Where Has All the Class Analysis Gone?
A short meta‑commentary on the current anti‑imperialist discourse
Note to Readers: I usually write longer, framework‑building essays, but today I wanted to step back and offer a short commentary on some tendencies I’ve been noticing.
Where has all the class analysis gone? Why is so much of what passes for anti‑imperialist commentary today content to treat nations as unified subjects, physical commodities as the primary sites of power, and shifts in the balance of trade as the horizon of emancipation? And why, when a more structural reading is offered, is it so often dismissed as “defeatism”?
I want to step back from the immediate debates and identify some of the analytical tendencies that have come to dominate the multipolar and anti‑imperialist media space. I greatly admire the diligent work of many of the analysts I will reference indirectly here. Their research is rigorous, their commitment is genuine, and they have done more than most to expose the crimes of the US‑led empire. But there is a persistent pattern of argumentation that, I believe, rests on a series of strawmen and produces a mutual misunderstanding between debating “sides.” My goal is not to attack individuals but to interrogate the underlying logic.
The Strawman: Empire as 19th‑Century Commodity Hegemon
A common framing attributes to the United States a singular ambition: to become the world’s dominant physical supplier of oil and liquefied natural gas, to literally pump and export enough barrels to subjugate the globe. (Another version: The US-led empire wants to absolutely and needs to absolutely destroy Russia or China right now.) The argument then proceeds to dismantle this ambition with technical data—the US produces mostly light sweet crude, not the heavy and medium crude that most global refineries are configured to process; it cannot retro‑fit those refineries at scale; its own AI data centres are draining the domestic grid; LNG terminals take years to build and are already running near capacity.
All of this is factually accurate. And documented with precision. But I’d argue, it attacks a caricature.
The US‑led bloc does not need to physically pump and export every barrel of oil to maintain global partial hegemony. That is a 19th‑century view of empire. The current imperial strategy is not primarily about physical supply. It is about infrastructural and financial chokeholds. It is about ensuring that the trade in energy—whoever pumps it—is routed through US‑controlled financial architecture, insured by Western syndicates, and that the resulting surplus capital is recycled into Wall Street and Silicon Valley. In another breath, it is pointed out that Gulf sovereign wealth funds are investing trillions into US tech and AI. But this is treated as a vulnerability for the US—as if a weakened Gulf means a weakened empire—rather than as evidence of the deep integration of global elites into the very architecture of the Bunker State. The dialectic is missed here: the transnational capitalist class is funding the imperial infrastructure to suppress the global working class, regardless of which flag they fly. (And this is but just one example, another example would be the argument about military victories and losses, the armaments industry, and the ignoring of who sells what to whom.)
By attacking the caricature of America’s desire to physically supply the globe with energy, the analysis sidesteps the actual mechanisms through which imperial power is exercised today: the dollar‑denominated clearing system, the London insurance market, the credit rating agencies, the sanctions architecture, the legal and regulatory frameworks that can be weaponized against any state that attempts to build an alternative. The empire’s power rests in the pipeline, the insurance certificate, and the payment rail.
The Logical Leap: Friction Is Not Collapse
A second tendency is to mistake tactical friction for systemic collapse. The argument runs that because the US spent $25 billion on the war against Iran, depleted its munitions, failed to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, and could not unseat its government, the US has lost. Iran holding the Strait of Hormuz is presented as proof of ultimate victory.
Surviving a US assault is not the same as dismantling the capitalist world‑system. Neither is it a step toward dismantling the capitalist world system, at least not in the current state of the world. The US military‑industrial complex wants to expend munitions; that is how Lockheed Martin and Raytheon secure new congressional funding to replenish stockpiles. The depletion of one arsenal is the justification for the construction of the next. To frame the US as a bumbling, exhausted empire that has been outsmarted by Iran is to offer the audience a comforting narrative: don’t worry, the empire is burning itself out, we just have to watch.
But the US Navy was already studying the purposeful blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in 2016. The “Reverse Oil Weapon” was being discussed in Naval Postgraduate School seminars in 2015. The Brookings Institution was publishing papers on “mutually assured denial” in 2014. From at least the early 2010s, the US security establishment was not thinking in terms of “winning” in a traditional sense. It was accepting multipolarity as a material fact and preparing for a permanent condition of managed confrontation—a state in which everyone tacitly accepts they cannot push the US out, while the US accepts it cannot subordinate everyone, but in which everyone remains entangled in the global market under imperial infrastructural influence. The chaos is not the death rattle of empire. It is the new operating environment.
