Zionism: In the Words of the Leading Zionists and their Allies

by M. Shahid Alam / November 19th, 2024

Nearly all of these quotes are gathered from the chapter epigraphs in the book, M. Shahid Alam, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Springer: 2008). A few of the quotes are from non-Zionists. The sources for most these quotes can be found in this book.

 Chosenness

“Israel is not another example of the species nation; it is the only example of the species Israel.” Martin Buber

“Only Israel lives in, and constitutes, God’s kingdom…” Jacob Neusner

“For me the supreme morality is that the Jewish people has a right to exist. Without that there is no morality in the world.” Golda Meier, 1967

“We do not fit the general pattern of humanity…” David Ben-Gurion

“…only God could have created a people so special as the Jewish people.” Gideon Levy

Zionism

“There are upwards of seven million Jews known to be in existence throughout the world… possessing more wealth, activity, influence and talents, than any body of people their number on earth….they will march in triumphant numbers, and possess themselves once more of Syria, and take their rank among the governments of the earth.” Mordecai Noah, 1818

“The ultimate goal … is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years…. The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.” Vladimir Dubnow, 1882

“…the spirit of the age is approaching ever closer to the essential Jewish emphasis on real life.” Moses Hess, 1862

“…Jews are a nation which, having once acted as the leaven of the social world, is destined to be resurrected with the rest of the civilized nations.” Moses Hess, 1862

“Today we may be moribund, but tomorrow we shall surely awaken to life; today we may be in a strange land, but tomorrow we will dwell in the land of our fathers; today we may be speaking alien tongues, but tomorrow we shall speak Hebrew.” Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, 1880

“…we must seek a home with all our hearts, our spirit, our soul.” Peretz Smolenskin, 1881

“Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation: the rest we shall manage for ourselves.” Theodore Herzl, 1896

“Palestine is first and foremost not a refuge for East European Jews, but the incarnation of a reawakening sense of national solidarity.” Albert Einstein, 1921

Zionism:Weaponizing Antisemitism

“The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” Theodore Herzl, 1896

“The struggle of Jews for unity and independence…is calculated to attract the sympathy of people to whom we are rightly or wrongly obnoxious.” Leo Pinsker

“The Western form of anti-Semitism—the cosmic, satanic version of Jew hatred—provided solace to wounded [Arab] feelings.” Bernard Lewis, 2006

Zionism: Ethnic Cleansing

“Will those [Palestinians] evicted really hold their peace and calmly accept what was done to them? Will they not in the end rise up to take back what was taken from them by the power of gold…And who knows, if they will not then be both prosecutors and judges…” Yitzhak Epstein, 1907

Zionism: Ambition

“Discussed with Bodenheimer the demands we will make. Area: from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates. Stipulate a transitional period with our own institutions. A Jewish governor for this period. Afterwards, a relationship like that between Egypt and the Sultan.” Theodore Herzl, 1898

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.” David Ben-Gurion May 1948

Zionism: Destabilizing Logic

“Will those [Palestinians] evicted really hold their peace and calmly accept what was done to them? Will they not in the end rise up to take back what was taken from them by the power of gold…And who knows, if they will not then be both prosecutors and judges…” Yitzhak Epstein, 1907

“God forbid that we should harm any people, much less a great people whose hatred is most dangerous to us.” Yitzhak Epstein, 1907

“As to the war against the Jews in Palestine….it was evident twenty years ago that the day would come when the Arabs would stand up against us.”Ahad Ha’am, 1911

“Two important phenomena, of the same nature, but opposed, are emerging at this moment in Asiatic Turkey. They are the awakening of the Arab nation and the latent effort of the Jews to reconstitute on a very large scale the ancient kingdom of Israel. These movements are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins.” Najib Azouri, 1905

“It is all bad and I told Balfour so. They are making [the Middle East] a breeding place for future war.” Col. Edward Mandell House, 1917

“The question is, do we want to conquer Palestine now as Joshua did in his day – with fire and sword?” Judah L. Magnes, 1929

“It is our destiny to be in a state of continued war with the Arabs.” Arthur Rupin, 1936

“The day we lick the Arabs, that is the day, I think, when we shall be sowing the seeds of an eternal hatred of such dimensions that Jews will not be able to live in that part of the world for centuries to come.” Judah L. Magnes, 1947

“The state of Israel has had explosives – the grievances of hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs – built into its very foundations.” Isaac Deutscher, 1954

“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.” David Ben-Gurion, 1956

“Historical logic points to the eventual dissolution of the Jewish state. The powers around us are so great. There is such a strong will to annihilate us that the odds look very poor.” Benny Morris, 2008

Zionism: Demographic Threat

“In Jewish cities, villages and kibbutzim … families are having 1.2 children. For theYishuv, that spells extinction.” David Ben-Gurion, March 1943

 Christian Zionism

“…we welcome the friendship of Christian Zionists.” Theodore Herzl, 1897

“The entire Christian church, in its variety of branches… will be compelled… to teach the history and development of the nascent Jewish state. No commonwealth on earth will start with such propaganda for its exploitation in world thought, or with such eager and minute scrutiny, by millions of people, of its slightest detail.” A. A. Berle, 1918

“Christian Zionists favor Jewish Zionism as a step leading not to the perpetuation but to the disappearance of the Jews.” Morris Jastrow, 1919

“…Zionism has but brought to light and given practical form and a recognized position to a principle which had long consciously or unconsciously guided English opinion.” Nahum Sokolow, 1919

“Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism have combined to create an international alliance superseding anything that NATO or UN has to offer.” Daniel Lazare, 2003

“Put positively: Other than Israel’s Defense Forces, American [Christian] Zionists may be the Jewish state’s ultimate strategic asset.” Daniel Pipes, July 2003

Destabilizing Logic: Alienating Muslims

“…it seems to me and all members of my office acquainted with the Middle East that the policy which we are following [support for partition]…is contrary to the interests of the United States and will eventually involve us in international difficulties….we are forfeiting the friendship of the Arab world…[and] incurring long-term Arab hostility towards us.” Loy Henderson, November 1947

“US prestige in the Muslim world has suffered a severe blow, and US strategic interests in the Mediterranean and Near East have been seriously prejudiced.” George F. Kennan, January 1948

“You can trace the resurgence of what we call Islamic extremism to the Six Day War.” Michael Oren, 2007

Destabilizing Logic: Rise Of Israel/Six-Day War of June 1967

“Israel was now [after 1967] seen by the West, and primarily Washington, as a regional superpower and a desirable ally among a bevy of fickle, weak Arab states.” Benny Morris, 2001

“The glory of past ages no longer is to be seen at a distance but is, from now on, part of the new state…” Editorial in Haaretz, June 8, 1967

“We have returned to our holiest places, we have returned in order not to part from them ever again.” Moshe Dayan, June 9, 1967

“A messianic, expansionist wind swept over the country. Religious folk spoke of a “miracle” and of “salvation”; the ancient lands of Israel had been restored to God’s people.” Benny Morris, 2001

Zionism: Support of Western Imperialist Powers

“If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine…[w]e should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Theodore Herzl, 1896

“Don’t worry, Dr. Wise, Palestine is yours.” Woodrow Wilson, March 1919

“The United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs…I think it is quite clear that in case of an invasion the United States would come to the support of Israel.” John F. Kennedy, December 1962

Zionism: Incremental Strategy

“Erect a Jewish state at once, even if it is not on the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.” David Ben-Gurion, 1937

“Egypt is the only state among the Arab countries that constitutes a real state and is forging a people inside it. It is a big state. If we could arrive at the conclusion of peace with it, it would be a tremendous conquest for us.” David Ben-Gurion, 1949

Settler-Colonialism/Ethnic Cleansing

“As soon as we have a big settlement here we’ll seize the land, we’ll become strong, and then we’ll take care of the Left Bank [of the Jordan River]. We’ll expel them from there, too. Let them go back to the Arab countries.” A Jewish settler, 1891

“[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to hate us.” Israel Zangwill, 1905

“… Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English, or America is American.” Chaim Weizmann, 1919

“I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral.” David Ben-Gurion, 1938

“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.” Moshe Dayan, April 1956

“Zionism comprises a belief that Jews are a nation, and as such are entitled to self-determination as all other nations are.” Emanuele Ottolenghi, 2003

“Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.” Benny Morris, 2004

Jewish Power

“There are upwards of seven million Jews known to be in existence throughout the world… possessing more wealth, activity, influence and talents, than any body of people their number on earth….they will march in triumphant numbers, and possess themselves once more of Syria, and take their rank among the governments of the earth.” Mordecai Noah, 1818

“When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat…when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.” Theodore Herzl, 1896

““If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey.” Theodore Herzl, 1896

“…Jews are a great power in journalism throughout the world.” Israel Zangwill, 1914

“In large parts of Eastern Europe [during the early decades of the twentieth century], virtually the whole “middle class” was Jewish.” Yuri Slezkin, 2004

“The expansion and consolidation of United States Jewry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was as important in Jewish history as the creation of Israel itself; in some ways more important. For, if the fulfillment of Zionism gave the harassed diaspora an ever-open refuge with sovereign rights to determine and defend its destiny, the growth of US Jewry was an accession of power of an altogether different order, which gave Jews an important, legitimate and permanent part in shaping the policies of the greatest state on earth.” Paul Johnson

“…the Jews from every tribe have descended in force, and they are determined to break in with a jimmy if they are not let in.” Edward House, October 1917

 Jewish Power: Jewish Lobby

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” President Harry Truman, November 1945

