Hi Nel, thank you for the great piece as always. This has been a roller coaster piece for me. With each passing paragraph, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing in multiple aspects. But I think you write it clearly : without collective will to progress together and without sacrifice, anti-imperialism is not possible. But this leads me to a specific question : to what degree is anti-imperialism needed and realistically possible?
I will put my country (Indonesia) into perspective. Does people think the government is autocratic? Absolutely. Does people in majority whish for a better state governance? Absolutely. But does people care whether it’s imperialistic in nature or not? Now this is the main question for my country. Looking at historical context and current social economic conditions, I would dare say that what people care is only their livelihood. This part is quite general as in every other parts of the world. But the varying degree of “acceptable livelihood” in Indonesia is mind boggling. You can have an office worker working in the same place, in the same city, with the same living cost, wishing for very different livelihood. I think this is the part where consumerism that is capitalized by imperialist needs to be toned down.
But does the majority of Indonesia civillians wish for more rights and responsibility in statecraft? Rights yes, responsibility definitely no. This is the reality and this is where the Chinese model is actually very fitting. Not in the context of its policy, but of it’s mindset. Domestic governance should be the priority right now for all country wishing for resisting hegemony. Whether this leads to anti-imperialism or not, I don’t think majority of Indonesian citizens care because we are in such a deep economic and welfare crisis that all we focus on right now is survival. Coincidentally, this survival is impossible without certain revolution in domestic affairs management. This is, again, where anti-imperial become relevant : resisting wealth extraction. Wealth extraction from the poor and the working class into the ruling class.
However, let’s say a new ruler rise in Indonesia that is able to relatively increase the prosperity of the majority of people. Whether this new ruler is pro US imperialism or not, most people will not care. It’s just that right now the imperialism of US is so aggressive that the people of Indonesia has opened their eyes to this fact. If another empire can tone down US’ imperialism and by doing so improve Indonesian’s livelihood, I don’t think most Indonesian care about anti-imperialism. This is just the sad but true reality in my country. In the end we are only looking for a way of state management that could improve our livelihood, which is as you mentioned, what Russia, China, and Iran is doing. Anyway, hope this could be of some information to the discussion!
Thank so much for that input. It adds a more fundamental layer to the whole discussion. Do every-day people at the coal face really care so long as they can earn a living and or just survive? Perhaps the system as Nel articulates it is actually rooted at a more profound psychological level. And if so then perhaps capitalism and therefore consummerism is a more natural tendency in humans given it is motivated by the primal drive towards 'survival of the fittest'. While the merits of these sorts of platforms and discussions like Nel's (whixh are indispensable) can have higher intellectual impact - articulating these ideas and values to the grassroots would be a huge challenge given what Thomas has just described. It would be great to hear then what others here think about how that has been done in the past and or could be done today be it in Indonesia and anywhere else in the world.
Even if I generally admire your analyses, Nel, it feels to me like you're not reading Lenin's "Imperialism..." correctly enough, maybe because you're a bit too trapped in the "campista" narrative in which the only "imperialism" is that of the consolidated hegemon, the US Empire. 110 years later the parallels with Lenin's context are striking to me and have been so for some time: the USA is Great Britain (the hyper-financiarized Empire in decline) and China is Germany (the industrial powerhouse and rising star that prefers soft-gloved imperialism such as trading with Brazil and Mexico or building the Baghdad Railroad). There are some differences but not enough not to see that the parllels are striking.
And Lenin, even if he accepted some help by Germany to migrate from Switzerland to the Baltic, had no illusions about the Central Powers being "anti-imperialist" at all, all the opposite. That's why he and comrades demanded the "sealed train", so they could remain uncontaminated from German capitalist and imperialist influence. Like him, we should keep ourselves "sealed" from any hope that Dengist (capitalist) China is our friend in the anti-imperialist struggle, much less the fight for the extremely urgent eco-socialist revolution.
As you repeatedly quote: “We only export goods, capital, and markets; we do not export revolution.” That says it all about the nature of China. There are smaller state actors like Cuba or Algeria, both emerged from socialist and anti-imperialist revolutions, which I deem respectable and credible, but no great power of that type anymore. And Algeria particularly has noticed that China is not trustworthy, going in few years from celebrating a long history of friendship with China to totally snubbing BRICS because China is selling war drones to sub-imperialist Morocco in their fight against West Sahara.
China is selfish and totally imperialist in their behavior. They're also militaristic-imperialist in some areas like the South China Sea, their support for the infamous military junta of Myanmar or the 99 years lease of a naval base in Sri Lanka, but they're mostly Bismarck-style soft-gloved imperialist. As I sometimes say: China doesn't play wéiqí (go) anymore, as Pepe Escobar claimed over a decade ago: now they play plain Monopoly, buying and selling without any grand strategy.
In fact, their grand imperialist strategy, the BRI (formerly the new Silk Road) is quite broke for lack of actual commitment to its consolidation... but that's another story.
Imperialism is ultimately not just something that powers, capitalist powers, do but the name of the game of capitalist competition for the world's resources and markets. It's thus not just something that the USA does but also everyone else to some extent or another, quite notably China. One has been doing it for a century or two, the other (unless we go to ancient history or go to the issues of Tibet and the Indian borders) only in the last decade maybe. But they both do it.
The USSR, with all their limitations, was a much better reference, especially after Stalin. Call me "revisionist" if you wish: it's better than Dengist.
Thank you for your patience, and for this sharp and grounded comment.
You're right that a Leninist reading of the present would probably not treat China as an anti-imperialist force necessarily. Lenin refused to take sides in inter-imperialist competition, and he would have been the first to warn against easily labeling any state functioning within this late capitalist world as a friend of liberation. The parallels you draw between the Anglo-German rivalry of his time and the US-China dynamic of ours are not lost on me. I understand why you read the essay and felt that a harder line was missing.
So why didn't I write it that way?
Because this essay was designed as a strategic and diplomatic intervention. My goal was to reach readers who are not already convinced of a Leninist or Marxist analysis: particularly IR realists, the broader anti-imperialist spectrum, and those who see multipolarity as inherently liberatory and peaceful. If I had opened by framing the grand multipolar powers as potential capitalist-imperialist competitors, many of those readers would have stopped on the first page.
So I chose a different path. I used China as the test case for my argument precisely because China is the hardest case. If even a state with a Marxist-led party, a vast state sector, and a declared socialist orientation is not building a systemic outside to the capitalist world-economy, then the structural constraints are real. I didn't need to define China's character. I needed to show that even on its own terms, the cage holds. That is a claim that opens a question, a room for discussion and thinking (specifically in the currently more entrenched and closed multipolarista space, so to speak).
What I hoped to plant was a seed of doubt about what multipolarity means and what it could mean. Once you see that the shift in the balance of power is not the same as a shift in the logic of the system, the harder questions can follow naturally, a space for thinking a bit more about what's actually happening emerges.
Thanks to you for clarifying, Nel. I can see (now better than before) your stylistic choice and why, however, presented with the article at face value, from my viewpoint, the style becomes the content (to a very large extent at least), hence my perplexity. Sorta reminds me of when I was in the Antimilitarist Movement decades ago and we discussed the relation of "means and goals" -- I'll spare you the details but guess you can understand how the means can become the goals if we're not very careful, and even then.
China is complicated but to me at least it has been clear for a long time that they tend to be very comparable to Bismarck's II Reich, mutatis mutandi. Cheers.
I think I understand your point about style and content folding into each other. For me it really is a tightrope: if I completely step away from the broader “multipolarista” space, and I’m certainly not going to join the conservative right, there isn’t a lot of room left from which to speak. This is the one audience that is at least somewhat open to having the harder conversation, so I’m trying to meet them where they are without simply reproducing their narrative.
I agree with you about the “means becoming the goals” danger. That’s very close to what worries me when I see parts of the anti‑imperial space sliding into inevitability talk: the style of total confidence—“the empire is dead, capitalism is collapsing, peace is around the corner”—starts to replace analysis. Logical leaps take the place of mechanisms. And then, instead of preparing people for long, messy work, we give them a kind of eschatology.
I’m not arguing that the US‑led empire is invincible or eternal. History moves, systems break, and there are real cracks opening now. What I’m pushing against is the idea that this guarantees a good outcome on its own, or that naming decline is the same as understanding how the current system actually works. If we have any responsibility to readers, I think it is to help them see the mechanics—the infrastructures, class structures, and constraints—and to identify where there is genuine space to build something different, not to reassure them that history has already done the work. Turn them into specators instead of subjects of history. Countries or great leaders are not the subjects of history, it is always the masses of people, and yet, here we are cheering on teams.
I’m still observing and researching all this, and I probably need to write something directly on these epistemic bubbles and the “means/goals” problem. The next essay will brush against it a little from the “what now?” side.
What can I say? I'm not one of those who needs to fit in but rather sometimes lament that the rest don't fit in closer to where I stand... yet shrugs and moves on.
I find it ironic that multipolarity doesn't seem to allow you be your own polarity. To me "multipolarity" or rather "campism", means people pandering Erdogan or generally cherleading mindlessly, almost like hooligans sometimes, the "Primakov Triangle" (Escobar's wording), without any criticism. In the end they have no words to justify China selling drones to Morocco to kill the Sahrawis, alienating very anti-imperialist Algeria... which moved on, snubbed the BRICS and proclaimed that only bilateral relations matter. That, what Algeria did is true multipolarism to me, and not what Mali does (again pandering to Morocco).
Disclaimer: I have no particular connection to Algeria but I do respect their stand, as I do with Cuba's. They're not the big boys but they are genuine (and genuinely anti-imperialist) in a way that the "Eurasians" aren't.
"Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar..."
"Walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking..."
(Antonio Machado, one of the Spanish "Brechts" who succumbed to fascism in the 30s, a major influence in how I think since school).
Concuerdo totalmente y no quiero ser parte de algún equipo, solo analizar y presentar lo que estoy viendo y ojalá le sirva a alguien. Sin embargo, este es el momento que nos tocó y con responsabilidad hay que encontrar la manera de presentar esto a la mayor gente posible.
Lamentablemente el capitalismo solo se transforma con las crisis y no se muere. Eso solo con las revoluciones y esas necesitan a la gente conciente, como actor y sujeto de la historia. A veces pienso que ha vuelto la creencia en la fuerzas históricas de Marx, el marxismo otordoxo determinista, en el cual el capital es una historia que se lee antes de irse a dormir, una historia que nos aplaca nuestras preocupaciones, el capitalismo va a morir.
Y no fue eso. Esos escritos más bien son herramientas que nos enseñan que hace falta, que nos hacen entender estás son las debilidades de este sistema y ya.
No sabía que hablaras castellano, mucho menos con tanta fluidez.
Estoy muy radicalmente en desacuerdo con lo del que el Capitalismo no muere. Necesariamente tiene que morir ya, o si no nos matará a la Humanidad entera. Los Límites al Crecimiento han sido sobrepasados, no hay planeta B, así que sólo nos queda Eco-Socialismo o Extinción, parafraseando a Rosa Luxemburg.