The failure to distinguish friction from collapse produces the inevitability myth. In other words, “the empire is inevitably losing, and we need only wait.” Both versions (The empire will always win and The empire will inevitably lose) produce the same political consequence: passivity. If the empire is already blundering into collapse, why build alternative institutions? Why organize mass movements? The spectacle of American defeat is just as demobilizing as the spectacle of American invincibility.
The Missing Class: Nations as the Subject of History
Perhaps the most striking feature of much contemporary anti‑imperialist analysis is the near‑total absence of class. Nations are treated as unified, anti‑imperialist monoliths. Iran is the righteous resistance. China is the rising alternative. Russia is the defender of sovereignty. (Which doesn’t mean that they are not, but there’s more to it.) The internal class structures of these nations—their own capitalist classes, their own comprador fractions, their own integration into the same global financial architecture—disappear.
A dialectical thinker would look at the fact that Gulf monarchies are investing trillions into US Silicon Valley and AI infrastructure and conclude that the elites of the Global South are deeply integrated into elite‑competitive multipolarity, actively funding the algorithmic control systems of the empire to protect their own capital.
Similarly, trading in local currencies is routinely equated with a break from global capitalism. However, for instance, BRICS is building parallel capitalist infrastructure to secure better terms of trade. A multipolar world where global elites use the Yuan or the Ruble instead of the Dollar is still a capitalist world‑system. Perhaps that is what many analysts are comfortable with—a softer form of exploitation. Perhaps the hope is that China’s long‑term socialist horizon will somehow, magically, radiate outward and transform every trading partner. But the Chinese government itself heavily emphasizes that this is not its intent at all. The subject of history has become the nation‑state, and the working class has vanished from the frame.
Reductionist Materialism and the Fetishism of Data
There is a broader intellectual tendency at work here that deserves to be named. It is a form of reductionist materialism or techno‑empiricism that reduces imperial power to the physical characteristics of commodities. Empire is analyzed as a machine whose outputs can be calculated if you have the right data: barrel counts, pipeline diameters, terminal capacities, sulfur content. The world becomes a giant engine, and political conclusions are drawn directly from technical constraints.
But empire has never been primarily about producing the right kind of crude. The British Empire didn’t fall because of the viscosity of its oil. It mutated into the Anglo‑American financial order while retaining the City of London as a global hub. The current empire doesn’t rest on light sweet crude, either. It rests on sanctions architecture, military command integration, and the ability to lock others into asymmetric dependency. By focusing so narrowly on physical energy flows, this mode of analysis systematically avoids the structures of class power, financial coercion, and ideological reproduction that are the actual terrain of imperial domination.
This is not what Marx meant by materialism. Engels, in his letters on historical materialism, explicitly warned against the reduction of history to economic mechanics. The base “determines” the superstructure only “in the last instance,” and the relationship is one of complex interaction. Gramsci fought against the economism of the Second International, which reduced Marxism to a passive waiting for the inevitable collapse of capitalism under its own contradictions. He insisted on the role of hegemony, of culture, of the active construction of consent, and of the organizational capacity of the working class. Today’s data‑driven analyses, for all their technical sophistication, are the heirs of the points that Marx, Engels, and Gramsci spent their careers refuting. In such a manner, materialism is turned into a fetishism of data, and physical properties of commodities are mistaken for the social relations that give them their power.
A genuinely materialist—a genuinely Marxist—analysis of the current energy war would not stop at the viscosity of crude. It would ask: who controls the extraction, the refining, the shipping, the insurance, the financing, and the pricing of oil? What class interests are served by the current architecture of the global oil market? How does the weaponization of oil—through sanctions, through the dollar system, through the control of chokepoints—serve the reproduction of imperial class power? How do the struggles over oil reshape the balance of forces between classes and between states? Even if the US cannot become the world’s dominant oil exporter, can it still control the Strait of Hormuz, the Malacca Strait, and the other chokepoints through which oil must flow? Partially? Temporarily? Can it still sanction any country that trades in dollars? Can it still force the London insurance market to deny coverage? Can it still pressure SWIFT to disconnect a rival’s banks?