“I know I was elected because of the votes of American Jews. I owe them my election. Tell me, is there something I can do for the Jewish people?” President John F. Kennedy, December 1961

“Without this lobby Israel would have gone down the drain.” Isaiah (Si) Kenen

“During every congressional campaign, each candidate for every seat is asked to describe his or her views on the Middle East. Most office-seekers happily comply in writing. AIPAC then shares the results with its members, helping them to decide who is the most pro-Israel.” J. J. Goldberg, 1996

“AIPAC has one enormous advantage. It really doesn’t have any opposition.” Douglas Bloomfield, 2003

“In the last two decades between 1980 and 2000, American Jews gained power and influence beyond anything that they had ever experienced.” Stephen Schwartz, 2006

“A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.” Steven Rosen, 2005

“If Israel nuked Chicago, Congress would approve.” Steve Reed, 2009

“1000 Jewish lobbyists are on Capitol Hill against little old me.” President George H. Bush, September 1991

“… before I was elected to office I vowed to be an unshakable supporter of Israel. I have kept that commitment.” President Bill Clinton May 1995

“…I will bring to the White House an unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.” Barack Obama, June 2008

Zionism versus Saving Jewish Lives

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.” David Ben-Gurion, 1938

“If I am asked could you give money from UJA [United Jewish Appeal] moneys to rescue Jews? I say ‘No; and I say again, No.” Itzhak Greenbaum, 1943RedditEmail

M. Shahid Alam is Emeritus Professor, Department of Economics, Northeastern University. He is the author of Israeli Exceptionalism (Springer, 2008) and Yardstick of Life (KDP, 2024), a book of poetry. Read other articles by M. Shahid.

Opinion

Remembering Gustavo Gutiérrez

(RNS) — A group of priests, most of us working in parishes in the slums, met with Gutiérrez to talk about our experiences. Only later did we realize that what he told us in return were the first moments of what would come to be called liberation theology.

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez attends a news conference at the Vatican, May 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Joseph Nangle
October 30, 2024

(RNS) — On an ordinary weekday in the basement of a downtown church in Lima, Peru, in the late 1960s, a gathering of priests, most of them working in slum parishes, heard theology being done in an entirely new way: from the bottom up, based on day-to-day events, working from practice to theory.

Only later did we realize that something quite remarkable was taking place, and that we were experiencing the first moments of what would come to be called liberation theology.

The leader of the group was the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Catholic priest who was leading the discussion that day. It was there that I first heard Gutiérrez, who died Oct. 22, say, “I think the Exodus story in the Hebrew Scriptures has much to do with what we are doing here — the movement of a people from slavery to freedom: liberation.”

For several months he had invited us to meet with him weekly and share our pastoral experiences from the slum parishes where most of us we worked. Gustavo would simply listen as we spoke of the events taking place in our ministries, then, at the end, sum up what he had been hearing. We never sensed he was there to instruct or correct us. In fact, he sometimes remarked that the events we were describing were “the raw material for his theologizing.”

As the term “liberation theology” went viral, Gustavo expanded his initial reflections on this process, saying we were grappling with a fundamental question: Does God’s Word (the Holy Scriptures) have anything to say to the poor of the earth? The best way to begin answering that question, he said, was to look at the experience all around us in the so-called Third World of poor, marginalized, oppressed human beings.

Today the answer to that question and its instinctive affirmative reply is readily agreed upon: “Yes, of course, a principal theme in God’s Word to us concerns the poor among us.” At that time and place, however, this answer was not so clear. The institutional Catholic Church in Latin America was identified with powerful forces – economic, political and military elements that maintained an iron grip on the generally impoverished lives of its citizens. One archbishop in Peru celebrated the fact of so many poor, saying “this allowed the church the opportunity to be charitable toward them!”

The question about God’s Word and the recognition of victims of “institutionalized oppression” — another insight of liberation theology — were keys to understanding this “new grace” in theological terms, and, more importantly, in Catholic spirituality and pastoral practice. It turned the entire process of theologizing on its head, from ethical and doctrinal propositions to a new beginning place: reality. One can make the case now that this process has become a norm in most theological circles, even without labeling it liberation theology.

Gutierrez’s instinct about reflecting and acting on human experiences as the starting place for understanding God’s Word to humanity ran into serious obstacles. The most famous of these was the reaction of St. John Paul II and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) at the Vatican. As the inevitable consequences of entire communities of oppressed people beginning to learn of God’s liberating Word, the Vatican leaders reacted sometimes violently against their status quo.

One can conjecture that the Polish pope and his German theologian moved from their deeply felt opposition to communism. They felt that poor people were being incited to Marxist-style revolution such as those the hierarchs had experienced, particularly in Soviet-dominated countries.

This attitude was 180 degrees apart from the intent of liberation theology. One cannot continue to oppress a people. They will protest. In the Bible’s Book of Exodus, we hear the Lord say, “I have heard the cry of the poor,” and Moses say, “Let my people go.” Liberation theology brought this consciousness of God’s will ever more clearly to oppressed human beings in Latin America and eventually far beyond. This is Gutierrez’s lasting and glowing legacy.

Sometime after my return from Peru to the United States in 1975, Gustavo called me to ask if I would approach an American religious superior and urge him to intervene with a member of his congregation in Peru. The superior was influential in many circles there and was undermining liberation consciousness among the people. Gustavo’s comment on that occasion is significant: “What’s important is not some arcane argument among armchair theologians, but essential for the popular organizations being moved by this new understanding of their religion.”

This request speaks of the importance that liberation theology has come to represent not only for marginalized people but for the Catholic Christian world and beyond. Judging, challenging, interpreting the Word of God by its relevance in ordinary life is a new spirituality. Gustavo was very strong on this point, often insisting with us who were engaged in ministry that the message of a liberating God was essentially a pastoral task.

In that and many other ways, Gustavo was a dedicated and faith-filled son of the Catholic Church. His adherence to it, despite official opposition from the highest levels of that institution, speaks volumes about his integrity as a loyal member of the church.

As a Christian, a Catholic, a member of the Franciscan order and an ordained priest in those institutions, I can say with utter honesty that Gutierrez has been the most important influence in my life. From a typically conservative cradle Catholic, educated theologically in the decade of the 1950s, I had my eyes opened to a whole new way of praying, celebrating the Catholic sacraments and above all engaging in pastoral work.

I began as a popularizer who saw his vocation as making people happy, without addressing the underlying causes of deep, widespread tragedies in the world. Gustavo opened my eyes. I was never the same again. He showed me that the Hebrew Scriptures and the gospel of Jesus Christ come with an expensive price tag, that of standing with and speaking on behalf of the millions who are denied a voice. And without promoting it, that view of Christianity inevitably provokes deep opposition.

In the words of another “liberationist,” Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “It is the cost of discipleship.”

(The Rev. Joseph Nangle is a Catholic Franciscan priest. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

Gutiérrez's liberation theology still inspires young Latin American theologians

(RNS) — While liberation theology has been criticized for a view of oppression that is too simplistic, young Latin American theologians say Gutiérrez opened the doors for new movements in Catholic thought, even as the Vatican warmed to his legacy.

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez speaks during a news conference at the Vatican, May 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)
Eduardo Campos Lima
October 29, 2024

SÃO PAULO (RNS) — The death of the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, called the “father of liberation theology,” at age 96 on Oct. 22 has set off a reconsideration of the theological and pastoral movement spawned by the publication of the Peruvian priest’s 1971 book, “A Theology of Liberation.”

Once a powerful influence on both faith and politics in Latin America, liberation theology grew out of Gutiérrez’s concern for the poor amid the collapse of political projects in the 1960s that tried to modernize the region’s economies, exacerbated by the political repression by military juntas in several South and Central American countries.

The result was widespread violence and poverty — something that, for Gutiérrez and his colleagues, was not natural, but produced by severe social and economic inequality.

“That was the innovation introduced by Gustavo Gutiérrez and others – including myself – when we conceived theology starting from the suffering and oppression faced by the great majority of the Latin American people. The poor are oppressed, and all oppression cries for liberation,” said Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian and a prominent proponent of liberation theology himself, who called Gutiérrez “a dear friend.”

Before writing his book, Gutiérrez had visited Brazil, where a new kind of church organization was already being set in motion by urban and rural workers: so-called basic ecclesial communities, known by their Portuguese and Spanish acronym CEBs, which gathered workers in a given neighborhood into a single community where they could discuss their lives and their faith.

The CEBs inspired Gutiérrez, and his writings spread the CEB model to peasants, landless rural workers, members of Indigenous groups, factory workers and the unemployed.

Liberation theology, however, encountered criticism from Catholic Church leaders, especially in Europe, who said it owed too much to Marxist ideas in its analysis of poverty and was too sympathetic to ideas about violent revolution. Boff recalled that “Gutiérrez’s work was seen as a kind of Trojan horse designed to promote Marxism in Latin America.”

At the same time, the early years of liberation theology were also a time of intense debate as the church absorbed the changes of the Second Vatican Council, and Gutiérrez’s thought was not given its due. “Europeans couldn’t care less about the thought coming from the peripheries, especially about theological or philosophical thought,” Boff said.

But under Pope John Paul II and his doctrine watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), the Vatican would closely monitor liberation theology. Boff described how Gutiérrez once had to clarify some of his ideas for Vatican officials and the whole Peruvian episcopate. In 1984, liberation theology was officially censored, and though he was never silenced by Rome himself, Gutiérrez was relegated to the fringes of the church’s theological debates. Meanwhile, the Latin American church saw many of its most progressive leaders replaced by conservative prelates.