Me considero marxista (ur-marxista, no realmente leninista, también un poco anarquista quizá pero no del todo) pero pienso que más que dialéctica lo que hay es Caos (teoría de Caos, por desgracia no muy usada pero muy real). Y estamos ya mismo, según hablamos, entrando en una fase caótica brutal, sin precedente desde lo del Dryas Reciente. El Capitalismo no puede sobrevivir al desastre tan extremo que ha creado: todo tiene que cambiar y todo va a cambiar en esta década misma (2026-35 aprox.) Esa es mi convicción respecto al tiempo que vivimos.
Sin duda harán falta "vanguardias" activas (existen ya, están al acecho) pero la conciencia emerge por la propia dinámica de la catástrofe y la revolución, que es caótica, cuasi-espontánea en su naturaleza. El Partido Bolchevique, por poner un ejemplo, tenía apenas 1000 afiliados en Febrero de 1917. Como decía Kropotkin, no fueron ellos quienes hicieron la Revolución, que fue como "un maremoto", sino quienes lograron no hundirse y llegar sanos y salos a su final.
I'm no Marxist, but I think the way you characterize China is wrongheaded. All westerners think empires are inevitable because we cannot escape our own epistemology.
China was Confucian a long time before Marx was born and remains so. The same way European people are Christians regardless of whether we identify as such consciously.
I suggest you try and read up on Chinese culture and Confucianism in particular to get a less US empire framed capitalist slander mongering vocabulary. Your cynicism might also decrease which would benefit your temperament, I imagine, considering your vocabulary preferences.
Confucius is in essence the Chinese Plato: a conservative ideologue/philosopher that was adopted by the Empire, the Chinese Empire. Because China was already an empire back then and its western counterpart was the Roman Empire. The difference is that "Da Qin" (Rome) did not survive its fragmentation, although it has been dynamically reborn many times in many forms, with the modern version being not so much the USA but rather NATOplus in whole, "the West" as they say... Da Qin = Great West (Qin, which also gives the western name of China, via India, was the westernmost state in the warrior states period and the one that unified China). China on the other hand survived many invasions and divisions and re-consolidated as nation-empire... mostly because victorious but internally divided Da Qin could not get themselves to agree to partition it over a century ago, as they did with Africa... and they got Western revolutionary influences, not just in terms of revolutionary ideas but even in weapons, assuming that you accept that USSR communist troops disobeying Stalin in 1945 are Westerner (Russia and the other Slavic states that formed the USSR are all kinds of European, no matter what the Duginists/Eurasianists dream of).
You can say that this is "Eurocentric" but the reality is that the whole world has been Eurocentric in the last many centuries and even today it is to a large extenct. As the Spaniards say: "a la fuerza ahorcan" ("you get hanged by force"). The "unipolar moment" was not just the 1990s and 2000s but there were others before, quite notably the Victorian era. When it was somewhat "multipolar" it was a European and Eurocentric multipolarity anyhow. This is the first time since Globalization was symbolically kickstarted by my compatriot Elcano's first circumnavigation of Earth, over five centuries ago, that there is a non-European superpower or great power with global projection (because the Ottomans were also European, even if "Eurasian" and Muslim, and were the last claimants to the Roman throne, surviving even the Tsars).
Da Qin's fragments were not psychologically or culturally driven to imperialism by mere ideology (nothing in Plato's works call for imperialism, Plato deals with anti-democracy rather but he lived in a small city-state and never prefered the superpower of his day: Persia or Iran), they were because they had to fight each other... and, when you don't win, when you lose, you become a subject of others, possibly even a colony. There are rare exceptions like, say, Switzerland, which is extremely Western in everything but adopted "perpetual neutrality"... because it was forced to by Milan, which defeated them after a century-long spat of revolutionary Swiss victories. Or an even more radical instance was Savonarola's Florence (which is also Machiavelli's Florence), which was essentially "communist" but lacked an army by ideological choice, so it was easily conquered by the Pope and his Medici lackeys, something that Machiavelli lamented. No miracle and no ideology saved the day.
Anyway, the leading power in Da Qin has been for centuries Great Britain (and more recently their colonial spawn: the USA, which inherited empire and geostrategy, with lesser variations) and their core strategy was always to impede any other great power to consolidate. This happened mostly in Europe (first against Habsburg "Spain", then against France, later against Germany and Russia) but now it has a global significance and the challenger is obviously China. This is often framed as (neo-)colonialism (which is what they mean often by "imperialism") but it's mostly not: it is what great powers do, at least in terms of oligarchies (Capitalism but also the previous Landownerism, which is much older): fight for power. There are diverse ways to do that and bourgeois regimes have often been reluctant to go colonialist, preferring "free trade" without the "burden" of direct management, however that gives others the possibility of encroaching and denying such markets and resources, what leads to actual classical Imperialism and thus to war.
The II Reich politely asked Britain for a trade union (i.e. German access to the British colonial empire) and Britain flatly rejected the proposal. Harmonious cooperation is not thus possible, as every power tries to exploit their advantages vs the others, and that leads to war.
But using a Chinese moniker for Rome and then proceeding to discuss everything in a western framework does not constitute any redress of my initial comment.
Also, confusing the man with the cultural tradition seems like mentioning Jesus and what happened to him as a substitute for talking about Christianity and the influence it has had on so-called western civilization.
Pasting a few paragraphs of whataboutism from your favorite AI chatbot seems like a distraction.
So, I will be kind and helpful and point out that Confucian philosophy considers the welfare of the people as its primary function, which is quite similar to communism. It abhors wealth accumulation, saying it only invites disaster and division. Also very similar to communism.
China has historically avoided continuing expansion, unlike the West. China is focused on continuity, which is a different word for sustainable. (Perhaps you don't believe in climate change?)
The port in Sri Lanka you mentioned is currently operating at full capacity and looking to expand to enable higher throughput and has more than earned back the initial investment. So not a point of empire leverage, but of enablement. (Not sure if that counts as communism, but hey).
China's record trade surplus was immediately deployed into development loans for the global South, rather than lowering the national deficit. Also quite a show of Communist financial solidarity, I suppose, but like I said I am not fluent in Marxism.
I don't interact with any AI chatbot or otherwise. I strongly dislike them.
Also I clearly said that that recent history is Eurocentric no matter how we may dislike that. It's a fact just like the barrel of the gun Mao chanted to.
So please don't smear nor straw-man me with nonsense. Wide is the Internet, I can live without you (and vice versa).
Confucianism is not in any way "similar to communism". It is a conservative ideology based on respecting hierarchy in a extremely patriarchal and oligarchic way. Surely neo-Confucianism may allow for many neo-interpretations but I don't care because we're not going to discuss the vast depths of neo-Confucianism (or Marxism or whatever else of such extreme complexity) here.
China avoided expansion? Sure: they infamously burned the Canton merchant fleet even when they needed it the most out of fear of the others, out of extreme conservatism. Is that a virtue? I don't think so but anyhow it's not a practical virtue, because it doomed China and allowed the Western powers to encroach on them. Anyway that's not the modern post-communist China but the Ming dynasty, just like modern secularist France is not the realm of Louis the Pious, just like today's Mali of Gral. Goita is not the same as that of Mansa Musa. Countries are not "eternal": they do evolve.
Loans to corrupt autocratic dictators do not help the people, only the semi-colonial flow of raw materials to the lender.
Alright then, getting somewhere slightly more interesting.
I'm curious to find out what you define as recent history and also why you so adamantly claim it's all eurocentric?
And I will happily agree to disagree and move along.
Your point about the hierarchies of organization that remain in China is one of the most noteworthy differences to my rough understanding of Marxism and the Chinese characteristics and although it is conservative, conservation seems to me to be of increasing importance given the state of the world. What would satisfy your standard? What is the alternative, considering the rather precarious global ecological and geopolitical circumstances? Just briefly stated, if you don't mind. Like you wrote, here is not the place for expansive discussion.
On Sri Lanka... As with other countries, China seems to just want to trade and leave local politics to the side. This strikes me as shrewd and virtuous, rather than compromised and unprincipled. Self determination comes from within and solidarity has too many similarities to white savoir complex to be deployed without fundamental contradictions, in my opinion. Empire building being the most obvious problem.
What is an alternative that doesn't (con-)descend from lofty heights of utopian idealism? What is a materialist approach that surpass China's current efforts?
The last five centuries, and more so since the Industrial Revolution (last 250 years?), were clearly hyper-dominated by Europe (or "New Europe" since the ascent of the USA) at a global scale. In terms military, in terms of trade/colonialism and in terms of culture and (quite critically) science. I'm not even sure why I even have to explain this, really: if you know any History, you know this.
It's been reasonably argued that the Hajin system (radically restricting maritime trade) prevented China from actually being a great power or superpower... precisely when the Europeans were arriving to the region, leaving them unchecked control of the seas and soon also the coasts. If Taiwan is now Chinese, it's only because of illegal private enterprise, if Singapore is, it's because Britain settled it with Chinese people.
I would also argue on my own account that one of the problems that China had in the long run was that it remained an empire, while Da Qin (the West) didn't and that fragmentation and "internal" competition forced these to innovate more, not just in science (which was important for the development of cannons and what-not) but in strategies, often leading these European powers to colonialism of one type or another and thus the overall European domination of the World for many centuries.
This also happened with some Europeans forcibly subordinating others, most clearly in the shift from Iberian to Anglosaxon centrality, which was not just a streak of luck but a conscious decision by the latter to industrialize (first the Brits since Elizabeth I, later the Yankees with their own creole revolutions), while the Iberians remained backwards and semi-rural instead, not having a proper national grand strategy, but rather doing in their own way the same that China did: knee-jerk into their backward tendencies, losing momentum and power as result.
If PRC were communists, they would do something to favor the toppling of reactionary autocracies like Saudi Arabia and favor as a matter of principle, the more or less socialist and anti-colonial forces of Earth. They do not: their attitude is "everything goes" and worse: they consciously choose odious regimes like the one of Morocco (imperialist, zionist, US protectorate) vs progressive/socialist forces like Algeria and West Sahara. Sadly China has repeatedly failed at the Internationalist test, and it did so even in the days of Mao but even more clearly since Dengism (neo-Capitalism) took over.
My hope is that because of the levels of complexity in the modern world and its interconnectiveness no one entity will be able to simply de-couple/ take over and become a new Hegemon. We are trying to imagine a future that steers a certain direction. But, as technology both accelerates and increases in complexity nobody can actually physically build that world. Because the choices you make now will likely be obsolete in 5-10 years time. Take AI or warfare or the combination of the 2. You cannot control those things. But the danger lies in the people who think they can and know the way to get there. There is also a destructive element in humans we need to consider. We do live in...interesting times.
