By Tom Costello and Connor Rosoman
The world has changed dramatically in recent years. Wars, trade conflicts and shifting global alliances are defining this new era. The old ‘unipolar’ world order of unchallenged US domination is now over. But what has replaced it?
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the world was in a state of unipolarity. US imperialism reigned supreme as the dominant world power as the USSR fell apart. The 20th century had been defined by conflict between major powers, expressed in two horrific world wars, as well as the Cold War between US imperialism and the Stalinist states of the Soviet-aligned bloc.
This was an era of extreme optimism for the ruling classes in Western countries. Academics like Francis Fukuyama described it as the ‘end of history’, where US-style liberal capitalism would go unchallenged, ushering in a new age of stability. But Marxists understand that history never stands still. Beginning in the late 2000s, the unipolar world order of the 1990s began to break down with the emergence of China as a new competitor. Today these tensions are more pronounced than they have ever been.
The end of unquestioned US dominance is, for many, represented by forces such as the BRICS, a tenuous alliance between China, Russia and states like Brazil, India, South Africa and others. Brazilian president Lula, at the BRICS summit last year, praised the group’s “fight for a multipolar world and less asymmetrical relations between countries”.
How do Marxists explain these changes?
Rather than moving towards multipolarity, International Socialist Alternative has explained how the key process taking place has been a reactionary, bipolar division of the world – a growing competition and rivalry between rival blocs led by the US and China, which has steered the path of the rest of the world.
The US remains a global superpower, but its main challenge has come from the Chinese ruling class. China is not ‘socialist’ today (despite what its regime ridiculously claims), but is a capitalist and imperialist power. From the 1980s onwards, the ruling so-called Communist Party implemented capitalist restoration from above, shifting the country away from Mao’s bureaucratically planned economy, and heading the country down the road of the market.
China is today the biggest multilateral lender to the African continent, and has become South America’s biggest trading partner. From both continents, China extracts enormous amounts of raw materials for use in building new computers and infrastructure projects, amassing billions for the Chinese economy.
In their battle for global supremacy, the Chinese and US ruling classes are waging trade wars against each other, each side attempting to limit the other’s ability to develop new technology and military equipment. This has impacted the whole world, pulling the world toward one or the other force in a volatile reshaping of relations.
What does BRICS really represent?
Within BRICS, China is the dominating power with a 19% share of global GDP, more than all other member states combined. Russia, despite its military strength and aspirations of regaining its former superpower status, has a GDP smaller than Italy’s. While it plays a role as a minor imperialist power in its own right, it serves as a junior partner behind China.
But this is not to say that BRICS is a uniformly Chinese-aligned bloc. It is not a cohesive enough grouping to represent such a force. Other BRICS members such as India have tried to play an independent role, playing off the two superpowers for their own gain. But India is moving closer to the US-led bloc, spurred on by its conflict on its border with China.
Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa (among other states such as Vietnam, Mexico and Turkey), all followed the US in applying protectionist tariffs on Chinese goods last year, over fears of China flooding domestic markets with cheap products as part of their drive to keep the stagnating Chinese economy afloat. Far from an example of multipolarity with many different competitors, all countries are forced to hover around one or the other pole.
Confusion on the left
How should we view this new era? For some sections of the left, the end of the unipolar world and the rise of a new ‘multipolar’ order is seen as a progressive trend – a sign of a world moving away from imperialist domination and towards equality. This is often described in terms of the ‘rise of the Global South’.
Andrew Murray, a leader of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), wrote in the Morning Star around Christmas, about the inevitable emergence of a world “based on principles of co-existence, co-operation and universal respect for international law”, impeded only by the policies of the US and its allies.
Murray’s phrasing directly reflects the line of the Chinese dictatorship, which the Morning Star and the CPB falsely depict as being socialist. Leading Chinese ‘Communist’ Party Wang Yi put forward last year a similar idea that the rise of China would mean an “equal multipolar world” with “equal rights, equal opportunities and equal rules for every nation”.
Rather than parroting state propaganda and taking it at face value, we need to dig beneath the surface to look at the underlying balance of forces. Every imperialist power throughout history has tried to feed the world a propaganda line which it uses to cover its tracks. For China, its imperialist ambitions are couched in words about ‘equal rights’ and ‘mutually beneficial relations between nations’. For the US and its allies, its acts of aggression are framed as being about ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, and ‘bringing freedom’ to the world. Both are fundamentally lies. Chinese imperialism cares only about dominating markets and exploiting resources, and US imperialism has an extensive track record of propping up repressive dictatorships to do its bidding.
Neither superpower serves our interests
Recent years have seen a deep rejection of US and Western imperialism across much of the neocolonial world. This is especially the case in Africa, where institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been exposed for their real role.