With the end of the Cold War a few years later, new ideas changed how Latin American thinkers, especially conservatives, saw politics and societal transformation. New generations of progressive theologians also found themselves rejecting liberation theology’s view of the poor and oppressed.

Over the past few decades, the fragmentation of categories such as “the poor” into smaller social groups and identities has been leading to several new theological movements in Latin America, more focused on the needs and realities of specific segments. Works like Gutiérrez’s may be seen by younger generations as classics from the past in that context.

“We realized that such rhetoric was too broad and nonspecific. Those ‘poor’ had no color. We’re all poor, but some of us are racialized, some of us are Black or Indigenous, some of us are women,” Colombian theologian Maricel Mena López, a professor at the Santo Tomas University in Bogota, told RNS.

A proponent of Black feminist theology, Mena said that, little by little, younger theologians also came to see liberation theology as patriarchal. “Apparently, women’s issues were not important in that theology,” she said.

Bolivian theologian Heydi Galarza, an expert in biblical studies, told RNS that the first generation of liberation theology thinkers “had great difficulty grasping the relevance of women’s issues.”

“That has been and continues to be a strong criticism,” Galarza said. “Latin American theology has gone a long way since then, with the development of new schools of thought.”

Both Mena and Galarza agree, however, that Gutiérrez opened the doors for those new movements.

“His theological work made other ones possible. I consider myself to be a liberation theologian – as well as a Black feminist theologian,” Mena said, adding that in her opportunities to talk with Gutiérrez at academic events, he always listened with great attention to all she had to say.

“He was very welcoming of feminist ideas, for instance. I never felt he was critical of them. He even told me, on one occasion, that he was glad that we were seeing things they couldn’t see back then,” she said.

The fact that his theological work started from the reality of social groups and from the practical experience with them still forms the basis for new theological approaches, Galarza said. “That nonspecific view of the poor has been overcome, but the way his theological work related to them — starting from the praxis — is still valid and can be applied to all social groups,” she said.

Pope Francis’ pontificate has also returned some vigor to liberation theology. A longtime acquaintance of Gutiérrez, the pontiff has always rejected what he considers to be “excess” in liberation theology, referring to its Marxist tendencies. But Gutiérrez’s focus on the poor and his preference for concrete theology directly connected to the people are ideas close to the pope’s own.

Indeed, under Francis the Vatican “rehabilitated” Gutiérrez, and he was invited to take part in official meetings there.

Bolivian theologian Tania Avila, a member of the women’s and Indigenous’ hubs of the Catholic Church’s Pan-Amazon Ecclesial Network, known as REPAM, writes on “integral ecology,” a holistic approach to thinking about the environment that Francis included in his 2015 environmental encyclical, “Laudato Si’.” Avila told RNS that she considers Gutiérrez a “brave theologian who challenged his own time’s limitations to see the social context.”

Avila also agreed that Gutiérrez and some of his colleagues “made an effort to recognize, decades later, that they failed to take into consideration the feeling and thinking of the women in their theological work.”

Francisco Bosch, a young Argentine theologian who has been accompanying the Latin American CEBs as an adviser to the Episcopal Conference of Latin America, said he feels close to Gutiérrez. “Theology, for him, is a love letter between God and his people. The work of the theologian is about that letter. And we’re living amid projects of hatred in Latin America,” Bosch told RNS.

In a time of political crisis and a general feeling of lack of representation, of economic hardships and environmental catastrophes, “Gutiérrez’s words are more urgent than ever,” Bosch said.

“His thought is part of the great Judeo-Christian tradition, which still has much to offer to humankind, especially in times of disorientation,” said Bosch. The “struggles of different social groups — Blacks, Indigenous, women and so on — converge and strengthen each other, telling the same narrative of emancipation when their agents discover that God walks with them.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez, founding father of liberation theology, dies at 96

Record levels of heat-related deaths in 2023 due to climate crisis, report finds

Anna Bawden 

Health and social affairs correspondent

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 29 October 2024

Impact of a drought in Spain in March 2023. Higher temperatures mean 151m more people faced moderate or severe food insecurity that year.Photograph: Paola de Grenet/The Guardian


Heat-related deaths, food insecurity and the spread of infectious diseases caused by the climate crisis have reached record levels, according to a landmark report.

The Lancet Countdown’s ninth report on health and the climate breakdown reveals that people across the world face unprecedented threats to their health from the rapidly changing climate.

“This year’s stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet,” warned Dr Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown at University College London.


“Once again, last year broke climate change records with extreme heatwaves, deadly weather events, and devastating wildfires affecting people around the world. No individual or economy on the planet is immune [to] the health threats of climate change.

“The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts, and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach.”

The report finds that in 2023, extreme drought lasting at least one month affected 48% of the global land area, while people had to cope with an unprecedented 50 more days of health-threatening temperatures than would have been expected without the climate crisis. As a result, 151 million more people faced moderate or severe food insecurity, risking malnutrition and other harm to their health.

Heat related deaths among the over-65s rocketed by 167% in 2023, compared with the 1990s. Without the climate crisis, an ageing global population means such deaths would have increased, but only by 65%. High temperatures also led to a record 6% more hours of lost sleep in 2023 than the 1986–2005 average. Poor sleep has a profound negative effect on physical and mental health.

Hotter and drier weather saw greater numbers of sand and dust storms, which contributed to a 31% increase in the number of people exposed to dangerously high particulate matter concentrations, while life-threatening diseases such as dengue, malaria and West Nile virus continue to spread into new areas as a result of higher temperatures.

But despite this, “governments and companies continue to invest in fossil fuels, resulting in all-time high greenhouse gas emissions and staggering tree loss, reducing the survival chances of people all around the globe”, the authors found.

In 2023, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions reached an all-time high, 1.1% above 2022, and the proportion of fossil fuels in the global energy system increased for the first time in a decade during 2021, reaching 80.3% of all energy.

Responding to the findings, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said: “The climate crisis is a health crisis. As the planet heats up, the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters increase, leaving no region untouched.”

The report makes it clear, he added, that “climate change is not a distant threat, but an immediate risk to health”.

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said: “Record-high emissions are posing record-breaking threats to our health. We must cure the sickness of climate inaction – by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction – to create a fairer, safer and healthier future for all.”

Temperate countries are also seeing the effects of the climate crisis. In 2013-2022, the UK’s overall mean increase in heat-related deaths was estimated at nine deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, while there were 8.5 million potential working hours lost due to heat exposure in 2023.

Dr Lea Berrang Ford, head of the Centre for Climate and Health Security at the UK Health Security Agency, which published its own report on the health impacts of global heating on the UK, said: “Climate change is not solely a future health threat. Health impacts are already being felt domestically and globally, and these risks will accelerate.

“There are significant opportunities for win-win solutions that can combat climate change and improve health. The health decisions we make today will determine the severity and extent of climate impacts inherited by today’s youth and their children.”

Dr Josh Foster, lecturer in human environmental physiology at King’s College London, said the report’s “alarming” trends would “result in more frequent mass mortality events in older people as the devastating impacts of climate change are realised”.


Climate change driving 'record threats to health': report

Daniel Lawler
Tue 29 October 2024


The world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters (Sylvie HUSSON) (Sylvie HUSSON/AFP/AFP)


Climate change poses a growing threat to human health in a variety of record-breaking ways, a major report said Wednesday, the experts warning that "wasted time has been paid in lives".

The new report was released as heatwaves, fires, hurricanes, droughts and floods have lashed the world during what is expected to surpass 2023 to become the hottest year on record.

It also comes just weeks before the United Nations COP29 talks are held in Azerbaijan -- and days before a US election that could see climate change sceptic Donald Trump return to the White House.

The eighth Lancet Countdown on health and climate change, developed by 122 experts including from UN agencies such as the World Health Organization, painted a dire picture of death and delay.

Out of 15 indicators that the experts have been tracking over the last eight years, 10 have "reached concerning new records," the report said.

These included the increasing extreme weather events, elderly deaths from heat, spread of infectious diseases, and people going without food as droughts and floods hit crops.

Lancet Countdown executive director Marina Romanello told AFP the report showed there are "record threats to the health and survival of people in every country, to levels we have never seen before".

- 'Fuelling the fire' -

The number of over-65s who died from heat has risen by 167 percent since the 1990s, the report said.

Rising temperatures have also increased the area where mosquitoes roam, taking deadly diseases with them.

Last year saw a new record of over five million cases of dengue worldwide, the report noted.

Around five percent of the world's tree cover was destroyed between 2016 and 2022, reducing Earth's capacity to capture the carbon dioxide humans are emitting.

It also tracked how oil and gas companies -- as well as some governments and banks -- were "fuelling the fire" of climate change.

Despite decades of warnings, global emissions of the main greenhouse gases rose again last year, the World Meteorological Organization said earlier this week.

Large oil and gas companies, which have been posting record profits, have increased fossil fuel production since last year, the report said.

Many countries also handed out fresh subsidies to fossil fuels to counteract soaring oil and gas prices after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $1.4 trillion in 2022, which is "vastly more than any source of commitments to enable a transition to a healthier future," Romanello said.

- 'No more time to waste' -

But there were also "some very encouraging signs of progress," she added.

For example, deaths from fossil fuel-related air pollution fell by nearly seven percent to 2.10 million from 2016 to 2021, mainly due to efforts to reduce pollution from burning coal, the report said.

The share of clean renewables used to generate electricity nearly doubled over the same period to 10.5 percent, it added.

And there are signs that climate negotiations are paying more attention to health, Romanello said, pointing to the COP talks and national climate plans to be submitted early next year.