Looking beneath the surface of today’s fractured geopolitics reveals that this thesis of an immutable "elite-competitive multipolarity" suffers from a blind spot: it confuses a shifting distribution of global power with a preservation of the system’s underlying logic. It presumes that non-Western powers are merely bargaining over shares within a static, inescapable capitalist architecture, lamenting the absence of an ideological "outside" like the Comintern. Yet this reading ignores the colossal material “outside” standing in plain sight: the Chinese domination of global productive capacity. By maintaining strict synchronicity to socially necessary abstract labor in China while the West flees into a financial simulacrum of stock buybacks and intellectual property tolls, an emergent socialist transitional mode has internalized the law of value as a conscious planning tool. To mistake the utilisation of market forms - such as sovereign debt and clearing rails - for the retention of capitalist relations is to misread China; a system willing to accept depressed immediate profit rates to maximize socialized returns and expand productive forces is operating on a fundamentally post-capitalist trajectory.
Furthermore, characterizing this eastern orientation as a purely defensive retreat into strategic vulnerability - a mere commercial transaction summarised by the doctrine of exporting computers rather than revolution - betrays a blindness to historical parallels. When the western Eurasian peninsula began incubating the capitalist mode of production, it did not initiate its ascent by launching an open, premature war against the dominant, pre-modern tributary trade cores of Eurasia and Africa; rather, it embedded itself within those very networks, mastered their dynamics, and built superior productive forces until the old system was shattered from within. Exporting physical commodities and advanced technology rather than empty ideological rhetoric is the historical-materialist dialectic in motion, anchoring all wealth on earth to a massive proletarian concentration under Communist self-rule that has become the world’s true store of value. It is actually the Western imperialist core that sits trapped in a structural cage of its own making, forced by the Triffin dilemma to run perpetual external deficits that systematically hollow out its domestic industrial base - a flight of capital from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) that leaves it economically eviscerated.
Similarly, the assumption herein that the institutional apparatus of world money - SWIFT, Western credit agencies, and USD primacy - constitutes a permanent, monolithic cage for imperialism’s erstwhile victims overlooks the acute terminal crisis building within the seven fracturing pillars of US world money. The contemporary global fiat system did not emerge as a technical evolution or as a result of US victories over the world, but as a desperately errected structural mechanism to attempt to sever money from abstract labor, artificially depressing wages below their value - in order to rescue Western capital from absolute overaccumulation. The gold bullion rally and the steadily growing control over these and other commodities markets is empirical verification that the US imperialist paper pyramid scheme has finally exhausted its ability to violate the law of value with impunity. Far from a passive surrender to the status quo, the creation of a plural monetary ecology - where physical gold functions as a secure store of value for Chinese domestic savings while the renminbi operates as an industrial medium of exchange and a tool for long-term planning - is a highly sophisticated de-escalation strategy. It allows the transitional mode to insulate itself from Western sanctions and bypass the Triffin trap, quietly preparing and building a alternative global infrastructure for when the financialised simulacrum faces its ultimate systemic reckoning.
Finally, attributing a calculative, shape-shifting rationality to the US empire’s "bunker strategy" gives the transatlantic rentier bourgeoisie far too much credit for strategic foresight, mistaking a frantic reflex of economic decay for an efficient geopolitical design. When a historical mode of production can no longer manage the objective laws of investment or generate sufficient surplus value through direct production, its political superstructure inevitably turns erratic, substituting raw military logic for collapsed economic competitiveness. The dangerous flirtation with catastrophic military escalation and proxy conflicts in North and South West Asia is not a masterclass in containing multipolarity, but a desperate, militarized spasm to enforce the utility of an unbacked currency by sheer force as alternative payment rails increasingly bypass traditional maritime chokepoints. The Western rentier class, now comprising an unproductive elite whose wealth is entirely divorced from value creation, is lashing out precisely because the economic walls are closing in. The empire is not an invincible manager of an inescapable global cage; it is a bankrupt order driven to madness, unable to govern by economic gravity and possessing no new productive paradigm to offer the world. It is not the subject of history but its object.
Thank you, Abra. I really appreciate your challenging comment because through such comments, we can cooperatively refine our insights.
So, firstly, I agree with you.
The US financial system is indeed facing structural contradictions which are real, and they are eroding the material base of American power.
China's state-led productive capacity is a genuine material counterweight to Western financial dominance. The scale of Chinese industrial output, its control over critical supply chains, and its gradual construction of alternative institutions are all significant.
Gold and commodity market shifts do reflect a slow erosion of confidence in the dollar-centered system.
And, yes, the Bunker State is indeed, in part, a "frantic reflex of economic decay".
However, none of this contradicts this essay. These sound like a response to an argument like that the empire is invincible and the cage is permanent. I explicitly refuted that claim at the very beginning.
However, here is where our analyses diverge a little regarding the current reality of this transition:
While China is undeniably pursuing a post-capitalist trajectory, it still operates within the framework of the global capitalist economy. A genuine "material outside" would mean immunity to the imperial financial and legal infrastructure. The fact that Western sanctions, SWIFT exclusions, and export controls (like those on semiconductors) still cause real damage demonstrates that this alternative system is still in a phase of transition, not yet a fait accompli. The cage, for now, remains real.
The idea that exporting socialist-produced technology automatically fosters "communist self-rule" abroad overlooks how technology actually functions in practice. A railway or a piece of machinery operates within the social and class structures of the receiving country. Technology does not inherently carry its conditions of production with it; its social effect depends entirely on who uses it and under what systemic conditions. (However, if I misinterpreted your comment, correct me.)
Further, comparing China's development to how early capitalism incubated within feudalism is an elegant analogy, but it requires caution. Capitalism did not simply embed itself peacefully and wait for the old system to shatter; it waged centuries of violent struggle, enclosure, and colonization to replace the old mode of production. If this analogy holds, it implies a prolonged, dangerous conflict rather than a peaceful transition, which is exactly the danger my essay warns about.
Dismissing the empire's current behavior as mere "madness," "desperate spasms," or irrational decay underestimates its lethality. The Bunker State is an emergent, adaptive strategy (through militarization, weaponized finance, and hybrid warfare). To mistake adaptation for mere flailing is dangerous precisely when the empire is fighting to preserve its core hierarchies. (Furthermore, countless Marxists like Luxemburg and Gramsci have pointed to the adaptability of capitalism in different conditions, so have world-systems theorists.)
Lastly, the core of my argument is that the decline of an empire does not automatically guarantee liberation. We currently lack a shared transnational political horizon, cross-border mass organizations, and a fully scaled alternative financial architecture. Until these exist, the transition period remains incredibly perilous. As Gramsci warned, it is precisely in this interregnum—when the old is dying and the new struggles to be born—that the most morbid symptoms appear.
I believe we share the same ultimate hope for a multipolar, post-imperial future, but assuming the victory is already structurally guaranteed might blind us to the immense challenges and organizing still required to actually get there.
At the end of the day, I hope I'm wrong and anti-imperialism and non-capitalist more mixed economy types of organization will simply emerge out of the historical moment, that the contradicitions won't be adapted to by the US-led empire, and we can just sit back and watch, but I doubt it.
Thank you, Nel. I also really appreciate your reply to my reply!
I agree that humanity cannot just sit back and watch. Quite the contrary, class struggle is always and ever at the centre of this - from its most abstract (producers vs. owners), to the laws of motion of modes of production (imperialist modes of destruction, and anti-imperialist modes of which the most advanced, the one in the active process of being universalised and generalised, and the one that is objectively superior in cost and quality of output is China’s), to the relations between states and the state system, to the domestic politics of this or that society, to the struggles in the workplace against the owners, to the streets against the fascists and their state, etc. I simply say the West (the US, sub-imperial UK, Germany, France etc., its West Asian settler-colony, and vassal family dictatorships) is not the subject of history, because it isn’t anymore.
The Western 'bourgeois proletariat,' bloated on imperialist wages and decoupled from productive labor, possess no structural leverage until the imperialist core is defeated by 'regime change' or war or economic collapse - or all three - and re-industrialisation along the Chinese model can take place (and we are a very long way from this being on the horizon). As to the Western imperialist bourgeoisie, their comprador bourgeoisies, etc. - well, as much as imperialism remains the central and primary contradiction in the world system today, anti-imperialism remains the dialectical other side of it. Thus, the greatest contradiction in human history: a Marxist economic and social system actively propping up the dilapidated Western imperialist one. The US issues fiat dollars that can no longer buy anything productive domestically, exchanging this paper for the immense volume of physical commodities churned out by China’s industrial base. A dying, financialised 'mode of unproduction' (or destruction, as Ali Kadri has put it) is kept afloat by the very transitional socialist mode of production destined to supersede it (just a question of when and how). The ruling workers of China are the largest proletarian concentration in human history, through whom value maintains its strict synchronicity to labour whatever financial chicanery the Western 'capital markets' try. As I have tried to summarise, the law of value actively operates in China as an objective material reality, whereas in the West it is systematically suppressed and violated through the USD fiat world money system, financialisation, etc.
(The Axis of Resistance, who put more at stake than anyone in their anti-imperialism and from societies systematically destroyed by imperialism, sanctions, etc. are also central - in the annals of the decline and fall of Western imperialism the role of the Palestinians, Iranians, and Russians, etc. in exposing and attriting the empire will be writ large. In contrast, people like Richard Medhurst continue to emphasise imperialism’s endless appetite for ruthless war without acknowledging the endless appetite of the oppressed and massacred peoples of West Asia to resist, doing a great disservice to a cause he has done much to champion.)
Thus, the new mode grows within the old through aufheben, sublation, etc. Hence, I do not agree that China need be outside imperial instruments of domination, but I do believe it is pretty much immune to them - having made itself sufficiently indispensable to imperialism in such a way that it has significant strategic agency within the imperialist world system, while ailing Western imperialism’s agency is mere brute force (economic, political, military, cultural, etc.). This reveals that imperial madness (Nixon’s brainchild, I believe) and primitive mercantilism is nothing but structural fragility and not a calculated 'bunker state strategy' (though Washington beltway think tankers may try to rationalise it into one).
I agree that Chinese technology export does not inherently carry its conditions of production with it; I did not mean to suggest it did. Yet exploring how technology operates under different modes helps clarify that the Chinese endeavour to export its forces of production can fundamentally alter relations of production across the Global South, which is transcending the imperialist centre-periphery contradictions. Hence, rather than replacing US hegemony, China facilitates sovereign industrial development over raw extraction, offering a universality based on win/win cooperation. Thus formerly peripheral nations are pulled into a new economic gravity, which brings with it a certain necessity to resist imperialist dependency, bullying, and aggression as societies restructure internal production to benefit from the new superior Chinese mode’s laws of motion. So, technology carries immense structural weight here: it provides the material base that makes breaking away from comprador dependency possible.
