives to gain the influential support of at least three principal international organisations. Chinese imperialism does so by advancing its main foreign policy goals within the structures of these top-three-by-choice transnational formations.

Beijing’s priority multilateral institutions are the UN, the BRICS (Brazil/Russia/India/China/South Africa), and the SCO. While there are other global bodies that China synchronously maintains relations with (the World Trade Organisation, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, East Asia Summit, the G20, etc), there are fundamental factors that oblige China to prioritise this trio.

China maintains that the UN remains the central foundation of the international system. Yet, the UN is incrementally becoming more reliant on Beijing’s diplomatic contributions while warmly welcoming its many significant external policy initiatives. Subsequently, with this altering UN-based milieu, Chinese diplomacy is equally becoming more vocal about its intentions regarding the urgent need for a major overhaul — via substantive organisational reforms — of the world’s primary global body.

As one of the five UN Security Council permanent members holding veto powers — the Permanent 5 (P5) — China has only lately appreciated the need to maximise its powerful role within the UN. Being a member of the P5, Chinese social-imperialism is set to readily exploit UN global platforms to advance its anti-Washington foreign policy agenda.

Moreover, since the UN contains 193 member states, including sub-imperialist states plus the majority of the world’s peripheral countries, Beijing has a growing desire to win over a majority to its own strategic geopolitical project and shift the global balance of power in China’s favour.

Beijing is primed to take fuller advantage of the UN system as an international arena of great power struggle so as to reshape the global order in its favour. China’s function inside the UN is oriented to frustrating US imperialism’s diplomatic manoeuvres in global affairs. Beijing will gradually do so on top of the UN’s premier world stage.

On BRICS, China fathoms the alternative role that this intergovernmental organisation plays in current world affairs. With 10 member states and nine partner countries, BRICS now reflects about 4 billion people (more than half of the world’s population), spans an estimated 47 million square kilometres, and accounts for at least 40% of the global economy (in PPP terms).

Aspiring to counter US geostrategy on a global scale, China appreciates the similar perspective which the other BRICS member states share and advocate. Simultaneously, Beijing values the fact that BRICS countries have a presence within key regions.

As BRICS steadily expands its membership, it will amplify its global sway through an economic-political-diplomatic lens. With a joint stance opposing the US imperialist-led bloc, BRICS can be employed by China to advance its “global governance” schemes. This geostrategic direction can help build a powerful Chinese social-imperialist-led bloc, which could counter US hegemonism on a global scale in the near future.

With the SCO, China views it as a premier international organisation in the Eurasian sphere. The SCO comprises 10 member states, two observer states and 14 dialogue partners, with its Secretariat based in Beijing. With only one member state located in Europe, the rest of the SCO countries are located in parts of Asia (including a few spanning the Europe-Asia divide).

As a primary Eurasian political-security alliance, the SCO is seen as a transregional bulwark straddling the Eastern Hemisphere with a major focus on deepening political cooperation, ensuring and maintaining regional peace and security, enhancing international diplomacy, strengthening mutual trust and amity among the member states, and promoting a “new democratic, fair and rational” international political and economic order.

Furthermore, the SCO retains unique features positive to China. The SCO projects a Eurasia-wide stature and influence, espouses a critical anti-US imperialist policy agenda and maintains a distinctively pro-China stance. Given the current equilibrium, and its overall volatility, Beijing is confident the SCO is poised to become a highly effective regional political-security instrument to boost China’s geostrategic line.

This is undoubtedly why the CPC staged a very impressive People’s Liberation Army (PLA) parade in Beijing on September 3, 2025 — just two days after this year’s SCO meeting in Tianjin. Although this military show-of-force was to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the official end of World War II, it was aimed at Washington and its Western allies.

When Xi delivered his keynote address at Tiananmen Square, he was flanked by fellow SCO leaders (including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian) as well as Kim Jong Un, the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a non-SCO country).

In his speech, the CPC General Secretary stated, “Today, humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum,” while emphasising the Chinese people “firmly stand on the right side of history”.