"If action is not taken today, the future will be very dangerous," she warned.

"There is really no more time to waste -- I know we have been saying this for many years -- but what we are seeing is that the wasted time has been paid in lives."

For people at home, Romanello advised a climate-friendly diet, travelling without burning dirty energy, ditching banks that invest in fossil fuels and voting for politicians promising greater action on global warming.

dl-jdy/giv

Climate crisis caused half of 2022 European heat deaths, study finds
Maryam Kara
Tue 29 October 2024

(AFP/Getty Images)


More than half of the 68,000 heat-related deaths during the scorching European summer in 2022 were caused by climate change, a study has found.

Researchers from Barcelona Institute for Global Health revealed human-induced climate change, brought on by the burning of fossil fuels and destruction of nature, may have resulted in 38,000 more deaths in 2022.

It was the year that saw the hottest summer on record and a death toll about 10 times greater than the number of homicides in Europe during the whole year.

Warm weather had killed more women than men, more southern Europeans than northern Europeans, and more individuals over the age of 64 in comparison to those who were younger.

While scientists have previously established a link between carbon pollution and hotter heatwaves, they were unaware of how much carbon pollution had driven up the death toll.

It has now been revealed the generally higher vulnerability of these groups was exacerbated by anthropogenic warming, and the clogging of the atmosphere by greenhouse pollutants.

To estimate how many more people die as a result of hot weather, an existing heat and health data model for 35 European countries was examined alongside temperatures for a hypothetical world in which humans had not heated the planet.

Researchers concluded climate change was behind 22,501 heat deaths in women and 14,026 heat deaths in men, but also highlighted human-induced climate change has exacerbated the heat-related mortality during other exceptionally hot summers.

During 2015–2021, between 44 per cent and 54 per cent of summer heat-related mortality can be attributed to anthropogenic warming.

The study’s lead authors have warned that without mitigation action to combat heat-related deaths, the mortality rate is also “likely to speed up” in the near future.

They said: “Our study urgently calls for national governments and agencies in Europe to increase the ambition and effectiveness of heat surveillance and prevention measures, new adaptation strategies, and global mitigation efforts.”

 

More than half of European heat-related deaths in summer 2022 attributed to anthropogenic warming

The results of the study show a higher number of heat-related deaths attributed to climate change among women and people aged 80 and over

Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)

The unprecedented temperatures in the summer of 2022 caused more than 68,000 deaths on the continent, according to a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the 'la Caixa' Foundation. A new study has now found that more than half - 56% - of the heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022 were related to human-induced climate change. According to the research, 38,154 of the 68,593 heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022 would not have occurred without anthropogenic warming.

The starting point was previous research in which, using temperature and mortality records from 35 European countries, epidemiological models were fitted to estimate heat-related mortality in the summer 2022. Using a dataset of global mean surface temperature anomalies between 1880 and 2022, they estimated the increase in temperatures due to anthropogenic warming for every region. They then subtracted those increases from the recorded temperatures to obtain an estimate of what temperatures would have been in the absence of anthropogenic warming. Finally, using the model developed in the first study, they estimated mortality for a hypothetical scenario where those temperatures would have occurred. 

The results, published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, showed that the number of heat-related deaths per million inhabitants attributed to anthropogenic warming was twice as high in the Southern regions compared to the rest of Europe.

In line with previous studies, the team found a higher number of heat-related deaths attributed to climate change among women (22,501 out of 37,983 deaths) and people aged 80 years or more (23,881 out of 38,978 deaths) as opposed to men (14,026 out of 25,385 deaths) and people aged 64 years or less (2,702 out of 5,565 deaths).

“This study sheds light on the extent to which global warming impacts public health. While we observe an increase of heat-related mortality across nearly all the countries analysed, not everyone is affected equally, with women and the elderly particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of rising temperatures,” says Thessa Beck, ISGlobal researcher, and the study's first author.

Urgent need for ambitious adaptation and mitigation measures

Temperatures in Europe are rising twice as fast as the global average, exacerbating health impacts. But climate change has not only exacerbated heat-related mortality in exceptionally hot summers as in 2022. According to the study's findings, between 44% and 54% of heat-related summer mortality between 2015 and 2021 can be attributed to global warming. In absolute terms, this corresponds to an annual burden of between 19,000 and 28,000 deaths. By comparison, the figures for 2022 show an alarming 40% increase in heat-related mortality and a two-thirds increase in mortality attributed to anthropogenic warming.

“Our study urgently calls on governments and national authorities in Europe to increase the ambition and effectiveness of surveillance and prevention measures, new adaptation strategies, and global mitigation efforts. Without strong action, record temperatures and heat-related mortality will continue to rise in the coming years,” says Joan Ballester Claramunt, Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant EARLY-ADAPT (https://www.early-adapt.eu/).

>>Check the data.

Reference

Beck TM, Schumacher DL, Achebak H, Vicedo-Cabrera AM, Seneviratne SI, Ballester J. Mortality burden attributed to anthropogenic warming during Europe’s 2022 record-breaking summer. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. Oct. 2024. Doi:  10.1038/s41612-024-00783-2

---

Journal

npj Climate and Atmospheric Science

DOI

10.1038/s41612-024-00783-2 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Mortality burden attributed to anthropogenic warming during Europe’s 2022 record-breaking summer

Article Publication Date

29-Oct-2024

Imperialism as antagonistic cooperation

By Promise Li

Published 16 October, 2024

In the months before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s uneasy visit to Beijing last year, the CEOs of J.P. Morgan, Starbucks, Apple, General Motors, and Tesla had amiable meetings with former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang.1 Reaffirming what Xi Jinping and other Chinese ministers have declared on an annual basis, Qin assured Elon Musk that China “remain[s] committed to fostering a better market-oriented, law-based and internationalized business environment.”2

What some pundits label the decoupling of strategic industries in this period of intercapitalist tensions must be critically examined. Economic interdependence has shown surprising resilience even across rival geopolitical blocs. Existing theories of imperialism fail to fully account for these seemingly contradictory dimensions of today’s world system. Tricontinental theorizes the current stage of imperialism as “hyper-imperialism,” characterized by a unipolar “US-Led Military Bloc” as the sole imperialist force that renders all other global contradictions secondary or “non-antagonistic.”3 For the authors at Tricontinental, this imperialist bloc is being challenged by a multipolar “socialist grouping led by China,” representing “growing aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernization, and multilateralism, emerging from the Global South.” Such a perspective disregards the implications of both the interdependence between the two blocs and the emergent role of certain intermediate economies — for example, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia — in developing regional hegemonies that facilitate imperialism amidst geopolitical tensions.

In contrast to Tricontinental, some see the form of imperialism today as an interimperialist conflict in the same vein as the First World War, which Bolshevik revolutionaries V. I. Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin first theorized.4 This view overly downplays the decline of US hegemony while overestimating the rise of new imperialists as a counterbalance to US imperialism. These faulty conceptions are two sides of the same coin: they overstate the dynamics of rivalry, thus obscuring salient sites of interconnection in the imperialist system that can yield powerful opportunities for solidarity across antisystemic struggles.

Of course, deep antagonisms between nations nonetheless exist and have already generated a disastrous human cost, as in the US-Israeli assault on Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But, we must not miss capitalism’s readjustment of its own constitution to develop new terms for recovery and stabilization. Antagonistic cooperation, a conceptual framework developed by Marxists in postwar Germany and Brazil, provides the best tools for analyzing this particular stage of imperialism. Unlike the unipolar theorization of Tricontinental or the multipolar rivalry of those following the Bolshevik theorists, which both overemphasize rivalry between imperialist powers, antagonistic cooperation understands the imperialist system as an interdependent totality that can accommodate interdependence between and beyond geopolitical blocs. Additionally, unlike the two models described above, antagonistic cooperation also allows for heterogeneity of power relations within this paradigm even as the overall structure of dependency between core and periphery economies continues to exist. For one, the rivalry between the United States and China does not imply their equality in the global imperialist system, which is still led and dominated by the former. What Claudio Katz calls “empires-in-formation,” and other intermediate or subimperial countries, are also cultivating the ability to occasionally check US power through military, economic, or other means.5 But this signals neither an anti-imperialist affront to US hegemony nor a straightforward leveling of the playing field as a new terrain of interimperialist rivalry.