Your warning that the historical analogy to early capitalism incubating within feudalism implies a prolonged, violent conflict rather than a peaceful transition is well taken - but we can locate the structural origin of that conflict more precisely. This highlights two distinct paths of development: Western capitalism was subsidised by domestic dispossession, colonial genocide, and enslavement. China’s industrialisation was built upon a peasantry that kept its land post-revolution. Its integration into the world-system was a calculated Faustian bargain - trading cheap labor for technology - while the CPC ensured workers were not exploited below the cost of their reproduction, resulting in a meteoric rise in living standards. China's rise remains peaceful; transitional misery stems from the dying mode trying to erect a cage it no longer has adequate production facilities for.
Regarding imperialism’s ability to adapt circa 100 years ago when Luxemburg and Gramsci were saying it, and when Lenin had identified only the highest form of capitalism so far, this was indeed the case. I fail to see it adapting now, however. What would imperialism need to do today to adapt? It would have to win in more than just Venezuela. It would need to defeat Iran and Russia. And even then it is questionable what it could achieve. How much of Iraq’s wealth was squandered in the USA’s pitiless war against it? How much of Libya's? Again, this goes back to the nature of the imperialist mode as it has degenerated, as one which can only waste away the earth, humanity, etc.
Finally, who is the subject that lacks a shared transnational political horizon? We Westerners, perhaps, but as I implied at the top, who cares? Meanwhile, China has a Global Governance Initiative, a Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, all giving context and specificity to its vision of building a community with a shared future for humanity including a path to a global ecological civilisation. And what is the shared transnational political horizon of the Axis of Resistance? Sovereign liberation from imperialism. So, I think we (humanity) do not lack these things. But sure, we Westerners have a lot of catching up to do.
(I was glad to see you on LNN the other day, and look forward to seeing you on RIF tomorrow - apologies for descending into polemics slightly at the end there, but I hope I have made my point without doing so too stringently - there is much we agree on and what we disagree on is perhaps only a matter of emphasis. We do indeed share the same ultimate hope for a multipolar, post-imperial future. Keep up the good work.)
I think you have done a pretty good job of outlining the interregnum as it is currently. But how long your framing remains descriptive given the pace of change makes me think you might have made the argument a bit longer than necessary.
From an EU perspective I see very little change around me, but the mood is generally somber, and tense. Quiet before the storm.
On your thorough analysis it seems to me that the rapid development of drone tech in warfare is rapidly leaving past paradigms of military power behind in favor of a much more accessible, affordable, and ultimately democratizing warfare into view. This will have profound implications for security architecture and what it means in the next five years, or so. American security guarantees are already looking dubious and drone warfare will only speed up credible deterrence in the hands of every nation and even local militias. This, more than anything else, will profoundly alter realpolitik in terms of de facto territorial control, barring carpet bombing or nuclear escalation. I'm sure you can do the mental gymnastics yourself to appreciate the flow on effects. When security guarantees begin to mean resource supply instead of military power, everything you cover strengthens. Your argument is confirmed.
A last point, on the lack of grand narratives or unifying projects, is that climate change ambiguity/ uncertainty and local preparation, adaptation, and survival is the unifying project of humanity. And will probably remain so and strengthen in time. Geography and local climate will dictate materials and constraints and this is where the mutual interdependencies really begins to kick and find traction. We just haven't quite clicked on regarding this aspect. We will have it rubbed in our faces soon enough, as this current energy crisis is about to seriously disrupt industrial civilizations and our food supply from the cascading effects on chemicals and fertilizer etc. Current hot takes are predicting early July as the next critical threshold for assessing the severity of supply disruption and impacts on crops, production and distribution. Leaving aside sudden escalation of warfare.
One thought this essay prompted: If the major powers are as constrained by interdependence as the "multi-layered cage" suggests, is the absence of a shared anti-imperial project really the cause of elite-competitive multipolarity, or is it partly an outcome of the same structural constraints?
Put differently, do states hedge because they lack a common horizon, or do they lack a common horizon because the system rewards hedging?
The distinction matters because it changes where we locate agency. In one reading, the solution is political organization. In another, the deeper challenge is altering the structure that continually reproduces transactional behaviour regardless of intent.
The essay made me think about whether we sometimes treat strategic behaviour as a choice when it may be a property of the system itself.
Superb and such a good framework to help reorient people from the "Multipolarity WINS" discourse. The way you describe China, Russia + hedging in a structurally interdependent world is excellent and can clarify so many discussions. I also strongly agree with your comments on civilization discourse; a civilization state is an empire in mock grand historical clothing.
I had two notes on the historical legacy.
One there is the inertia of the USA's 'post-1945 'Partition of Eurasia' that has become normalised in USA strategic circles - "Why are we still in Korea?" - but also creates its own forces for inertia.
The second is the Chinese thinker you quote on the peaceful rise of China presents a distorted version of Soviet and Chinese history.
It was more Mao's China than the USSR that was 'exporting revolution' for a long time there... Didn't Stalin turn that page in the 1920s in the USSR? Mao despised the 'revisionist' USSR who turned their back on Stalin (indeed Deng Xiaoping was in Moscow when Khrushchev gave the Stalin cult speech and called Mao in a panic immediately), wanted coexistence, and pursued the early detentes. I think this kind of Chinese historical theory is revealing. It also neglects China's relations with USA and USSR during the years of collapse and just after. I find it unconvincing a a way of making sense of the complex dynamics of the Cold Wars, decolonisation, post-145 world building.
I do wonder if there is not at least a third form of multipolarity too, especially since empire has been the rule of the road for a long time . . . but that can be described in time. Thanks again for all of your insights
Jeff, thank you so much for this thoughtful and generous comment. I’m really glad the framework resonated with you, especially regarding the “civilizational” discourse.
I agree with your two notes on the historical legacy. You are right about the inertia of the post-1945 architecture. That bureaucratic and military “autopilot” is a part of what sustains the Bunker State today. Once those forward-deployed infrastructures and the military-industrial networks behind them are built, they generate their own structural momentum.
Regarding Zheng Bijian, your historical corrective is sharp. It was indeed Stalin who turned toward 'Socialism in One Country,' Khrushchev who pushed for peaceful coexistence, and Mao’s China that was fiercely exporting revolution (and despising the USSR as revisionist for seeking détente!). Though we shouldn't forget that the USSR still provided massive material support to anti-colonial liberation movements worldwide, the ideological zeal you're describing was certainly centered in Beijing during that era.
But your critique here actually proves exactly why I found Zheng’s quote so revealing! By projecting the 'export of revolution' onto the Soviet Dream, the modern CCP is performing a deliberate historical sleight-of-hand. They are actively burying Mao’s radical internationalism to reassure Washington and global capital that China is a safe, reliable partner for market integration. The fact that they have to distort their own history to prove they aren't a revolutionary threat illustrates my central point: the anti-imperialist horizon has been abandoned by the current ruling strata in favor of elite-competitive survival.
Finally, I am very glad you brought up the possibility of a third form of multipolarity. I view these forms as a continuum rather than rigid boxes, and we can choose which elements to emphasize based on the world we want to build (which means speculating about a future, I think, depends on what general concepts and frameworks one uses anyway). I explore a 'third way' in Part II of the essay, proposing a transitional 'Mixed-Economy Multipolarity' as a potential narrow path forward.
However ( you just knew there was a 'but'), I liken the Trump world, which is just a violently 'in your face' extension of US policy formulated for decades, as Chicago 1930s style. There are 3 major mobs, and one or two minor ones. Only one mob has the ability currently to project its power outside its neighbourhood, the other two are just kings of their own patches. There is inevitably times of 'action' on the edges, periodically one or other of the smaller mobs gets kicked around for trying to interfere with 'business'. The dominant mob holds most aces but not enough to bring the other two to heel. Sometime the distrust between the other two may be overcome to create a power to project their joint strength and give the dominant mob a good doing over. Probably will only happen if simultaneously they feel the dominant mob has just gone too far in interfering in their territory/business.
Ain't going to happen any other way, as 'City Hall' hasn't the power to interfere nor the inclination as its too busy taking back handers. Like all good mobster stories the end of the chief gang comes about in unexpected ways, internal disputes usually providing the ignition.
Although I still believe China's current realistic approach is the only viable path toward an alternative system, I think you're right — some people on the left (including me) have become spectators of this reality, abandoning any imagination to transcend it.
"But ironically, this defensive posture is precisely what makes these powers so vulnerable to the Bunker State. Because they are not building an anti‑imperialist architecture—because they are building pipelines and trade corridors rather than, or better yet, alongside, a shared revolutionary infrastructure—the empire can use sanctions, sabotage, elite capture, and hybrid warfare to pick them off one by one. It can physically blow up their connecting infrastructure and keep them continuously entangled before they ever form a genuine collective alternative. The very defensiveness that keeps them alive in the short term is what will leave them structurally vulnerable in the long term."
Gen. Sir Rupert Smith observed that "war is storytelling". Story structure, in its simplest form has Act One introduce the characters and the conflict; Act Two, the story's protagonist 'reacting' to the initiatives of the story's antagonist; and Act Three, resolution when the protagonist turns the tables on the antagonist. So long as our protagonists simply reacts, defensively, there can be no transition to Act Three: No resolution.
"And this will mean continued violence."
"King Wen asked: “How do I gain the people’s support?”
Taigong replied: “The world does not belong to one person; instead it is shared by everyone. Those who share in the benefits of the world can gain the world; those who try to monopolize them, lose them. "
We all lose because these "interesting times" are plagued by universal selfishness - perfectly captured in twelves seconds (from 3:50 to 4:02) of The Drew Carey Show Season 5 Episode 2.
You are so smart, perceptive and analytical. I shift my understanding of the world every time I read one of your extended pieces. You cut through the connfusion and give me lucidity for which I thank you Nel.
Your distinction between elite‑competitive and anti‑imperialist multipolarity makes the point clearly: the cage isn’t just about money or force, it’s about the lack of a shared vision that would make breaking away feel possible.
The real question is: what would it take to turn hedging from the default into something coordinated? Is the bottleneck institutions (no parallel payments, insurance, courts), politics (no mass cross‑border movement), or ideas (no shared diagnosis of what we’re fighting against)?
I’ve been tracing how “there is no alternative” moved from a description to something enforced — dollar, SWIFT, energy, chips as the spine of the system. Your framework explains why that spine holds even as power shifts. In Part II, where do you see the weak point most likely to crack first: the financial layer, the tech layer, or the political layer?
The article assumes there is or has been an alternative to Elite Theory. No need to go into the details but that seems a tad far fetched. Haven't elites not always ruled? Im NOT talking about popular uprisings but the iron rule of oligarchy. Organised minority wins from disorganised majority. The structures that have been formed after ww1 and ww2 will be changed, abandoned, reformed according to the power of different elites who all try to set up the digital control grid for their own purpose. The only way The People can fight back is to disrupt this infrastructure ( which means this post is likely flagged..somewhere on the personalised data grid) as is the writer of the article.
Hi Nel, thank you for the great piece as always. This has been a roller coaster piece for me. With each passing paragraph, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing in multiple aspects. But I think you write it clearly : without collective will to progress together and without sacrifice, anti-imperialism is not possible. But this leads me to a specific question : to what degree is anti-imperialism needed and realistically possible?