Justified hatred toward the Western powers played a central role in the uprising in Kenya last year, where a mass youth uprising was sparked by the Kenyan government passing a finance bill which deepened poverty and hunger while paying off predatory loans to Western financial institutions. Likewise we have seen a mass rejection of French imperialism across the Sahel region of Africa, with countries such as Niger and Mali shifting toward alliances with Russia and China.
Across much of Africa and Latin America, there are many illusions in the idea that moving into the orbit of China will bring a ‘better deal’ than US dominance. However there is very little difference in practice. Both the US and China operate on an imperialist basis. Both use loans with excessive interest which place poorer countries into a debt trap, allowing them to lay claim to ownership of natural resources and industries.
In Zimbabwe for instance, Chinese corporations now own an estimated 90% of the country’s mining industry. A review last year by the Zimbabwean Centre For Natural Resource Governance reported that “Chinese mining ventures have led to widespread environmental degradation, disregard for the cultural rights of host communities, and, in many cases, the violation of the country’s labor laws, often with apparent impunity.”
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a bloody civil war stretching over decades has been heating up amid growing competition for the region’s mineral wealth. The tech and AI wars between the US and China has seen both powers scramble for the biggest possible supply of coltan and cobalt – required for the production of smartphones, laptops and other key technology. UNICEF estimates 40,000 children work in these mines, made to perform labour in slave-like conditions at gunpoint before refinement and export for use by corporations like Apple, Huawei and Nvidia.
This is a brutal reminder of the reality of imperialism, whether draped in the US, Chinese or Russian flag.
Understanding imperialism today
Lenin’s classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism is essential reading for anybody seeking to understand the world around us today. Written after the outbreak of World War I, this short book set out to explain the processes which led up to it.
Lenin recounts how the scramble for Africa between the major European powers in the late 1800s was not just a ‘policy’, but an inevitable byproduct of the capitalist system. The concentration of the economy into monopolies – small but powerful clusters of interlinked corporations and banks – meant the ruling classes of the richest countries were compelled to look outside their borders for access to resources, labour and new sources of profit.
Capitalism in its monopoly stage means war, as a handful of states come into competition, fighting for domination over colonised countries. Despite a century passing since Imperialism was written, its analysis remains as relevant as ever.
The likes of Murray and the CPB claim to be ‘Marxist-Leninists’, but their actual analysis is completely opposed to that of Lenin. They in fact have much more in common with Lenin’s opponents at the time such as the German social democrat Karl Kautsky, whose theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’ proposed that the major powers could arrive at a state of peaceful co-existence and partnership.
The idea that an “equal multipolar world” without war is possible under capitalism is a fantasy. As Lenin put it best: “The capitalists divide the world, not out of malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get profits.” Imperialism isn’t a policy which can simply be discarded by the ruling classes of the US and China: it’s the only means which they can use to sustain their rule.
The growing conflicts around the globe, from escalating conflicts in the Middle East, to the military build-up around Taiwan are not aberrations which can be removed simply by the US changing some of its policies and choosing to be friendly with the Chinese ruling class. It is bound up with a declining and decaying capitalist system.
This is also illustrated by developments around the Ukraine war, where Trump’s sidelining of EU and Ukrainian governments represents a dramatic turn in policy choice, but does not signal a break from the underlying imperialist system. Trump’s attempts to grab billions of dollars in Ukrainian minerals as part of a future deal shows this. But it also shows the character of these blocs – which far from being made up of equal partners individually choosing to work together, are grouped together by necessity against their rivals, with the main superpower standing at the head.
Trump’s attempts to make a deal with Russia on Ukraine are a classic feature of imperialist carving-up of the world. Likewise, Trump’s seeming attempts at a rapprochement with Putin represent an effort to undermine his geopolitical opponents in Beijing – although Russia’s integration in the Chinese bloc may make this much harder than Trump anticipates.
Independent workers’ movements needed
A central mistake made by ‘multipolarity’ cheerleaders is in their advocacy of unity with the ruling classes of countries within the BRICS or Chinese-led bloc. Just a basic look at these regimes shows how they can’t be relied on to bring liberation. Modi’s government in India is a brutal anti-working class regime which spreads religious sectarian and caste discrimination. The South African government today presides over conditions for the Black population which are barely improved from apartheid, while the country’s ruling elite enriches itself.
A genuine socialist and Marxist approach is instead about building independent working-class movements, based on solidarity between workers in all countries. The road to genuine freedom for the oppressed masses in the neocolonial world is not through ‘unity’ with capitalist governments. It is through challenging and ultimately overthrowing them, building independent unions, workers’ parties and ultimately a revolutionary socialist movement which can take on the capitalist system as a whole, seizing control of the wealth which is exploited by the billionaires globally.