Antagonistic cooperation must also be distinguished from different individual (or branches of) capitalists competing with each other for profits while maintaining the system as a whole as a class. The concept specifically denotes how, as Enrique Dussel puts it, “the international social relation of domination between national bourgeoisies determines…the transfer of value in world competition.”6 In other words, antagonistic cooperation concerns the terms in which the relations of domination between nations take shape today. This essay identifies and explores three main characteristics of antagonistic cooperation: 1) the coexistence of a degree of antagonism between imperialist countries, empires-in-formation, and other intermediate, subimperial, and regional hegemons with their interdependence and cooperation; 2) the key role intermediate and regional economies play in maintaining global accumulation by developing a degree of political and economic autonomy to interface between geopolitical antagonisms; 3) the ever-deepening fusion of finance and state-led industrial capital that secures these two characteristics.7

Defining antagonistic cooperation

In the 1960s, the Brazilian Marxist collective Política Operária (POLOP) gathered socialists from different traditions to investigate the role of the national bourgeoisie in periphery countries within a larger imperialist world system. They developed the concept of antagonistic cooperation, first coined by German communist August Thalheimer in his 1946 pamphlet, Basic Principles and Concepts of World Politics after World War II (Grundlinien und Grundbegriffe der Weltpolitik nach dem 2. WeItkrieg). POLOP encountered Thalheimer’s ideas through its Austrian-born member Erich Sachs, who had been exposed to Thalheimer and Bukharin during his brief stay in Moscow as a Jewish refugee in the 1930s.8 In his pamphlet, Thalheimer observes that though the fundamental contradictions of capitalism only sharpened (verschaerft) in the wake of the Second World War, unlike the outcome of the First World War, “the acuteness of inter-imperialist antagonisms has been interrupted (“den innerimperialistischen Gegensaetzen die Spitze abgebrochen”).9 He admits that, within the imperialist camp, “not all antagonistic forces have disappeared, but the fundamental result is the predominance of their unity over the two remaining groups: the Soviet state with its sphere of influence and the group of colonial and semi-colonial nations.”10 Thalheimer takes the example of the shifting relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States after the war, arguing that United Kingdom’s subordination to the US imperialist bloc does not mean the former has lost all its autonomy. On the contrary:

Although the United States is the military, economic, and ultimately political leader, it is not the sole determinant. There is a kind of interpenetration of mutual imperial interests and domains. It is both cooperation and competition, whereby cooperation predominates. One could use the term “antagonistic cooperation,” coined in physiology. Cooperation against the abolition of colonial rule and exploitation in general and against the socialist sphere, and competition for a share in the exploitation of the colonial territories. Both this cooperation and this competition are taking on forms of their own.11

Thalheimer’s conception of antagonistic cooperation illustrates how a single dominant hegemon does not foreclose the possibilities of antagonisms in its bloc, though such forces can unite to maintain the dependency of periphery economies. This relation of dependency is, as Dussel defines it, a moment in the competition of national capitals itself on a global scale.12 So, more accurately, we can modify Thalheimer’s definition and consider antagonistic cooperation a particular stage of imperialism in which the terms for competition between national capitals take shape through or are mediated by the “interpenetration of mutual imperial interests and domains,” rather than cooperation and competition as distinct tendencies.13 Thalheimer also reminds us that the “form” of antagonistic cooperation “is not fixed once and for all.” This framework does not completely preclude the reemergence of intensified interimperialist rivalry as in the First World War, but characterizes a particular stage of the imperialist system upon the rise of US hegemony.

Thalheimer’s view of imperialism treats the world economy as a kind of interdependent totality, building on Bukharin’s understanding of imperialism as a distinct stage of capitalism in which “the capitalist relations of production dominate the entire world and connect all the parts of our planet with a firm economic bond. Nowadays the concrete manifestation of the social economy is a world economy. The world economy is a real living unity.”14 Bukharin sees that rivaling national economic blocs may arise within this interdependence in the form of “state capitalist trusts.” Bukharin writes: “Being in opposition to each other, these trusts are rivals not only as units producing one and the same ‘world commodity, ’ but also as parts of a divided social world labor, as units which are economically complementary. Hence their struggle is carried on simultaneously along both horizontal and vertical lines: this struggle is complex competition.”15 The expansion of finance capital fortifies this unity, as “monopolistic employers’ associations, combined enterprises, and the penetration of banking capital into industry created a new model of production relations, which transformed the unorganized commodity capitalist system into a finance capitalist organization.”16 The expansion of finance capital fortifies this unity, as “monopolistic employers’ associations, combined enterprises, and the penetration of banking capital into industry created a new model of production relations, which transformed the unorganized commodity capitalist system into a finance capitalist organization.”17 Rather than tending to equilibrium, this “living unity” of imperialism that Bukharin describes tends toward unevenness in maintaining the expansion of profits on a global scale.

POLOP extends this analysis to differentiate periphery economies. Its members argue that the antagonistic cooperation of the world economy propels the peripheries’ uneven development. This unevenness helps develop a certain degree of political and economic autonomy for some nations despite the persistence of dependency. POLOP member Ruy Mauro Marini — most known for his theorization of subimperialism — builds on Ernest Mandel to explain that periphery economies are not homogeneously dependent on the core in the same way. Like Mandel, Marini distinguishes a semiperipheral layer of semi-industrializing countries (like Brazil) from other periphery regions. Marini observes that the speed of technical progress in advanced countries compelled capitalists to replace their fixed capital before it fully wore out (what Marx calls moral depreciation), and so, “these countries increasingly found it necessary to export equipment and machinery that had become obsolete to the periphery before they fully depreciated.”18 This bolstering of certain dependent countries leads Marini to believe that dependency is malleable and dynamic, and it “affect[s] different Latin American countries in diverse ways, according to their specific social formations.”19 Mandel describes this incongruity as “inter-zonal differences of development, industrialization and productivity [that] are steadily increasing.”20 As Katz notes, the approach to unequal exchange and dependency that Marini and Mandel endorse tracks “the heterogeneous dynamic of accumulation, which increases the disparity between the components of a single world market as it expands.”21 In other words, the antagonistic cooperation of the imperialist system also complicates a straightforward understanding of the polarization between the core and the periphery.

This understanding of core/periphery relations as uneven and dynamic entails, as Thalheimer correctly argues, that the form of antagonistic cooperation is not fixed. Marini’s analysis enables us to recognize a certain degree of political and economic autonomy among lesser Western imperialist countries subordinated to the US bloc and in the intermediate economies below the upper rungs of imperialist countries. Other theorists of POLOP further explore this analysis to unpack how some countries cultivate contradictory political relations with other imperialist powers in the world system. POLOP’s 1967 program articulates that an interdependent and cooperative capitalist system can make room for different kinds of antagonistic relationships between states: “With the postwar development, the imperialist system has entered the phase of antagonistic cooperation. This is a cooperation aimed at the conservation of the system and which has its basis in the very process of centralization of capital, and which does not eliminate the antagonisms inherent in the imperialist world. Cooperation prevails and will prevail over antagonisms.”22 As Sachs explains in another essay:

[This antagonistic cooperation between rivaling imperialist powers] finds its logical extension in the relations between them and the national bourgeoisies of the underdeveloped capitalist world. In Latin America and Brazil, this has had the following general consequences: a) a limited field of maneuver for the native bourgeoisie, who have periodically been able to exploit the contradictions between imperialist powers (the United States, England, Germany, etc.) to improve their own positions; b) an acceptance of and growing dependence on the domination of US imperialism in an economic association, in which imperialist capital participates in industrialization, occupies virtual command positions and decisively influences the pace of economic activity.23

In other words, these intermediate economies can play an indispensable role in facilitating the operations of the imperialist system without necessarily challenging or joining the ranks of major imperialists. The subimperial autonomy of such regimes, guided by their “native bourgeoisie” seeking to maximize their profits in the world market, may even buttress the power of existing imperialists. From the perspective of the dominant imperialists, the developing political power of certain intermediate economies can also provide opportunities to secure the expansion of capital against working-class unrest.

We may extend Leon Trotsky’s formulation of uneven and combined development — which he describes as “an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms (of production)” to understand the heterogeneity of intermediate economies. While intermediate states like Turkey, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (despite their continued ties to the United States) are developing relatively autonomous spheres of political and economic hegemony in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, they are, strictly speaking, not imperialist formations. However, such levels of independent regional influence mean that subimperialism is not always a useful analytic. These intermediate economies show that countries can project hegemonic forms of regional power robust enough to check imperialism without becoming full-fledged imperialists or anti-imperialist forces. This schema permits us to understand how the rise of international financial institutions and multinational firms affords unprecedented cooperation in the global capitalist class, which can remain durable in geopolitical crises. As Sachs writes:

Antagonistic cooperation does not free the capitalist world from internal shocks at all levels, ups and downs. There are moments when antagonism seems to predominate, when the national bourgeoisies threaten an “independent” foreign policy, rebel against the schemes of the International Monetary Fund, and nationalize particularly unpopular foreign companies. The same phenomenon occurs among the imperialist powers themselves in moments of periodic relaxation of international tension. It disappears when there is a new upsurge in international tension and, as in France in 1968, when the capitalist regime is put in check. In the long run, cooperation for the maintenance of the system prevails.24

This model of cooperation can thus account for substantial instances of disruption. Sachs’s example of the national bourgeoisie occasionally rebelling against the IMF proves particularly prescient in understanding the actions of BRICS today. These reactions testify to the real existence of crises and instability in the era of imperialist antagonistic cooperation, which is itself situated in a broader geopolitical consensus committed to preserving the expansion of capital accumulation.

The strength and relevance of POLOP’s framework of antagonistic cooperation lies in its recognition that capitalism can creatively renegotiate new terms for survival. On the other hand, Tricontinental’s hyperimperialism thesis mistakenly sees the China-led multipolar order as an opportunity to break from the reproduction of the capitalist economy. Some adherents of the theory of revived interimperialist rivalry argue that today’s profitability crisis may compel more military confrontation among imperialists to stabilize the system.25 While this is not incorrect, we must not overlook how such conflicts would take shape through a deeper nexus of intercapitalist interdependence than obtained in the systemic crises of the 1890s and 1930s (resolved by full-scale global warfare). However, we must also not mistake this interdependence for an inert tendency of the system toward equilibrium. In reality, the maintenance of this cooperation requires continual upkeep, especially as the capitalist system is forced to address the repeating appearance of crises stemming from its internal contradictions. The crises of profitability in the 1970s and the 2000s, for example, required fundamental transformations in how capitalism is organized in order to restore growth (and the suppression of working-class insurgency).