I will put my country (Indonesia) into perspective. Does people think the government is autocratic? Absolutely. Does people in majority whish for a better state governance? Absolutely. But does people care whether it’s imperialistic in nature or not? Now this is the main question for my country. Looking at historical context and current social economic conditions, I would dare say that what people care is only their livelihood. This part is quite general as in every other parts of the world. But the varying degree of “acceptable livelihood” in Indonesia is mind boggling. You can have an office worker working in the same place, in the same city, with the same living cost, wishing for very different livelihood. I think this is the part where consumerism that is capitalized by imperialist needs to be toned down.
But does the majority of Indonesia civillians wish for more rights and responsibility in statecraft? Rights yes, responsibility definitely no. This is the reality and this is where the Chinese model is actually very fitting. Not in the context of its policy, but of it’s mindset. Domestic governance should be the priority right now for all country wishing for resisting hegemony. Whether this leads to anti-imperialism or not, I don’t think majority of Indonesian citizens care because we are in such a deep economic and welfare crisis that all we focus on right now is survival. Coincidentally, this survival is impossible without certain revolution in domestic affairs management. This is, again, where anti-imperial become relevant : resisting wealth extraction. Wealth extraction from the poor and the working class into the ruling class.
However, let’s say a new ruler rise in Indonesia that is able to relatively increase the prosperity of the majority of people. Whether this new ruler is pro US imperialism or not, most people will not care. It’s just that right now the imperialism of US is so aggressive that the people of Indonesia has opened their eyes to this fact. If another empire can tone down US’ imperialism and by doing so improve Indonesian’s livelihood, I don’t think most Indonesian care about anti-imperialism. This is just the sad but true reality in my country. In the end we are only looking for a way of state management that could improve our livelihood, which is as you mentioned, what Russia, China, and Iran is doing. Anyway, hope this could be of some information to the discussion!
Thank so much for that input. It adds a more fundamental layer to the whole discussion. Do every-day people at the coal face really care so long as they can earn a living and or just survive? Perhaps the system as Nel articulates it is actually rooted at a more profound psychological level. And if so then perhaps capitalism and therefore consummerism is a more natural tendency in humans given it is motivated by the primal drive towards 'survival of the fittest'. While the merits of these sorts of platforms and discussions like Nel's (whixh are indispensable) can have higher intellectual impact - articulating these ideas and values to the grassroots would be a huge challenge given what Thomas has just described. It would be great to hear then what others here think about how that has been done in the past and or could be done today be it in Indonesia and anywhere else in the world.
Even if I generally admire your analyses, Nel, it feels to me like you're not reading Lenin's "Imperialism..." correctly enough, maybe because you're a bit too trapped in the "campista" narrative in which the only "imperialism" is that of the consolidated hegemon, the US Empire. 110 years later the parallels with Lenin's context are striking to me and have been so for some time: the USA is Great Britain (the hyper-financiarized Empire in decline) and China is Germany (the industrial powerhouse and rising star that prefers soft-gloved imperialism such as trading with Brazil and Mexico or building the Baghdad Railroad). There are some differences but not enough not to see that the parllels are striking.
And Lenin, even if he accepted some help by Germany to migrate from Switzerland to the Baltic, had no illusions about the Central Powers being "anti-imperialist" at all, all the opposite. That's why he and comrades demanded the "sealed train", so they could remain uncontaminated from German capitalist and imperialist influence. Like him, we should keep ourselves "sealed" from any hope that Dengist (capitalist) China is our friend in the anti-imperialist struggle, much less the fight for the extremely urgent eco-socialist revolution.
As you repeatedly quote: “We only export goods, capital, and markets; we do not export revolution.” That says it all about the nature of China. There are smaller state actors like Cuba or Algeria, both emerged from socialist and anti-imperialist revolutions, which I deem respectable and credible, but no great power of that type anymore. And Algeria particularly has noticed that China is not trustworthy, going in few years from celebrating a long history of friendship with China to totally snubbing BRICS because China is selling war drones to sub-imperialist Morocco in their fight against West Sahara.
China is selfish and totally imperialist in their behavior. They're also militaristic-imperialist in some areas like the South China Sea, their support for the infamous military junta of Myanmar or the 99 years lease of a naval base in Sri Lanka, but they're mostly Bismarck-style soft-gloved imperialist. As I sometimes say: China doesn't play wéiqí (go) anymore, as Pepe Escobar claimed over a decade ago: now they play plain Monopoly, buying and selling without any grand strategy.
In fact, their grand imperialist strategy, the BRI (formerly the new Silk Road) is quite broke for lack of actual commitment to its consolidation... but that's another story.
Imperialism is ultimately not just something that powers, capitalist powers, do but the name of the game of capitalist competition for the world's resources and markets. It's thus not just something that the USA does but also everyone else to some extent or another, quite notably China. One has been doing it for a century or two, the other (unless we go to ancient history or go to the issues of Tibet and the Indian borders) only in the last decade maybe. But they both do it.
The USSR, with all their limitations, was a much better reference, especially after Stalin. Call me "revisionist" if you wish: it's better than Dengist.
Hi Luis,
Thank you for your patience, and for this sharp and grounded comment.
You're right that a Leninist reading of the present would probably not treat China as an anti-imperialist force necessarily. Lenin refused to take sides in inter-imperialist competition, and he would have been the first to warn against easily labeling any state functioning within this late capitalist world as a friend of liberation. The parallels you draw between the Anglo-German rivalry of his time and the US-China dynamic of ours are not lost on me. I understand why you read the essay and felt that a harder line was missing.
So why didn't I write it that way?
Because this essay was designed as a strategic and diplomatic intervention. My goal was to reach readers who are not already convinced of a Leninist or Marxist analysis: particularly IR realists, the broader anti-imperialist spectrum, and those who see multipolarity as inherently liberatory and peaceful. If I had opened by framing the grand multipolar powers as potential capitalist-imperialist competitors, many of those readers would have stopped on the first page.
So I chose a different path. I used China as the test case for my argument precisely because China is the hardest case. If even a state with a Marxist-led party, a vast state sector, and a declared socialist orientation is not building a systemic outside to the capitalist world-economy, then the structural constraints are real. I didn't need to define China's character. I needed to show that even on its own terms, the cage holds. That is a claim that opens a question, a room for discussion and thinking (specifically in the currently more entrenched and closed multipolarista space, so to speak).
What I hoped to plant was a seed of doubt about what multipolarity means and what it could mean. Once you see that the shift in the balance of power is not the same as a shift in the logic of the system, the harder questions can follow naturally, a space for thinking a bit more about what's actually happening emerges.
Thanks to you for clarifying, Nel. I can see (now better than before) your stylistic choice and why, however, presented with the article at face value, from my viewpoint, the style becomes the content (to a very large extent at least), hence my perplexity. Sorta reminds me of when I was in the Antimilitarist Movement decades ago and we discussed the relation of "means and goals" -- I'll spare you the details but guess you can understand how the means can become the goals if we're not very careful, and even then.
China is complicated but to me at least it has been clear for a long time that they tend to be very comparable to Bismarck's II Reich, mutatis mutandi. Cheers.
I think I understand your point about style and content folding into each other. For me it really is a tightrope: if I completely step away from the broader “multipolarista” space, and I’m certainly not going to join the conservative right, there isn’t a lot of room left from which to speak. This is the one audience that is at least somewhat open to having the harder conversation, so I’m trying to meet them where they are without simply reproducing their narrative.
I agree with you about the “means becoming the goals” danger. That’s very close to what worries me when I see parts of the anti‑imperial space sliding into inevitability talk: the style of total confidence—“the empire is dead, capitalism is collapsing, peace is around the corner”—starts to replace analysis. Logical leaps take the place of mechanisms. And then, instead of preparing people for long, messy work, we give them a kind of eschatology.
I’m not arguing that the US‑led empire is invincible or eternal. History moves, systems break, and there are real cracks opening now. What I’m pushing against is the idea that this guarantees a good outcome on its own, or that naming decline is the same as understanding how the current system actually works. If we have any responsibility to readers, I think it is to help them see the mechanics—the infrastructures, class structures, and constraints—and to identify where there is genuine space to build something different, not to reassure them that history has already done the work. Turn them into specators instead of subjects of history. Countries or great leaders are not the subjects of history, it is always the masses of people, and yet, here we are cheering on teams.
I’m still observing and researching all this, and I probably need to write something directly on these epistemic bubbles and the “means/goals” problem. The next essay will brush against it a little from the “what now?” side.
What can I say? I'm not one of those who needs to fit in but rather sometimes lament that the rest don't fit in closer to where I stand... yet shrugs and moves on.
I find it ironic that multipolarity doesn't seem to allow you be your own polarity. To me "multipolarity" or rather "campism", means people pandering Erdogan or generally cherleading mindlessly, almost like hooligans sometimes, the "Primakov Triangle" (Escobar's wording), without any criticism. In the end they have no words to justify China selling drones to Morocco to kill the Sahrawis, alienating very anti-imperialist Algeria... which moved on, snubbed the BRICS and proclaimed that only bilateral relations matter. That, what Algeria did is true multipolarism to me, and not what Mali does (again pandering to Morocco).
Disclaimer: I have no particular connection to Algeria but I do respect their stand, as I do with Cuba's. They're not the big boys but they are genuine (and genuinely anti-imperialist) in a way that the "Eurasians" aren't.
"Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar..."
"Walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking..."
(Antonio Machado, one of the Spanish "Brechts" who succumbed to fascism in the 30s, a major influence in how I think since school).
Concuerdo totalmente y no quiero ser parte de algún equipo, solo analizar y presentar lo que estoy viendo y ojalá le sirva a alguien. Sin embargo, este es el momento que nos tocó y con responsabilidad hay que encontrar la manera de presentar esto a la mayor gente posible.
Lamentablemente el capitalismo solo se transforma con las crisis y no se muere. Eso solo con las revoluciones y esas necesitan a la gente conciente, como actor y sujeto de la historia. A veces pienso que ha vuelto la creencia en la fuerzas históricas de Marx, el marxismo otordoxo determinista, en el cual el capital es una historia que se lee antes de irse a dormir, una historia que nos aplaca nuestras preocupaciones, el capitalismo va a morir.
Y no fue eso. Esos escritos más bien son herramientas que nos enseñan que hace falta, que nos hacen entender estás son las debilidades de este sistema y ya.
No sabía que hablaras castellano, mucho menos con tanta fluidez.
Estoy muy radicalmente en desacuerdo con lo del que el Capitalismo no muere. Necesariamente tiene que morir ya, o si no nos matará a la Humanidad entera. Los Límites al Crecimiento han sido sobrepasados, no hay planeta B, así que sólo nos queda Eco-Socialismo o Extinción, parafraseando a Rosa Luxemburg.