He affirmed that China is a great nation that “is never intimidated by bullies” — in apparent reference to the US imperialist-led bloc of Western states — and warned that China is “unstoppable”.

Is Russia imperialist? A response to Renfrey Clarke

By Chris Slee

Published date 18 January, 2026

In his article, “The sources of the Ukraine conflict: A reply to Chris Slee,” Renfrey Clarke disputes my contention that Russia is imperialist. Clarke says:

As analysed by Lenin early in the last century, imperialism is a characteristic of the richest and most developed capitalist countries.

However, he acknowledges that Vladimir Lenin regarded Russia as imperialist, despite the fact that the Russian empire of his day remained a “primitive and dependent state”. Clarke recognises that Russia was “a ranking military power, able to keep large non-Russian populations in subjection and to throw millions of soldiers into its wars.”

Clarke also notes that:

In his writings, Lenin never fully untangled this conundrum. But he left us a definite pointer to his views. In articles in 1915 and 1916 he described the Russian imperialism of his time as “feudal” and as “crude, medieval, economically backward”. Clearly, he did not include it in the same category with the modern imperialism of the advanced Western countries.

Instead, the Russian empire was a relic of an earlier, pre-industrial imperialism, based not on finance capital and advanced productive methods, but on peasant rents, handicraft production and merchants’ profits. For Lenin, it may be said, the Russian empire despite its military power belonged in a historical category with such empires as that of the Ottomans.

Military power and foreign interventions as indicators of imperialism

Certainly tsarist Russia was backward and semi-feudal. But some of Lenin’s writings indicate that he regarded military strength and interventions in foreign countries as indicators of imperialism, regardless of the economic system. For example, Lenin wrote:

The last third of the nineteenth century saw the transition to the new, imperialist era. Finance capital not of one, but of several, though very few, Great Powers enjoys a monopoly. (In Japan and Russia the monopoly of military power, vast territories, or special facilities for robbing minority nationalities, China, etc, partly supplements, partly takes the place of, the monopoly of modern, up-to-date finance capital)

Note the reference to Japan, which at that time was capitalist, though with feudal remnants, and where the development of finance capital was still limited. Despite this, Lenin highlighted its military power and interventions abroad (Lenin mentions China, but Japan had also invaded Korea). Clearly, Lenin regarded military power and foreign interventions as important factors in judging if a country is imperialist.

I am not aware of any writing by Lenin where he gives a full explanation of his views on this question. Lenin’s pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is often quoted as the definitive summary of his views. But Lenin himself noted its limitations. In his preface to the April 1917 edition, he said:

This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, particularly economic, analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language — in that accursed Aesopian language — to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up their pens to write a “legal” work.

Thus, Imperialism only deals with the economic aspects of imperialism. But Lenin’s other writings make clear that imperialism is not just an economic phenomenon. Political and military aspects are also important.

Clarke says:

Russia’s “feudal, medieval” imperialism perished in 1917. To characterise the country today using the tsarist regime as a historical reference is far-fetched.

Russia today is not semi-feudal, as it was in 1917. But its military strength makes it a great power. Lenin wrote: “The epoch of imperialism has turned all the 'great' powers into the oppressors of a number of nations…” This applies to Russia today.

Modern Russia

Clarke notes that:

The return of capitalism to Russia from 1991 saw the Russian Federation emerge as a typical “upper tier” country of the Global South; part of the “semi-periphery” of world capitalism along with countries such as Brazil, Mexico, or Türkiye.

Lenin never used the terms “Global South” or “semi-periphery”. Global South is an imprecise concept, while semi-periphery comes from World Systems Theory, which divides countries into the “core” and “periphery”, with semi-periphery as an intermediate category. This theory implies that the world capitalist system has a single “core” (or centre), ignoring the fact of inter-imperialist rivalry. 

In my view, Turkey, which intervenes militarily in Syria, Iraq and several African countries, is imperialist, even if on a much smaller scale than the United States.

Clarke says:

While Russia in 1991 inherited an industrial economy from the Soviet Union, the level of its technology in all but a few sectors was decidedly backward.