Fundamentally, these are questions about power.
Hyperpolitics and the Loss of Institutional Anchors
Why are these tendencies so prevalent? Part of the answer lies in the condition that the theorist Anton Jäger calls hyperpolitics: a state of high political discourse and low institutional density. Politics as a topic saturates every media channel—YouTube, X, Substack, podcasts—but the organizational anchors that once gave political analysis its material weight (unions, mass parties, internationalist organizations) are fragmented or absent.
In this vacuum, the nation‑state becomes the only visible agent of history. If you want to oppose US imperialism and the only forces you can see are states, then opposing US imperialism becomes synonymous with supporting those states. The absence of a shared political horizon, of transnational mass organizations, of an alternative mode of production—these are not troubling questions if you have already outsourced revolutionary agency to Iran, China, and others. Yet, national processes, however genuine their achievements, do not magically translate into global transformation without organization aimed at exactly that.
A Final Clarification
This is not a critique of any individual analyst’s work ethic, integrity, or commitment. I greatly admire the diligence and the courage of many who labour in this space. My concern is with the frameworks we use, the assumptions we carry, and the political consequences of the narratives we produce.
If you are a geopolitics or international relations specialist and you simply want a different balance of power—and you consider that sufficient—then that is perfectly fine. A state‑centric reading of inputs and outputs may be entirely adequate for what you imagine a more peaceful and multipolar world to be.
But if you offer a materialist, dialectical, or anti‑imperialist analysis, then class, social relations, and the institutional architecture of power could be at the centre of your inquiry. A more rigorous historical materialism would insist that the trends we observe create openings and make certain futures more plausible, but they do not write the script. The outcome depends on organization, consciousness, internal class struggles, and the ability to attack core structures of power—including in the core countries themselves. Lastly, Marxist analysis is non‑eschatological which means it allows for recognizing tendencies toward crisis and breakdown, but it does not guarantee emancipation simply because capitalism has contradictions.
We should be intellectually honest enough to recognize that a shifting balance of power is not the same as dismantling the imperial cage.
Join the Conversation
As we conclude this theoretical detour, I want to hear from you.
If you live in or follow a Global Majority country—whether Mexico, Russia, China, Iran, Brazil, South Africa, or elsewhere—do you see the conceptual blind spot I’ve described at work? Are the elites in your country quietly integrating into the capitalist world-system under the banner of multipolarity, and is the working class being erased from the geopolitical narrative? Are the de‑dollarization efforts and new infrastructure corridors genuinely contributing to building an alternative mode of production, or are they securing better terms of trade within the existing global market? Or maybe they serve both functions?
If you live in the imperial core—the United States, Britain, Europe, or the Anglosphere more broadly—have you witnessed the hyperpolitics I mentioned? Are you seeing the substitution of organized mass movements with passive cheerleading for foreign states? Or maybe rather than substition, what has happened with organized mass movements anyway? Do you see the invisible imperial infrastructure—the courts, the rating agencies, the compliance departments, the tech monopolies—being ignored?
More importantly, where does the inevitability myth show up in the media you consume, and where do you see it being effectively challenged? Or maybe you don’t agree at all, that there is such a thing as an inevitability myth?
Wherever you are, the default trajectory of a shifting balance of capitalist power is not the only horizon. Where do you see genuine efforts—however embryonic—to center class, build transnational solidarity, or construct the kind of mixed economies that move beyond mere geopolitical accounting? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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Stay curious,
Nel
I think that education is missing, education as in communicating about the process. Sharing insights of how it is done. And by that generating awareness ans appreciation for it.
Not a weekly hour long class, but a more hack internet style presentation.
Short to the point topics, and every so often a deeper dive that strings everything together.
With a good sense of humor where it fits. But dead serious where it matters.
When I read your articles im usually blown away. I see what you do, but I can't figure out how you pack all of it in one massive article. Or a series of articles that feel like a small book.
Eexacy, we live in societies dominated by ruling classes and the nature of those ruling classes is central to domestic and international politics. The oligarchs in the West have been very good at stifling class analysis. Rockhill has done some excellent work on this in the academy.