Me considero marxista (ur-marxista, no realmente leninista, también un poco anarquista quizá pero no del todo) pero pienso que más que dialéctica lo que hay es Caos (teoría de Caos, por desgracia no muy usada pero muy real). Y estamos ya mismo, según hablamos, entrando en una fase caótica brutal, sin precedente desde lo del Dryas Reciente. El Capitalismo no puede sobrevivir al desastre tan extremo que ha creado: todo tiene que cambiar y todo va a cambiar en esta década misma (2026-35 aprox.) Esa es mi convicción respecto al tiempo que vivimos.
Sin duda harán falta "vanguardias" activas (existen ya, están al acecho) pero la conciencia emerge por la propia dinámica de la catástrofe y la revolución, que es caótica, cuasi-espontánea en su naturaleza. El Partido Bolchevique, por poner un ejemplo, tenía apenas 1000 afiliados en Febrero de 1917. Como decía Kropotkin, no fueron ellos quienes hicieron la Revolución, que fue como "un maremoto", sino quienes lograron no hundirse y llegar sanos y salos a su final.
Al tiempo.
I'm no Marxist, but I think the way you characterize China is wrongheaded. All westerners think empires are inevitable because we cannot escape our own epistemology.
China was Confucian a long time before Marx was born and remains so. The same way European people are Christians regardless of whether we identify as such consciously.
I suggest you try and read up on Chinese culture and Confucianism in particular to get a less US empire framed capitalist slander mongering vocabulary. Your cynicism might also decrease which would benefit your temperament, I imagine, considering your vocabulary preferences.
Confucius is in essence the Chinese Plato: a conservative ideologue/philosopher that was adopted by the Empire, the Chinese Empire. Because China was already an empire back then and its western counterpart was the Roman Empire. The difference is that "Da Qin" (Rome) did not survive its fragmentation, although it has been dynamically reborn many times in many forms, with the modern version being not so much the USA but rather NATOplus in whole, "the West" as they say... Da Qin = Great West (Qin, which also gives the western name of China, via India, was the westernmost state in the warrior states period and the one that unified China). China on the other hand survived many invasions and divisions and re-consolidated as nation-empire... mostly because victorious but internally divided Da Qin could not get themselves to agree to partition it over a century ago, as they did with Africa... and they got Western revolutionary influences, not just in terms of revolutionary ideas but even in weapons, assuming that you accept that USSR communist troops disobeying Stalin in 1945 are Westerner (Russia and the other Slavic states that formed the USSR are all kinds of European, no matter what the Duginists/Eurasianists dream of).
You can say that this is "Eurocentric" but the reality is that the whole world has been Eurocentric in the last many centuries and even today it is to a large extenct. As the Spaniards say: "a la fuerza ahorcan" ("you get hanged by force"). The "unipolar moment" was not just the 1990s and 2000s but there were others before, quite notably the Victorian era. When it was somewhat "multipolar" it was a European and Eurocentric multipolarity anyhow. This is the first time since Globalization was symbolically kickstarted by my compatriot Elcano's first circumnavigation of Earth, over five centuries ago, that there is a non-European superpower or great power with global projection (because the Ottomans were also European, even if "Eurasian" and Muslim, and were the last claimants to the Roman throne, surviving even the Tsars).
Da Qin's fragments were not psychologically or culturally driven to imperialism by mere ideology (nothing in Plato's works call for imperialism, Plato deals with anti-democracy rather but he lived in a small city-state and never prefered the superpower of his day: Persia or Iran), they were because they had to fight each other... and, when you don't win, when you lose, you become a subject of others, possibly even a colony. There are rare exceptions like, say, Switzerland, which is extremely Western in everything but adopted "perpetual neutrality"... because it was forced to by Milan, which defeated them after a century-long spat of revolutionary Swiss victories. Or an even more radical instance was Savonarola's Florence (which is also Machiavelli's Florence), which was essentially "communist" but lacked an army by ideological choice, so it was easily conquered by the Pope and his Medici lackeys, something that Machiavelli lamented. No miracle and no ideology saved the day.
Anyway, the leading power in Da Qin has been for centuries Great Britain (and more recently their colonial spawn: the USA, which inherited empire and geostrategy, with lesser variations) and their core strategy was always to impede any other great power to consolidate. This happened mostly in Europe (first against Habsburg "Spain", then against France, later against Germany and Russia) but now it has a global significance and the challenger is obviously China. This is often framed as (neo-)colonialism (which is what they mean often by "imperialism") but it's mostly not: it is what great powers do, at least in terms of oligarchies (Capitalism but also the previous Landownerism, which is much older): fight for power. There are diverse ways to do that and bourgeois regimes have often been reluctant to go colonialist, preferring "free trade" without the "burden" of direct management, however that gives others the possibility of encroaching and denying such markets and resources, what leads to actual classical Imperialism and thus to war.
The II Reich politely asked Britain for a trade union (i.e. German access to the British colonial empire) and Britain flatly rejected the proposal. Harmonious cooperation is not thus possible, as every power tries to exploit their advantages vs the others, and that leads to war.
Funny! 😁
But using a Chinese moniker for Rome and then proceeding to discuss everything in a western framework does not constitute any redress of my initial comment.
Also, confusing the man with the cultural tradition seems like mentioning Jesus and what happened to him as a substitute for talking about Christianity and the influence it has had on so-called western civilization.
Pasting a few paragraphs of whataboutism from your favorite AI chatbot seems like a distraction.
So, I will be kind and helpful and point out that Confucian philosophy considers the welfare of the people as its primary function, which is quite similar to communism. It abhors wealth accumulation, saying it only invites disaster and division. Also very similar to communism.
China has historically avoided continuing expansion, unlike the West. China is focused on continuity, which is a different word for sustainable. (Perhaps you don't believe in climate change?)
The port in Sri Lanka you mentioned is currently operating at full capacity and looking to expand to enable higher throughput and has more than earned back the initial investment. So not a point of empire leverage, but of enablement. (Not sure if that counts as communism, but hey).
China's record trade surplus was immediately deployed into development loans for the global South, rather than lowering the national deficit. Also quite a show of Communist financial solidarity, I suppose, but like I said I am not fluent in Marxism.
Anyway.
I don't interact with any AI chatbot or otherwise. I strongly dislike them.
Also I clearly said that that recent history is Eurocentric no matter how we may dislike that. It's a fact just like the barrel of the gun Mao chanted to.
So please don't smear nor straw-man me with nonsense. Wide is the Internet, I can live without you (and vice versa).
Confucianism is not in any way "similar to communism". It is a conservative ideology based on respecting hierarchy in a extremely patriarchal and oligarchic way. Surely neo-Confucianism may allow for many neo-interpretations but I don't care because we're not going to discuss the vast depths of neo-Confucianism (or Marxism or whatever else of such extreme complexity) here.
China avoided expansion? Sure: they infamously burned the Canton merchant fleet even when they needed it the most out of fear of the others, out of extreme conservatism. Is that a virtue? I don't think so but anyhow it's not a practical virtue, because it doomed China and allowed the Western powers to encroach on them. Anyway that's not the modern post-communist China but the Ming dynasty, just like modern secularist France is not the realm of Louis the Pious, just like today's Mali of Gral. Goita is not the same as that of Mansa Musa. Countries are not "eternal": they do evolve.
Loans to corrupt autocratic dictators do not help the people, only the semi-colonial flow of raw materials to the lender.
Alright then, getting somewhere slightly more interesting.
I'm curious to find out what you define as recent history and also why you so adamantly claim it's all eurocentric?
And I will happily agree to disagree and move along.
Your point about the hierarchies of organization that remain in China is one of the most noteworthy differences to my rough understanding of Marxism and the Chinese characteristics and although it is conservative, conservation seems to me to be of increasing importance given the state of the world. What would satisfy your standard? What is the alternative, considering the rather precarious global ecological and geopolitical circumstances? Just briefly stated, if you don't mind. Like you wrote, here is not the place for expansive discussion.
On Sri Lanka... As with other countries, China seems to just want to trade and leave local politics to the side. This strikes me as shrewd and virtuous, rather than compromised and unprincipled. Self determination comes from within and solidarity has too many similarities to white savoir complex to be deployed without fundamental contradictions, in my opinion. Empire building being the most obvious problem.
What is an alternative that doesn't (con-)descend from lofty heights of utopian idealism? What is a materialist approach that surpass China's current efforts?
The last five centuries, and more so since the Industrial Revolution (last 250 years?), were clearly hyper-dominated by Europe (or "New Europe" since the ascent of the USA) at a global scale. In terms military, in terms of trade/colonialism and in terms of culture and (quite critically) science. I'm not even sure why I even have to explain this, really: if you know any History, you know this.
It's been reasonably argued that the Hajin system (radically restricting maritime trade) prevented China from actually being a great power or superpower... precisely when the Europeans were arriving to the region, leaving them unchecked control of the seas and soon also the coasts. If Taiwan is now Chinese, it's only because of illegal private enterprise, if Singapore is, it's because Britain settled it with Chinese people.
I would also argue on my own account that one of the problems that China had in the long run was that it remained an empire, while Da Qin (the West) didn't and that fragmentation and "internal" competition forced these to innovate more, not just in science (which was important for the development of cannons and what-not) but in strategies, often leading these European powers to colonialism of one type or another and thus the overall European domination of the World for many centuries.
This also happened with some Europeans forcibly subordinating others, most clearly in the shift from Iberian to Anglosaxon centrality, which was not just a streak of luck but a conscious decision by the latter to industrialize (first the Brits since Elizabeth I, later the Yankees with their own creole revolutions), while the Iberians remained backwards and semi-rural instead, not having a proper national grand strategy, but rather doing in their own way the same that China did: knee-jerk into their backward tendencies, losing momentum and power as result.
If PRC were communists, they would do something to favor the toppling of reactionary autocracies like Saudi Arabia and favor as a matter of principle, the more or less socialist and anti-colonial forces of Earth. They do not: their attitude is "everything goes" and worse: they consciously choose odious regimes like the one of Morocco (imperialist, zionist, US protectorate) vs progressive/socialist forces like Algeria and West Sahara. Sadly China has repeatedly failed at the Internationalist test, and it did so even in the days of Mao but even more clearly since Dengism (neo-Capitalism) took over.
My hope is that because of the levels of complexity in the modern world and its interconnectiveness no one entity will be able to simply de-couple/ take over and become a new Hegemon. We are trying to imagine a future that steers a certain direction. But, as technology both accelerates and increases in complexity nobody can actually physically build that world. Because the choices you make now will likely be obsolete in 5-10 years time. Take AI or warfare or the combination of the 2. You cannot control those things. But the danger lies in the people who think they can and know the way to get there. There is also a destructive element in humans we need to consider. We do live in...interesting times.
We live in interesting times.
We can live with bullshitters and also with rich idiots
But living with bullshitting rich idiots that is impossible.
And now we are dealing with a bunch of those.