Thus, the terms for cooperation must be consciously reinvented to be maintained. Indeed, the Soviet Union’s collapse threatened the stability of interimperialist cooperation. Another POLOP member, Victor Meyer, presages that “competition among cartels progressively increases, regional defensive blocs multiply, and they clash with each other” and “conflicts born within the capitalist system tend to become fiercer.”26 But Meyer underestimates the strength of the integration of nation-states into the international financial system. This process continues to propel the expansion of accumulation into new markets, even as rivalries deepen. Without downplaying the ever-present threat of antagonistic crises and rivalries between states, this analysis foregrounds the capacity of the imperialist world system to maintain cooperative dynamics to maximize paths for global accumulation. However, we must not mistake this striving for the guarantee that they can successfully restore a new long wave of peaceful growth of profits. As Mandel points out, subjective factors like “intensified class struggle” and other social forces also help determine whether “capital can implement the restructuring necessary to decisively redress the rate of profit.”27 Nonetheless, this framework helps explain the durability of the capitalist system — despite heightening internal antagonisms. While US unipolarity has cohered the capitalist world system for decades, the United States may be joined by a host of new actors in this role.

Antagonistic cooperation today

The interdependence between the United States, Russia, and China shows that even the most threatening antagonisms cannot fully sever the ruling class’s commitment to global accumulation. The role of finance capital in structuring the world economy that Bukharin tracks has grown to monstrous proportions today — a key engine that has allowed capitalism to continually displace its contradictions into new geographies, as Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey have theorized. Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno identify the “formation of a new finance capital” after the 2008 financial crisis, as the rise of asset managers has concentrated capital to an extreme degree through their ownership of highly diverse portfolios of industrial and other corporate firms.28 The United States still retains its predominant role in facilitating this system. For example, Paolo Balmas and David Howath show that the growing internationalization of the renminbi through investment channels does not supplant the dollar’s hegemony.29 This concentration of capital that persists through national rivalries exemplifies Nicos Poulantzas’s treatment of the capitalist state as a “strategic field and process of intersecting power networks, which both articulate and exhibit mutual contradictions and displacements.”30 Maher and Aquanno, analyzing the resilience of the US Fed despite Donald Trump’s efforts to contain it, pinpoint “institutional barriers circumscribing ‘political’ interference were reinforced by the organic linkages between the financial branch and the financial system.”31 Internal processes within states connect with global financial forces to counteract efforts to completely unify the different ruling classes’ interests at the level of the state. The antagonistic cooperation of the world system exacerbates these contradictions between the state and the capitalist classes, generalizing them on a global level. National development and industrial policies pivotally depend on global finance, as states take on more financial risk to expand capital accumulation. This convergence of finance and industry has readjusted the terms of imperialist dependency in the peripheries. Development no longer functions as the antithesis of neoliberalism, but, as Verónica Gago writes:

The developmentalist moment, if we no longer oppose it to financial hegemony and its colonization of the state in the last decade of the twentieth century, could then be seen as a moment of internalization of neoliberal power, which is boosted through rentier resources, intertwining elements that seemed contradictory (and that continue to be so according to certain rhetorics): rent and development, renationalization of companies and increased financialization, social inclusion and mandatory banking.”32

A major consequence of this global reorganization of capital is an unprecedented level of economic interdependence among the financial and industrial institutions of new rival geopolitical blocs. For one, Vanguard is now one of the largest shareholders in both Exxon and the Chinese state-owned Sinopec. Despite the emergence of geopolitical tensions between the West and the BRICS bloc alongside other “refurbished state capitalisms,” as Christopher McNally puts it, the latter “are deeply enmeshed in the global political economy and their practitioners own immense amounts of global financial assets, most significantly US treasury debt. Both models of capitalism are thus simultaneously co-dependent and in competition.”33 Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon go further to say that the world economy today features “not a clash of neatly distinct, rival models of capitalism, but multilinear, hybrid, recombinant landscapes of state intervention, which both shape and are shaped by world capitalist development.”34 Not all economies outside the Western bloc that have developed some degree of political and economic autonomy are equivalent: Brazil and China, for example, do not play the same geopolitical function. In any case, this “asymmetric multipolar world order” still features the United States at its helm, as Ashley Smith describes, but with new challengers like China, Russia, and other regional ones that the United States cannot fully control, in which “countervailing tendencies mitigate them from developing into open warfare.”35

In this sense, the framework of antagonistic cooperation enables us to understand how US imperialist dominance can coexist with emergent imperialists, lesser imperialists, subimperialists, and other regional hegemons. For example, Western sanctions on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine have not led to a straightforward severing of economic interdependence. Chevron, Mobil, and other Western firms continue to support Russian gas through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (which has seen an increase of $200 million in revenue between 2023 and 2024).36 One set of capitalists’ push for decoupling faces resistance from counterparts within their own ranks.37 And so, new forms of state power and geopolitical blocs do not signify that all major capitalists share the same interests as their own national states. In particular, German and American corporations have been eager to call for the stabilization of relations between the United States and China. The competition between Chinese planemaker Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) and Boeing did not obstruct a new joint agreement to deepen collaboration at a joint research center in late 2022.38 Most COMAC supply chains still involve Western firms. Despite new Chinese sanctions on Raytheon early last year, the company continues to play a significant role in supplying materials for China’s domestically produced jets through its subsidiaries.39 Raytheon’s chief executive Greg Hayes admits it still has “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling … is impossible.” The rise of public-private partnerships is another expression of this desire against decoupling, evidenced by the growth of companies like Yanfeng Automotive Interiors, the world’s largest auto interiors supplier, jointly owned by a Chinese state-owned enterprise and a global multinational corporation, or other joint ventures around the world between Chevron and Sinopec. Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements reported last year that while supply chains are becoming longer and more indirect, they have not grown more dense — suggesting that China remains a key player in global supply chains.40

The growing complexity of supply chains also reflects the power of mid-sized and other regional states to mediate the terms of the imperialist system. From the United Arab Emirates’s role in shaping the conflicts in Sudan and Yemen to Iran’s regional hegemony in the Middle East, more and more countries far from the upper rungs of the imperialist system are developing their own extractive, imperialist-like, spheres of influence. And while US hegemony and structures of dependency persist, empires-in-formation and intermediate economies play increasingly important roles in mediating the imperialist system. Katz perceives that “intermediate formations occupy a significant place that breaks the strict parallel between subimperial powers and economic semi-peripheries, as the geopolitical weight of some countries differs from the integration into globalized production achieved by others.”41 Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Israel, Tanzania, and Mexico, among other countries, are playing both sides with the US and China to fund new developmental projects, which, as Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo put it, “are more than manifestations of geopolitical competition—they are also constitutive of regional, national, and local visions and aspirations.”42 US tariffs negatively impact Chinese imports, but the latter continues to boom for items from electric vehicles to batteries. The drop in Chinese imports to the United States in 2023 is linked to the rise in Mexican imports: Chinese businesses are rerouting commodities to the United States through Mexico to avoid tariffs — a phenomenon some have labeled nearshoring. Tanzania and Kenya have courted IMF and Chinese loans to further privatize domestic resources in the name of development.43 Earlier in June, Kenyan President William Ruto secured billions of dollars from the United States to construct a new railway mere days after confirming China’s support in extending an existing railway.44 He states Kenya is “neither facing West nor East; we are facing forward where opportunities are.” These instances exemplify what Patrick Bond identifies as an often understated aspect of unequal ecological exchange, which recognizes that imperialist dependency is not challenged, but rather “facilitated by BRICS extractivism” when factoring in “depleted non-renewable resources, local pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and unpaid social reproduction of labor” in the global South.45 In this sense, empires-in-formation, subimperial, and other intermediate countries provide an outlet for the contradictions of imperialism to be mollified — at least for the foreseeable future.

That said, we must not downplay the antagonistic part of this cooperation. Catastrophic wars of national oppression still erupt, as Palestinians, Tigrayans, and Ukrainians have witnessed in recent years. Karl Kautsky’s theory of ultraimperialism, which sees the capitalist system developing into a peaceful period of “a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race,” remains false.46 Lenin and Bukharin’s dictum still rings true: socialists must staunchly organize against our own countries’ imperialistic tendencies, no matter how economically connected or disconnected they become. But for now, objective conditions prohibit us from drawing a strict definitive line between rivaling imperial blocs as different state capitals continue to overlap. The increased integration of state-owned enterprises into global finance reinforces an unprecedented level of intercapitalist collaboration and economic interdependence — but one that is more unstable than ever. This reality reflects a dynamic that neither interimperialist rivalry nor Kautsky’s ultraimperialism can fully account for. Indeed, global economic integration still existed in salient forms during the First World War, but mostly just contained within geopolitical camps, which historian Jamie Martin calls “strained interdependence.”47 However, the rise of neoliberalism has developed a level of interdependence that endures even across rival state blocs, thus undercutting the possibility of open interimperialist warfare witnessed in the first two World Wars.

