Introduction to International Committee discussion – Part 2: China, Russia and the Middle East
Many thanks to Ana Cristina. I’m in agreement with what she presented. We agreed that I would supplement her presentation by addressing two issues:
(1) the theoretical basis of our understanding of Chinese and Russian imperialism;
(2) the role of the Middle East today in imperialism and in resistance to imperialism.
The starting point for us in this discussion is the Leninist theory of imperialism, as it has developed in different periods since 1916. From the beginning, as Ana Cristina said, the theory was not just Lenin’s; Luxemburg, Hilferding and others made crucial contributions.
I’d like to stress one crucial point: while non-Marxists mainly conceive of imperialism in the form of military intervention, we as Marxists see military and geopolitical imperialism as founded on economic imperialism. That is: uneven capitalist development, export of capital, competition for raw materials, unequal exchange, and so on. In Ukraine, for instance, European imperialist influence is exerted at least as much by economic power – and other forms of what’s very misleadingly called ‘soft power’, like sexism and attacks on trans people, as Penny Duggan points out – as by arms shipments or through NATO.
This by no means implies that military power is unimportant to imperialism. I agree with Eric Toussaint that the US under Trump is trying to reverse its relative decline by banking on sectors where the US is particularly strong: the military-industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry. Whether Trump’s strategy will be effective is a different question. His tariffs are dislocating the very transnational car industry for instance, which weakens US capital as a whole. In any event, economic power is crucial.
In different periods of imperialism, as Ana Cristina explained, inter-imperialist clashes have been more or less intense. Before the two world wars, competition for colonial empires led twice to worldwide inter-imperialist wars. From the Cold War to the 2008 financial crisis, the rivalries were less intense: US imperialism dominated the capitalist world and subordinated other imperialisms to it.
Today, in the age of Trump and far-right, neofascist nationalism, inter-imperialist rivalries are again on the upswing, for example between the US and European imperialisms like Germany and France. Any contrast between bad Trumpite imperialism and less bad European imperialisms is implausible, however. The rise of neofascism is as manifest in Europe as in the US, both in specific countries (already in Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia and Slovenia, and who knows where tommorow) and in the EU institutions (particularly the deals that the traditional right is making with the far right in the European Parliament).
Chinese imperialism
This has been the context for capitalist restoration and emerging imperialisms in China and Russia, in different ways. The rise of Chinese and Russian imperialism isn’t the whole reason for growing inter-imperialist rivalries; it’s part of a broader picture. But as Ana Cristina says, we’re not yet facing global war. How sharp are today’s inter-imperialist clashes likely to become?
China is the clearer case of a rising economic power, widely seen as the main rival to the US. As Ilya Matveev’s article1 explains, the US today is still by far the world’s dominant military superpower, but China has become the world’s dominant manufacturing superpower. Initially its rise was not seen as a threat to the traditional imperialisms; on the contrary, it was a key player in shaping the neoliberal order, through a kind of symbiosis with Western multinationals. The two imperialisms are so closely intertwined today that their envisaged disconnection, which Ana Cristina mentioned, is a huge challenge.
The typical close coordination between imperialist states and multinational capitalist firms – between the Dutch state and a multinational like Shell, for example – is ensured in China, uniquely, by the Communist Party, with party committees as key corporate management bodies. In each Chinese international intervention – control of the Greek port of Piraeus, the Chinese base in Djibouti, Chinese projects in Africa or Latin America – Chinese geopolitical interests are linked to the economic expansion of Chinese capital.
In recent years, Chinese and Western imperialisms have increasingly clashed, for example over control of vital sea lanes. Parallels with the growing inter-imperialist tensions before the First World War have been widely noted.
Russia – a different case
Russia is economically far weaker than China, and much more dependent on military power to sustain its regional economic dominance. There is a parallel here with tsarist imperialism before the First World War – and note that Lenin didn’t let Russia’s poverty and economic backwardness stop him from characterizing it as imperialist.
Today, particularly since the establishment of Ukraine’s Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the EU after the Maidan rising, it has been irresistibly drawn into the EU’s economic region. And just as the incorporation of much of Poland into the Russian market was only made possible in Lenin’s time by tsarist political dominance, today only Russian military power can make it possible to transfer Ukraine to the Russian-dominated ‘Eurasian space’.
These are the realities of Chinese and Russian imperialism – realities that campists deny.
The Middle East
Looking at the Middle East and especially Palestine, we see that inter-imperialist conflicts have definite limits - limits that do not fit with a campist vision of geopolitics.
For Western imperialisms, oil has historically been and remains central to capital accumulation, with increasingly devastating consequences for the world’s climate and peoples. Beginning in the 1930s, it has been central to US imperialism in Arabia and the Gulf, with a global economy founded since the 1950s on petrochemicals and plastics, as Adam Hanieh has explained2. The contemporary crises of imperialism are overdetermined by ecological cataclysms.
With the rise of Arab resistance to colonialism, notably after the Egyptian revolution of 1952, policing the Arab region became a major challenge for imperialism. As Gilbert Achcar has explained, this made the US alliance with the settler-colonial state of Israel, especially since 1967, a great bargain for US capital. The almost $4 billion in annual US aid to Israel cost US imperialism far less than direct US intervention would.
Today, the era of Trump is also the era of Netanyahu, who in many ways pioneered today’s global far-right nationalism. Trump and Netanyahu have over the last two-plus years jointly waged the genocidal assault on Gaza.
Despite verbal condemnations by large majorities in the UN General Assembly and by the International Court of Justice, last November the Security Council turned Gaza over to Trump by establishing his so-called ‘Board of Peace’ – with European backing and Russia and China abstaining. We know now of five countries whose troops will enforce Trump’s rule: Indonesia, Morocco, Albania, Kazakhstan and Kosovo. This is the equivalent today of the ‘coalition of the willing’ that George W. Bush established decades ago for the invasion of Iraq.
The lesson is clear: the real limits to imperialist power are set by the struggles of the Palestinians and other oppressed people, not by relying on rival imperialisms. It isn’t that we as Marxists are incapable of understanding the emotional wellsprings of campism. Young people in particular are consumed today by moral revulsion at the genocide and devastation in Gaza. We share this moral revulsion. It’s understandable that the killing and destruction caused by Putin’s aggression in Ukraine seem lesser, secondary, by comparison. But our wholehearted commitment to fighting genocide in Palestine can only be strengthened by a strong, forceful opposition to genocide in Ukraine.
And our fight against neofascist imperialism can only be strengthened by opposition to growing ‘liberal’ authoritarianism. The neoliberal centre-right and centre-left are steadily trailing behind the xenophobia, racism and repression being promoted by the far right. Fighting far-right imperialism requires tactical flexibility and creativity, yet at the same time it requires fighting reaction in all its forms.
21 February 2026