Looking beneath the surface of today’s fractured geopolitics reveals that this thesis of an immutable "elite-competitive multipolarity" suffers from a blind spot: it confuses a shifting distribution of global power with a preservation of the system’s underlying logic. It presumes that non-Western powers are merely bargaining over shares within a static, inescapable capitalist architecture, lamenting the absence of an ideological "outside" like the Comintern. Yet this reading ignores the colossal material “outside” standing in plain sight: the Chinese domination of global productive capacity. By maintaining strict synchronicity to socially necessary abstract labor in China while the West flees into a financial simulacrum of stock buybacks and intellectual property tolls, an emergent socialist transitional mode has internalized the law of value as a conscious planning tool. To mistake the utilisation of market forms - such as sovereign debt and clearing rails - for the retention of capitalist relations is to misread China; a system willing to accept depressed immediate profit rates to maximize socialized returns and expand productive forces is operating on a fundamentally post-capitalist trajectory.
Furthermore, characterizing this eastern orientation as a purely defensive retreat into strategic vulnerability - a mere commercial transaction summarised by the doctrine of exporting computers rather than revolution - betrays a blindness to historical parallels. When the western Eurasian peninsula began incubating the capitalist mode of production, it did not initiate its ascent by launching an open, premature war against the dominant, pre-modern tributary trade cores of Eurasia and Africa; rather, it embedded itself within those very networks, mastered their dynamics, and built superior productive forces until the old system was shattered from within. Exporting physical commodities and advanced technology rather than empty ideological rhetoric is the historical-materialist dialectic in motion, anchoring all wealth on earth to a massive proletarian concentration under Communist self-rule that has become the world’s true store of value. It is actually the Western imperialist core that sits trapped in a structural cage of its own making, forced by the Triffin dilemma to run perpetual external deficits that systematically hollow out its domestic industrial base - a flight of capital from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) that leaves it economically eviscerated.
Similarly, the assumption herein that the institutional apparatus of world money - SWIFT, Western credit agencies, and USD primacy - constitutes a permanent, monolithic cage for imperialism’s erstwhile victims overlooks the acute terminal crisis building within the seven fracturing pillars of US world money. The contemporary global fiat system did not emerge as a technical evolution or as a result of US victories over the world, but as a desperately errected structural mechanism to attempt to sever money from abstract labor, artificially depressing wages below their value - in order to rescue Western capital from absolute overaccumulation. The gold bullion rally and the steadily growing control over these and other commodities markets is empirical verification that the US imperialist paper pyramid scheme has finally exhausted its ability to violate the law of value with impunity. Far from a passive surrender to the status quo, the creation of a plural monetary ecology - where physical gold functions as a secure store of value for Chinese domestic savings while the renminbi operates as an industrial medium of exchange and a tool for long-term planning - is a highly sophisticated de-escalation strategy. It allows the transitional mode to insulate itself from Western sanctions and bypass the Triffin trap, quietly preparing and building a alternative global infrastructure for when the financialised simulacrum faces its ultimate systemic reckoning.
Finally, attributing a calculative, shape-shifting rationality to the US empire’s "bunker strategy" gives the transatlantic rentier bourgeoisie far too much credit for strategic foresight, mistaking a frantic reflex of economic decay for an efficient geopolitical design. When a historical mode of production can no longer manage the objective laws of investment or generate sufficient surplus value through direct production, its political superstructure inevitably turns erratic, substituting raw military logic for collapsed economic competitiveness. The dangerous flirtation with catastrophic military escalation and proxy conflicts in North and South West Asia is not a masterclass in containing multipolarity, but a desperate, militarized spasm to enforce the utility of an unbacked currency by sheer force as alternative payment rails increasingly bypass traditional maritime chokepoints. The Western rentier class, now comprising an unproductive elite whose wealth is entirely divorced from value creation, is lashing out precisely because the economic walls are closing in. The empire is not an invincible manager of an inescapable global cage; it is a bankrupt order driven to madness, unable to govern by economic gravity and possessing no new productive paradigm to offer the world. It is not the subject of history but its object.
Thank you, Abra. I really appreciate your challenging comment because through such comments, we can cooperatively refine our insights.
So, firstly, I agree with you.
The US financial system is indeed facing structural contradictions which are real, and they are eroding the material base of American power.
China's state-led productive capacity is a genuine material counterweight to Western financial dominance. The scale of Chinese industrial output, its control over critical supply chains, and its gradual construction of alternative institutions are all significant.
Gold and commodity market shifts do reflect a slow erosion of confidence in the dollar-centered system.
And, yes, the Bunker State is indeed, in part, a "frantic reflex of economic decay".
However, none of this contradicts this essay. These sound like a response to an argument like that the empire is invincible and the cage is permanent. I explicitly refuted that claim at the very beginning.
However, here is where our analyses diverge a little regarding the current reality of this transition:
While China is undeniably pursuing a post-capitalist trajectory, it still operates within the framework of the global capitalist economy. A genuine "material outside" would mean immunity to the imperial financial and legal infrastructure. The fact that Western sanctions, SWIFT exclusions, and export controls (like those on semiconductors) still cause real damage demonstrates that this alternative system is still in a phase of transition, not yet a fait accompli. The cage, for now, remains real.
The idea that exporting socialist-produced technology automatically fosters "communist self-rule" abroad overlooks how technology actually functions in practice. A railway or a piece of machinery operates within the social and class structures of the receiving country. Technology does not inherently carry its conditions of production with it; its social effect depends entirely on who uses it and under what systemic conditions. (However, if I misinterpreted your comment, correct me.)
Further, comparing China's development to how early capitalism incubated within feudalism is an elegant analogy, but it requires caution. Capitalism did not simply embed itself peacefully and wait for the old system to shatter; it waged centuries of violent struggle, enclosure, and colonization to replace the old mode of production. If this analogy holds, it implies a prolonged, dangerous conflict rather than a peaceful transition, which is exactly the danger my essay warns about.
Dismissing the empire's current behavior as mere "madness," "desperate spasms," or irrational decay underestimates its lethality. The Bunker State is an emergent, adaptive strategy (through militarization, weaponized finance, and hybrid warfare). To mistake adaptation for mere flailing is dangerous precisely when the empire is fighting to preserve its core hierarchies. (Furthermore, countless Marxists like Luxemburg and Gramsci have pointed to the adaptability of capitalism in different conditions, so have world-systems theorists.)
Lastly, the core of my argument is that the decline of an empire does not automatically guarantee liberation. We currently lack a shared transnational political horizon, cross-border mass organizations, and a fully scaled alternative financial architecture. Until these exist, the transition period remains incredibly perilous. As Gramsci warned, it is precisely in this interregnum—when the old is dying and the new struggles to be born—that the most morbid symptoms appear.
I believe we share the same ultimate hope for a multipolar, post-imperial future, but assuming the victory is already structurally guaranteed might blind us to the immense challenges and organizing still required to actually get there.
At the end of the day, I hope I'm wrong and anti-imperialism and non-capitalist more mixed economy types of organization will simply emerge out of the historical moment, that the contradicitions won't be adapted to by the US-led empire, and we can just sit back and watch, but I doubt it.
Thank you, Nel. I also really appreciate your reply to my reply!
I agree that humanity cannot just sit back and watch. Quite the contrary, class struggle is always and ever at the centre of this - from its most abstract (producers vs. owners), to the laws of motion of modes of production (imperialist modes of destruction, and anti-imperialist modes of which the most advanced, the one in the active process of being universalised and generalised, and the one that is objectively superior in cost and quality of output is China’s), to the relations between states and the state system, to the domestic politics of this or that society, to the struggles in the workplace against the owners, to the streets against the fascists and their state, etc. I simply say the West (the US, sub-imperial UK, Germany, France etc., its West Asian settler-colony, and vassal family dictatorships) is not the subject of history, because it isn’t anymore.
The Western 'bourgeois proletariat,' bloated on imperialist wages and decoupled from productive labor, possess no structural leverage until the imperialist core is defeated by 'regime change' or war or economic collapse - or all three - and re-industrialisation along the Chinese model can take place (and we are a very long way from this being on the horizon). As to the Western imperialist bourgeoisie, their comprador bourgeoisies, etc. - well, as much as imperialism remains the central and primary contradiction in the world system today, anti-imperialism remains the dialectical other side of it. Thus, the greatest contradiction in human history: a Marxist economic and social system actively propping up the dilapidated Western imperialist one. The US issues fiat dollars that can no longer buy anything productive domestically, exchanging this paper for the immense volume of physical commodities churned out by China’s industrial base. A dying, financialised 'mode of unproduction' (or destruction, as Ali Kadri has put it) is kept afloat by the very transitional socialist mode of production destined to supersede it (just a question of when and how). The ruling workers of China are the largest proletarian concentration in human history, through whom value maintains its strict synchronicity to labour whatever financial chicanery the Western 'capital markets' try. As I have tried to summarise, the law of value actively operates in China as an objective material reality, whereas in the West it is systematically suppressed and violated through the USD fiat world money system, financialisation, etc.
(The Axis of Resistance, who put more at stake than anyone in their anti-imperialism and from societies systematically destroyed by imperialism, sanctions, etc. are also central - in the annals of the decline and fall of Western imperialism the role of the Palestinians, Iranians, and Russians, etc. in exposing and attriting the empire will be writ large. In contrast, people like Richard Medhurst continue to emphasise imperialism’s endless appetite for ruthless war without acknowledging the endless appetite of the oppressed and massacred peoples of West Asia to resist, doing a great disservice to a cause he has done much to champion.)
Thus, the new mode grows within the old through aufheben, sublation, etc. Hence, I do not agree that China need be outside imperial instruments of domination, but I do believe it is pretty much immune to them - having made itself sufficiently indispensable to imperialism in such a way that it has significant strategic agency within the imperialist world system, while ailing Western imperialism’s agency is mere brute force (economic, political, military, cultural, etc.). This reveals that imperial madness (Nixon’s brainchild, I believe) and primitive mercantilism is nothing but structural fragility and not a calculated 'bunker state strategy' (though Washington beltway think tankers may try to rationalise it into one).
I agree that Chinese technology export does not inherently carry its conditions of production with it; I did not mean to suggest it did. Yet exploring how technology operates under different modes helps clarify that the Chinese endeavour to export its forces of production can fundamentally alter relations of production across the Global South, which is transcending the imperialist centre-periphery contradictions. Hence, rather than replacing US hegemony, China facilitates sovereign industrial development over raw extraction, offering a universality based on win/win cooperation. Thus formerly peripheral nations are pulled into a new economic gravity, which brings with it a certain necessity to resist imperialist dependency, bullying, and aggression as societies restructure internal production to benefit from the new superior Chinese mode’s laws of motion. So, technology carries immense structural weight here: it provides the material base that makes breaking away from comprador dependency possible.
Your warning that the historical analogy to early capitalism incubating within feudalism implies a prolonged, violent conflict rather than a peaceful transition is well taken - but we can locate the structural origin of that conflict more precisely. This highlights two distinct paths of development: Western capitalism was subsidised by domestic dispossession, colonial genocide, and enslavement. China’s industrialisation was built upon a peasantry that kept its land post-revolution. Its integration into the world-system was a calculated Faustian bargain - trading cheap labor for technology - while the CPC ensured workers were not exploited below the cost of their reproduction, resulting in a meteoric rise in living standards. China's rise remains peaceful; transitional misery stems from the dying mode trying to erect a cage it no longer has adequate production facilities for.