So, we must consider how new overseers of the imperialist world system dictate new terms for how these antagonisms take shape, amidst entrenched interdependence between states and firms. Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh shows the interconnections between the West and Russia, despite Putin’s colonial invasion of Ukraine. While the West has looked to build links with Azerbaijan to tap into its oil resources as an alternative energy source to Russia, Azerbaijan has also deepened links with Russia to import its gas to keep up with this demand. Turkish imports of Russian crude oil also reached an all-time high late last year, with a Russia-Turkey gas hub in the works.48 It is doubtful if the drop in Russia-Turkey trade this year, thanks to pressure from US sanctions, would persist, especially with the deal signed last year between Russia’s Lukoil and Azerbaijan’s Socar to enable the Turkish STAR refinery to expand production. Turkey’s balancing act rests on the country’s hopes to benefit from playing different sides by laundering Russian gas to the West as “Turkish gas” (thus bypassing US sanctions). US ally India now imports 40 percent of its crude oil from Russia — a 1000 percent increase since Russia’s war on Ukraine started in 2021.49 Such links are particularly notable in the case of Israel. While the United States undoubtedly remains the decisive sponsor of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, as Michael Karadjis observes, “the main culprits” who are keeping Israel’s oil and coal supply running to maintain its war efforts are those countries that “have been publicly critical of Israel’s actions, including BRICS members Russia, Brazil, Egypt and China.”50

Israel’s ongoing genocidal onslaught on Palestine is a sharp reminder that the current iteration of antagonistic cooperation does not erase the existence of the core-periphery relation that structures imperialism, but maintains it with new actors and dynamics. Marini and Mandel’s amendments to models of dependency provide a crucial starting point for understanding this. Their framework registers how the semiperiphery unevenly combines core and periphery aspects. On the other hand, an orthodox core-periphery model does not account for this unevenness outside of core economies. An adequate understanding of today’s economy precisely rests on this differentiation among the periphery and semiperiphery economies, as they can now cultivate increasingly autonomous spheres of influence without challenging US dominance of the world system. While the United States remains Israel’s staunchest ally and military supplier, Israel’s trade with China has skyrocketed in recent years. Upon Israel’s genocidal leveling of Gaza, China has rightly pressured Israel for a ceasefire, but nonetheless, still reaffirms the two-state solution. As Israel has looked to diversify its political and economic allies, China balances its deep commitments to both Israeli and various Arab bourgeoisies by endorsing a highly compromised vision of Palestinian sovereignty. In response to the Houthis’s threats in the Red Sea in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, China responded by pressuring Iran to rein in the Houthis.51 The point is not that China plays just as disastrous of a role as the United States in the genocide in Gaza, but that, at decisive moments, it helps to uphold the global imperialist order, rather than upending it as a genuine counterweight to empire. The antagonistic cooperation of the world system accommodates rivalry without fully disrupting the ruling class’s collective drive toward global capital accumulation. Contemporary antagonisms in the world system have only reconfigured the terms in which global accumulation continues, without positing alternatives for a more democratic and liberatory social order.

Resisting antagonistic cooperation

Antagonistic cooperation requires constant upkeep and reinvention through new techniques, as capitalists still struggle to recover profitability and productivity in the face of overaccumulation.52 However, the constant denominator of each phase of imperialism remains the same: the active suppression of proletarian power. Geopolitical antagonisms may — but not necessarily — create better conditions for struggle. POLOP helps us understand how the bourgeoisie of subimperial countries can deepen exploitation in their own countries as they grant concessions to anti-imperialist and progressive forces in movements from below. Countries that play a subimperial or lesser imperial role from the perspective of value transfer in the world system may also express imperial modes of domination by other means, like resource imperialism in their own internal colonies.53 Thus, effectively building a global movement to challenge capital that links proletarian forces from the core to the peripheries demands a clear understanding of how imperialism functions today.

An inadequate understanding of imperialism can lead to dangerous political errors in the work of socialist internationalism. On the one hand, subscribing to an orthodox model of interimperialist rivalry that overestimates the decline of US hegemony risks downplaying the enduring force of the US empire in containing avenues for struggle through a variety of means, from its military capacity (evidenced in the genocidal destruction of Gaza) to its soft power through non-governmental organizations, human rights organizations, among other institutions. For one, while Ukraine has every right to defend itself against Russia’s colonial invasion, pro-Ukraine solidarity groups on the left must do more to disentangle its struggle for self-determination from NATO — an imperialist formation that has harmed many communities across the world.54 As Gilbert Achcar writes, socialist support for Ukrainian self-determination is not unconditional: we must “oppose anything that might tilt the balance toward turning this war into an essentially inter-imperialist one.”55 On the other hand, underestimating the role of intermediate, regional, and lesser imperialist powers in maintaining the imperialist system amidst US hegemony can lead to a problematic illusion that such forces represent an alternative to imperialism. Such a belief has induced some to apologize for or ignore the crimes of such states against their workers, national minorities, and other democratic movements.56 Groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, for example, have uncritically supported reactionary regimes that peddle anti-imperialist rhetoric, like the Syrian and Nicaraguan governments, even as they brutalize dissidents in diverse opposition movements by pigeonholing them all as lackeys of US imperialism.57

Understanding the world system’s antagonistic cooperation can expose the ideological fictions, like the so-called “New Cold War,” mustered by rivaling imperialists and other regional hegemons. This could provide opportunities for socialists to articulate links between struggles that do not falsely champion any one capitalist state as a stalwart of anti-imperialism or democracy against another. Rather than endorsing the threatening agenda of such states — exemplified by the uneven degrees of militarization of the Indo-Pacific by the United States and China, socialists can target sites of collaboration between capitalist powers that persist despite their antagonisms. For example, the Palestinian Youth Movement’s “Mask Off Maersk” campaign pressures Maersk, the world’s largest shipping and logistics company that plays a pivotal role in facilitating trade for most major geopolitical actors, to cease arms shipments to Israel.58 The Chinese diaspora-led Palestine Solidarity Action Network has developed a campaign against Chinese state-owned companies like Hikvision that are complicit in Israel’s surveillance of Palestinians, while promoting ongoing boycotts and actions against Western firms for Chinese-speaking audiences.59 Such efforts invite Sinophone communities to join with others to recognize the intersections of US and Chinese power in their mutual economic support of Israel’s apartheid state, thus expanding the scope of the BDS movement and Palestinian solidarity struggle in the United States. In another case, the Counter-Summit against the IMF and the World Bank in Marrakech in 2023 gathered over 170 grassroots organizations from the global North to South. It released a comprehensive set of demands that “reject all forms of oppression, domination, imperialism, and foreign military interference that threaten peace and national sovereignty, whatever their origin (French, American, Chinese, Russian).”60 Recent mass protests emerging from cost-of-living crises for working-class communities in Argentina, Sri Lanka, and Kenya all implicate their regimes’ dependency on both US-led and Chinese institutions to varying degrees. These movements are based on the correct understanding that complicity between various imperialist and other hegemonic formations facilitates global capitalism. A renewed antiglobalization movement building on such existing struggles is possible and necessary, as it can address interdependent roots of social ills, and provide opportunities for international solidarity and struggle that refuse to sacrifice the struggles of one people against oppression for another.

Far from undoing the neoliberal world order, the capitalist class innovates new terms for maintaining and reforming globalization. Theories of imperialism must account for economic barriers that prevent a clean break in today’s geopolitics. Indeed, the sphere of politics can act autonomously in relation to that of economics. But, we must also not underestimate how the persistence of tendencies that maintain globalization still plays a crucial role in determining the limits of politics. Moreover, understanding such dynamics can expose new sites of global working-class and anti-imperialist solidarity against ruling elites who strive to contain these possibilities in their rivalry and cooperation. Thus, the struggle against Western imperialism demands expanding our horizons to target the innumerable ways Western imperialist institutions and other imperialists are entangled. Supply chains, public-private partnerships, the portfolios of Blackrock and Vanguard, international climate agreements between national bodies, and the IMF — such actors can be crucial sites of struggle. From Blackrock’s neoliberal post-war reconstruction plan for Ukraine to jointly owned enterprises between US and Chinese state capital, there are many opportunities to develop an internationalist horizon from existing regional movements. Working-class struggles have already made crucial nodes of antagonistic cooperation visible in recent years. It remains for the left to build organizations and political strategies to further articulate them as salient sites of revolutionary struggle.

Promise Li is a socialist from Hong Kong and now based in Los Angeles. He is a member of Tempest Collective and Solidarity, and has been active in higher education rank-and-file union work, international solidarity and antiwar campaigns, and Chinatown tenant organizing.

• 1

  Ryan McMorrow and Demetri Sevastopolu, “US business elites welcome Xi Jingping with standing ovation,” Financial Times, November 16, 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/a8633d7f-f785-4195-b0b2-0ea9506968c9.

• 2

  Qin Gang Meets with Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Elon Musk,” Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Nigeria, May 30, 2023, http://ng.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zgxw/202306/t20230604_11089384.htm. Musk responded reciprocally, remarking that “the interests of the United States and China are interlinked, like conjoined twins inseparable from each other.” Later in the year, during the Asian Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) convening in San Francisco, Xi received a standing ovation from many of those same leaders—joined by others from major corporations like Pfizer and Bridgewater—as he proclaimed that “China is ready to be a partner and friend of the US.”

• 3

  Tricontinental, “Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage,” Tricontinental, January 23, 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/.

• 4

  Michael Pröbsting, “‘Empire-ism’ vs a Marxist analysis of imperialism: Continuing the debate with the Argentinian economist Claudio Katz on Great Power rivalry, Russian imperialism, and the Ukraine War,” Links, March 3, 2023, https://links.org.au/empire-ism-vs-marxist-analysis-imperialism-continuing-debate-argentinian-economist-claudio-katz

• 5

  Claudio Katz, “China: Neither Imperialism nor part of the Global South,” La Página Oficiel de Claudio Katz (blog), September 7, 2021,https://katz.lahaine.org/china-neither-imperialist-nor-part-of/.

• 6

  Enrique Dussel, “Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 and the ‘Concept’ of Dependency,” Latin American Perspectives 17, no. 2 (1990): 82, https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X9001700204

• 7

  The author’s discussions with Isaac Miller are essential in the formulation of these theses.