One sector, however, in which Russia was NOT backward was its military industry. This sector is crucial for Russia’s ability to intervene beyond its borders.

Clarke writes:

Entry to the “gated community” of the world’s rich states is effectively locked and barred; the list of genuinely wealthy countries, which apart from mini-states number about 20 in all, has barely altered since Lenin’s time.

Yet imperialism is not static. Japan, once a formerly poor country, is today an imperialist power.

Clarke says:

Imperialist states, if we read Lenin correctly, are marked by a surfeit of underused capital, seeking employment at the rates of profit its owners think they deserve. But the data cited above show that, compared to undoubted imperialist countries, Russia is strikingly capital-poor. Russian industry and infrastructure, the military sector aside, suffer from a severe lack of investment.

Meanwhile, the country is home to legendary natural resources that, in normal times, command high prices on world markets. To the extent that Russian entrepreneurs have capital to invest, they have the opportunity to draw very agreeable rates of profit at home, without the obloquy and vast expense of invading foreign countries.

This assumes that capitalists and their governments always act in a rational manner, avoiding unnecessary risks. In fact, they often act in a reckless and potentially self-destructive manner. Capitalists always want more wealth, and capitalist governments often seek to expand the territory under their control, even if it is unwise to do so. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an example.

Clarke writes:

The charge that Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine from an imperialist drive to territorial expansion is therefore absurd. If we discard (as we should) the “crazed dictator” narratives current in the West, that leaves us compelled to accept that the reason for Moscow’s “special military operation” is exactly what the Russians say it is: a defensive response to determined, persistent Western menaces.

Andriy Movchan has convincingly refuted the idea that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was defensive. Movchan points out that Putin showed little concern when Finland and Sweden joined NATO, even though Finland is very close to St Petersburg.

He argues that Russian chauvinist ideology played a key role. I agree that ideology is important, but would add that this ideology is not simply the result of Putin being a “crazed dictator”. It has a purpose: to unite Russia’s population on a nationalist basis under Putin’s leadership, and thereby suppressing dissent.

Clarke writes:

The World Beyond War site puts the number of US military bases on foreign territory in 2025 at 877, in 95 countries. According to the same source, Russia has 29, the great majority of them inherited from and located in countries of the former Soviet Union. Several more Russian bases are in Syria. Moves by Russia to secure a naval station on Sudan’s Red Sea coast appear to have stalled.

This pattern does not suggest the pursuit by Russia of world hegemony, but rather, a focus on its own security. All of Russia’s military bases, actual or mooted, outside of the former Soviet Union are in the Middle East — a strategically sensitive area of Russia’s “near abroad”.

Many imperialist countries have few, if any, foreign military bases: for example, Japan, Germany and Sweden. Russia has more foreign bases than these countries.

Clarke explains the presence of Russian bases in the Middle East by saying it is “a strategically sensitive area of Russia’s ‘near abroad’.” But the US could say the same about Latin America.

Should the left just accept Russia’s peace terms?

Clarke says:

In any war, after victory has ceased to be a realistic prospect, there comes a point where the implications of continuing to fight approach national extermination. The killing in the Ukraine conflict has been monstrous. Now it must stop, on whatever terms might plausibly be enduring. For the international left that means, in practice, calling for acceptance of the peace terms, outlined above, put forward by the Russian side.

There is no guarantee that such an agreement would be “enduring”. Putin's ideology, which says that Ukraine is not a real nation but a part of Russia that was artificially separated from the rest by the Bolsheviks, implies that he may renew the war when he judges conditions for victory are favourable.

Peace is essential, but there need to be guarantees that Russia will not renew the war. Perhaps an international peace-keeping force sponsored by the United Nations should be considered. This could be combined with referendums in the disputed areas to ascertain which state the people want to join.

Putin would probably reject such a proposal, unless subject to strong pressure from within Russia. The best guarantee of peace would be a strong anti-war movement in Russia, combined with democratic rights enabling such a movement to organise and express its views.