Regarding imperialism’s ability to adapt circa 100 years ago when Luxemburg and Gramsci were saying it, and when Lenin had identified only the highest form of capitalism so far, this was indeed the case. I fail to see it adapting now, however. What would imperialism need to do today to adapt? It would have to win in more than just Venezuela. It would need to defeat Iran and Russia. And even then it is questionable what it could achieve. How much of Iraq’s wealth was squandered in the USA’s pitiless war against it? How much of Libya's? Again, this goes back to the nature of the imperialist mode as it has degenerated, as one which can only waste away the earth, humanity, etc.
Finally, who is the subject that lacks a shared transnational political horizon? We Westerners, perhaps, but as I implied at the top, who cares? Meanwhile, China has a Global Governance Initiative, a Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, all giving context and specificity to its vision of building a community with a shared future for humanity including a path to a global ecological civilisation. And what is the shared transnational political horizon of the Axis of Resistance? Sovereign liberation from imperialism. So, I think we (humanity) do not lack these things. But sure, we Westerners have a lot of catching up to do.
(I was glad to see you on LNN the other day, and look forward to seeing you on RIF tomorrow - apologies for descending into polemics slightly at the end there, but I hope I have made my point without doing so too stringently - there is much we agree on and what we disagree on is perhaps only a matter of emphasis. We do indeed share the same ultimate hope for a multipolar, post-imperial future. Keep up the good work.)
I think you have done a pretty good job of outlining the interregnum as it is currently. But how long your framing remains descriptive given the pace of change makes me think you might have made the argument a bit longer than necessary.
From an EU perspective I see very little change around me, but the mood is generally somber, and tense. Quiet before the storm.
On your thorough analysis it seems to me that the rapid development of drone tech in warfare is rapidly leaving past paradigms of military power behind in favor of a much more accessible, affordable, and ultimately democratizing warfare into view. This will have profound implications for security architecture and what it means in the next five years, or so. American security guarantees are already looking dubious and drone warfare will only speed up credible deterrence in the hands of every nation and even local militias. This, more than anything else, will profoundly alter realpolitik in terms of de facto territorial control, barring carpet bombing or nuclear escalation. I'm sure you can do the mental gymnastics yourself to appreciate the flow on effects. When security guarantees begin to mean resource supply instead of military power, everything you cover strengthens. Your argument is confirmed.
A last point, on the lack of grand narratives or unifying projects, is that climate change ambiguity/ uncertainty and local preparation, adaptation, and survival is the unifying project of humanity. And will probably remain so and strengthen in time. Geography and local climate will dictate materials and constraints and this is where the mutual interdependencies really begins to kick and find traction. We just haven't quite clicked on regarding this aspect. We will have it rubbed in our faces soon enough, as this current energy crisis is about to seriously disrupt industrial civilizations and our food supply from the cascading effects on chemicals and fertilizer etc. Current hot takes are predicting early July as the next critical threshold for assessing the severity of supply disruption and impacts on crops, production and distribution. Leaving aside sudden escalation of warfare.
One thought this essay prompted: If the major powers are as constrained by interdependence as the "multi-layered cage" suggests, is the absence of a shared anti-imperial project really the cause of elite-competitive multipolarity, or is it partly an outcome of the same structural constraints?
Put differently, do states hedge because they lack a common horizon, or do they lack a common horizon because the system rewards hedging?
The distinction matters because it changes where we locate agency. In one reading, the solution is political organization. In another, the deeper challenge is altering the structure that continually reproduces transactional behaviour regardless of intent.
The essay made me think about whether we sometimes treat strategic behaviour as a choice when it may be a property of the system itself.
Brilliant, Nel. You manage with very complx levels of your analyse admirably.❣️
Superb and such a good framework to help reorient people from the "Multipolarity WINS" discourse. The way you describe China, Russia + hedging in a structurally interdependent world is excellent and can clarify so many discussions. I also strongly agree with your comments on civilization discourse; a civilization state is an empire in mock grand historical clothing.
I had two notes on the historical legacy.
One there is the inertia of the USA's 'post-1945 'Partition of Eurasia' that has become normalised in USA strategic circles - "Why are we still in Korea?" - but also creates its own forces for inertia.
The second is the Chinese thinker you quote on the peaceful rise of China presents a distorted version of Soviet and Chinese history.
It was more Mao's China than the USSR that was 'exporting revolution' for a long time there... Didn't Stalin turn that page in the 1920s in the USSR? Mao despised the 'revisionist' USSR who turned their back on Stalin (indeed Deng Xiaoping was in Moscow when Khrushchev gave the Stalin cult speech and called Mao in a panic immediately), wanted coexistence, and pursued the early detentes. I think this kind of Chinese historical theory is revealing. It also neglects China's relations with USA and USSR during the years of collapse and just after. I find it unconvincing a a way of making sense of the complex dynamics of the Cold Wars, decolonisation, post-145 world building.
I do wonder if there is not at least a third form of multipolarity too, especially since empire has been the rule of the road for a long time . . . but that can be described in time. Thanks again for all of your insights
Jeff, thank you so much for this thoughtful and generous comment. I’m really glad the framework resonated with you, especially regarding the “civilizational” discourse.
I agree with your two notes on the historical legacy. You are right about the inertia of the post-1945 architecture. That bureaucratic and military “autopilot” is a part of what sustains the Bunker State today. Once those forward-deployed infrastructures and the military-industrial networks behind them are built, they generate their own structural momentum.
Regarding Zheng Bijian, your historical corrective is sharp. It was indeed Stalin who turned toward 'Socialism in One Country,' Khrushchev who pushed for peaceful coexistence, and Mao’s China that was fiercely exporting revolution (and despising the USSR as revisionist for seeking détente!). Though we shouldn't forget that the USSR still provided massive material support to anti-colonial liberation movements worldwide, the ideological zeal you're describing was certainly centered in Beijing during that era.
But your critique here actually proves exactly why I found Zheng’s quote so revealing! By projecting the 'export of revolution' onto the Soviet Dream, the modern CCP is performing a deliberate historical sleight-of-hand. They are actively burying Mao’s radical internationalism to reassure Washington and global capital that China is a safe, reliable partner for market integration. The fact that they have to distort their own history to prove they aren't a revolutionary threat illustrates my central point: the anti-imperialist horizon has been abandoned by the current ruling strata in favor of elite-competitive survival.
Finally, I am very glad you brought up the possibility of a third form of multipolarity. I view these forms as a continuum rather than rigid boxes, and we can choose which elements to emphasize based on the world we want to build (which means speculating about a future, I think, depends on what general concepts and frameworks one uses anyway). I explore a 'third way' in Part II of the essay, proposing a transitional 'Mixed-Economy Multipolarity' as a potential narrow path forward.
I really like reading your stuff its stimulating.
However ( you just knew there was a 'but'), I liken the Trump world, which is just a violently 'in your face' extension of US policy formulated for decades, as Chicago 1930s style. There are 3 major mobs, and one or two minor ones. Only one mob has the ability currently to project its power outside its neighbourhood, the other two are just kings of their own patches. There is inevitably times of 'action' on the edges, periodically one or other of the smaller mobs gets kicked around for trying to interfere with 'business'. The dominant mob holds most aces but not enough to bring the other two to heel. Sometime the distrust between the other two may be overcome to create a power to project their joint strength and give the dominant mob a good doing over. Probably will only happen if simultaneously they feel the dominant mob has just gone too far in interfering in their territory/business.
Ain't going to happen any other way, as 'City Hall' hasn't the power to interfere nor the inclination as its too busy taking back handers. Like all good mobster stories the end of the chief gang comes about in unexpected ways, internal disputes usually providing the ignition.
Although I still believe China's current realistic approach is the only viable path toward an alternative system, I think you're right — some people on the left (including me) have become spectators of this reality, abandoning any imagination to transcend it.
It's all in the final exclamation point.
"But ironically, this defensive posture is precisely what makes these powers so vulnerable to the Bunker State. Because they are not building an anti‑imperialist architecture—because they are building pipelines and trade corridors rather than, or better yet, alongside, a shared revolutionary infrastructure—the empire can use sanctions, sabotage, elite capture, and hybrid warfare to pick them off one by one. It can physically blow up their connecting infrastructure and keep them continuously entangled before they ever form a genuine collective alternative. The very defensiveness that keeps them alive in the short term is what will leave them structurally vulnerable in the long term."
Gen. Sir Rupert Smith observed that "war is storytelling". Story structure, in its simplest form has Act One introduce the characters and the conflict; Act Two, the story's protagonist 'reacting' to the initiatives of the story's antagonist; and Act Three, resolution when the protagonist turns the tables on the antagonist. So long as our protagonists simply reacts, defensively, there can be no transition to Act Three: No resolution.
"And this will mean continued violence."
"King Wen asked: “How do I gain the people’s support?”
Taigong replied: “The world does not belong to one person; instead it is shared by everyone. Those who share in the benefits of the world can gain the world; those who try to monopolize them, lose them. "
We all lose because these "interesting times" are plagued by universal selfishness - perfectly captured in twelves seconds (from 3:50 to 4:02) of The Drew Carey Show Season 5 Episode 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyjmcDbBd3E
You are so smart, perceptive and analytical. I shift my understanding of the world every time I read one of your extended pieces. You cut through the connfusion and give me lucidity for which I thank you Nel.
Your distinction between elite‑competitive and anti‑imperialist multipolarity makes the point clearly: the cage isn’t just about money or force, it’s about the lack of a shared vision that would make breaking away feel possible.
The real question is: what would it take to turn hedging from the default into something coordinated? Is the bottleneck institutions (no parallel payments, insurance, courts), politics (no mass cross‑border movement), or ideas (no shared diagnosis of what we’re fighting against)?
I’ve been tracing how “there is no alternative” moved from a description to something enforced — dollar, SWIFT, energy, chips as the spine of the system. Your framework explains why that spine holds even as power shifts. In Part II, where do you see the weak point most likely to crack first: the financial layer, the tech layer, or the political layer?
The article assumes there is or has been an alternative to Elite Theory. No need to go into the details but that seems a tad far fetched. Haven't elites not always ruled? Im NOT talking about popular uprisings but the iron rule of oligarchy. Organised minority wins from disorganised majority. The structures that have been formed after ww1 and ww2 will be changed, abandoned, reformed according to the power of different elites who all try to set up the digital control grid for their own purpose. The only way The People can fight back is to disrupt this infrastructure ( which means this post is likely flagged..somewhere on the personalised data grid) as is the writer of the article.
Maybe this has something to do with it. https://youtu.be/qJJzA-YWc3s?si=m0OXyMD75B6EwOov
Good work. Very helpful.