• 8

  “Érico Czaczkes Sachs,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed September 15, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/portugues/sachs/index.htm. Sachs was secretly exposed to anti-Stalinist contacts and discourses in Moscow, which led to his expulsion to Paris. In Paris, Sachs met Thalheimer—a member of the International Communist Opposition who sided with Bukharin and the Right Opposition upon their fallout with Stalin—who became his mentor. Sachs later brought Bukharin and Thalheimer’s ideas to Brazil.

• 9

  August Thalheimer, Grundlinien und Grundbegriffe der Weltpolitik nach dem 2. WeItkrieg (Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik, 1946), 9.

• 10

  Thalheimer, Grundlinien, 2.

• 11

  Thalheimer, Grundlinien, 10.

• 12

  Dussel, “Marx’s Economic Manuscripts,” 74.

• 13

  Enrique Dussel, “Marx’s Economic Manuscripts,” 62–101.

• 14

  Nikolai Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of Transition Period (Routledge, 1979 [1920]), 58.

• 15

  Bukharin, Politics, 63.

• 16

  Bukharin, Politics, 60.

• 17

  Bukharin, Politics, 60.

• 18

  Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency (Monthly Review Press, 2022 [1973]), 148.

• 19

  Marini, Dialectics of Dependency, 155.

• 20

  Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (NLB, 1976 [1972]), 376.

• 21

  Claudio Katz, Dependency Theory after Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Latin American Critical Thought (Brill, 2022 [2019]), 51.

• 22

  Política Operária, “Programa Socialista para o Brasil,” in POLOP: uma Trajetória de Luta pela Organização Independente da Classe Operária no Brasil (Centro de Estudos Victor Meyer, 2009 [1967]), 101.

• 23

  Ernesto Martins (Erich Sachs), “Caminho e caráter da revolução brasileira,” in POLOP, 144.

• 24

  Ernesto Martins (Erich Sachs), “Caminho e caráter da revolução brasileira,” in POLOP, 144.

• 25

  Ashley Smith, “Crisis, Rivalry, and the Fragmentation of Global Capitalism: An Interview with Michael Roberts,” Spectre, June 14, 2023,https://spectrejournal.com/crisis-rivalry-and-the-fragmentation-of-global-capitalism/.

• 26

  Victor Meyer, “​​Tensões interestatais: o declinio da “cooperação antagônica,” available at https://www.marxists.org/portugues/meyer/1998/03/27.pdf.

• 27

  Ernest Mandel, Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A New Interpretation (Verso Books, 1995 [1980]), 37.

• 28

  Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From JP Morgan to Blackrock (Verso, 2024).

• 29

  Paolo Balmas and David Howath, “Chinese currency exceptionalism: The curious internationalisation of the renminbi,” The World Economy (Early View, September 2024): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.13632.

• 30

  Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (Verso, 1990), 136.

• 31

  Stephen Maher and Scott M. Aquanno, “From Economic to Political Crisis: Trump and the Neoliberal State,” in Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate, Rob Hunter, Rafael Khachaturianm, and Eva Nanopoulos, ed., (Palgrave McMillan, 2023), 115.

• 32

  Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Duke University Press, 2017), 26.

• 33

  Christopher McNally, “The Challenge of Refurbished State Capitalism: Implications for the Global Political Economic Order,” dms – der moderne staat – Zeitschrift für Public Policy, Recht und Management 61 (2013): 44,https://doi.org/10.3224/dms.v6i1.03.

• 34

  Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2024), 232.

• 35

  Ashley Smith, “The asymmetric world order: Interimperial rivalry in the twenty-first century,” International Socialist Review, no. 100 (2016): https://isreview.org/issue/100/asymmetric-world-order/.

• 36

  Kate Watters, “Sidestepping the Sanctions on Russia,” Inkstick, October 4, 2022, https://inkstickmedia.com/sidestepping-the-sanctions-on-russia/; Tamara Vaal and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Caspian Pipeline Consortium sees its 2024 revenue rising to 2.5 bln,” Reuters, January 16, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/caspian-pipeline-consortium-sees-its-2024-revenue-rising-25-bln-2024-01-16/

• 37

  Thomas Fazi, “The capitalists are revolting over China; Western hawks face an unlikely resistance, “ UnHerd, June 6, 2023, https://unherd.com/2023/06/the-capitalists-are-revolting-over-china/.

• 38

  Reuters Beijing Newsroom, “COMAC, Boeing agree to step-up research cooperation,” Reuters, November 9, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-boeing-agree-step-up-research-co-operation-2022-11-09/

• 39

  Sylvia Pfeifer, “‘We can de-risk but not de-couple’ from China, says Raytheon chief,” Financial Times, June 19, 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/d0b94966-d6fa-4042-a918-37e71eb7282e.

• 40

  Han Qiu, Hyun Song Shin, Leanne Si Yang, Zhang, BIS Bulletin No. 78: Mapping the realignment of global value chains (Bank for International Settlements: Basel, 2023), https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull78.pdf.

• 41

  Katz, Dependency Theory, 251

• 42

  Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo, eds., The Rise of the Infrastructure State: How US-China Rivalry Shapes Politics and Place Worldwide (Bristol University Press, 2023), 2.

• 43

  Peter S. Goodman, “Why Chinese Companies Are Investing Billions in Mexico,” New York Times, June 20, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/business/china-mexico-trade.html.

• 44

  Cliff Mboya, “Ruto’s US Visit Is not a Detachment from China,” Kenyan Foreign Policy, June 17, 2024, https://kenyanforeignpolicy.com/rutos-us-visit-is-not-a-detachment-from-china/.

• 45

  Patrick Bond and Federico Fuentes, “US imperial dominance, BRICS sub-imperialism, and unequal ecological exchange,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, December 23, 2024, https://links.org.au/us-imperial-dominance-brics-sub-imperialism-and-unequal-ecological-exchange-interview-patrick-bond

• 46

  Karl Kautsky, “Der Imperialismus,” Die Neue Zeit 2, no. 32 (1914): 908–22, translation available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/09/ultra-imp.htm.

• 47

  Jamie Martin, “Strained Interdependence: Inflation and Uprisings in Colonial Economies in the First World War,” American Historical Review 128, no. 2 (June 2023): 767-82. See also Adam Tooze and Ted Fertik, “The World Economy and the Great War,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 40 (2014): 214-38, https://doi.org/10.13109/gege.2014.40.2.214.

• 48

  Reuters, “Exclusive: Turkey saves $2 billion on Russian oil as imports soar despite sanctions,” Reuters, December 18, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/turkey-saves-2-bln-russian-oil-imports-soar-despite-s

• 49

  Mike Schuler, “India’s Crude Oil Imports from Russia Surge 1000%,” gCaptain, August 7, 2024, https://gcaptain.com/indias-crude-oil-imports-from-russia-surge-1000/.

• 50

  Michael Karadjis, “BRICS and Israel’s ongoing energy supplies,” Their Anti-imperialism and Ours (blog), July 9, 2024, https://theirantiimperialismandours.com/2024/07/09/brics-and-israels-ongoing-energy-suppli

• 51

  Parisa Hafezi and Andrew Hayley, “Exclusive: China presses Iran to rein in Houthi attacks on the Red Sea, sources say,” Reuters, January 25, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/china-presses-iran-rein-houthi-attacks-red-sea-sources-say-2024-01-26/

• 52

  Smith, “Crisis, Rivalry, and the Fragmentation of Global Capitalism.”

• 53

  John Smith and Federico Fuentes, “Twenty-first century imperialism, multipolarity and capitalism’s ‘final crisis’: Interview with John Smith,” Links, August 1, 2023, https://links.org.au/twenty-first-century-imperialism-multipolarity-and-capitalisms-final-crisis-interview-john-smith

• 54

  Josefina L. Martinez and Diego Lotito, “NATO and Imperialist Military Expansion,” Left Voice Magazine, July 17, 2022, https://www.leftvoice.org/nato-and-imperialist-military-expansionism/

• 55

  Gilbert Achcar, “Ukraine and abstraction of violence: my reply to Tom Dale,” New Politics, July 17, 2023, https://newpol.org/ukraine-and-the-abstraction-of-violence-my-reply-to-tom-dale/.

• 56

  William I. Robinson, “The Unbearable Manicheanism of the ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Left,” Philosophical Salon, August 7, 2023, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-unbearable-manicheanism-of-the-anti-imperialist-left/.

• 57

  Stephen Gowens, “Syria’s Uprising in Context,” Liberation, February 10, 2012, https://www.liberationnews.org/syrias-uprising-in-context-html/; Nicholas Stendler, “Nicaraguans send message of defiance to U.S. Empire with Sandinista election win,” Liberation, November 10, 2021, https://www.liberationnews.org/nicaraguans-send-message-of-defiance-to-u-s-empire-with-san

• 58

  Palestinian Youth Movement, “Mask Off Maersk: Demand logistics giant Maersk cut ties with genocide,” Mondoweiss, June 4, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/mask-off-maersk-demand-logistics-giant-maersk-cut-ties-with-genocide/

• 59

  Palestine Solidarity Action Network, “Between Chinese Surveillance and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” New Politics 20, no. 1 (2024): https://newpol.org/issue_post/between-chinese-surveillance-and-israeli-settler-colonialism/.

• 60

  Maha Ben Ghada, Imen Louati, and Fadhel Kaboub, “A Counter-summit in Marrakech to say stop to the 79 years of neocolonial exploitation and destruction by the WB and the IMF,” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung/ North Africa Office, December, 2023, https://rosaluxna.org/publications/a-counter-summit-in-marrakech-to-say-stop-to-the-79-years-of-neocolonial-exploitation-and-destruction-by-the-wb-and-the-imf/