A New Beginning

Katharina ‘Käthe’ Kern

(1900–1985) // Katharina was engaged in the struggle for women’s rights on several fronts, from being an active member of the anti-fascist resistance under the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the co-founder of the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany (DFD) in 1947 and a member of its board until her death. She led the women’s secretariat of the SPD and later Socialist Unity Party (SED) until 1949 as well as the DFD faction in parliament until 1984 and was the director of the health ministry’s Mother and Child Department between 1949 and 1970. Katharina led the German-Soviet Friendship Society from 1958 to 1962.

The period following World War II in Germany was marked by destruction, hunger, shortages, and the spread of disease. Women accounted for 60 per cent of the German population, and a considerable number of men were wounded, permanently unable to work, or still prisoners of war.1 Out of pure necessity and the will to survive, women joined forces to support each other, removing rubble all while caring for children, the elderly, the traumatised and wounded. In the wake of the war, anti-fascist women’s committees were formed, mostly headed by social democrats and communists. As non-partisan interest groups at the municipal level in the Soviet Occupation Zone (the part of Germany under the administration of the USSR), these committees took on important social welfare tasks such as setting up sewing and laundry rooms, providing meals through communal kitchens, and offering medical and psychological support to women.2

Discussions within the anti-fascist women’s committees, in consultation with the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), led to the formation of the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany (DFD) in 1947, which would become a driving force of anti-fascist democratic reconstruction spanning across both East and West Germany before being banned in the latter in 1957. At the DFD’s founding congress, delegate Käthe Kern from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) emphasised the importance of this mass organisation of women, which, she said, would allow ‘a large number of women with no political party affiliation to participate in the democratic development of Germany’.3 Mass political education and cultural work became decisive fields of action in an ideological struggle that set out to impart a new set of values, of which gender equality was a key component. The DFD also played a key role in enshrining equality in the German Democratic Republic’s Constitution (1949) and in drafting new laws that furthered women’s emancipation, such as the Family Code, which codified the new social relations that were developing under socialism.

In the countryside, land reform carried out between 1945 and 1948 ended the centuries-long servitude of female farmers and agricultural workers as they were given land that was expropriated by large landowners. In 1952, cooperative farming emerged, fundamentally changing farmers’ living conditions by establishing fixed working hours, a stable income, and paid holidays that were codified in the agreements made by each cooperative and reinforced by the DDR’s labour code.4 The cooperative movement sought to transform hierarchies in the countryside, with new arrangements – such as providing childcare – to supplant ‘outdated ideas and habits’, as the DFD put it.5 Peasant women, who historically had the least rights in the countryside and perhaps stood to gain the most, played a decisive role in this movement.

The new laws reflect the radical democratic agenda pursued by the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in the post-war period. Women self-confidently played an active and leading role in building a socialist women’s movement that pushed these reforms into law and sought to rebuild society. This new beginning in the DDR was also a political revival that sought to overcome undemocratic and bourgeois conditions and guarantee equal participation in the production process, paving the way for a new social role for women.

Women’s lives vastly improved during the DDR’s forty years of existence in areas such as self-determination, reproductive rights, and access to affordable, quality childcare and healthcare. Their participation in the production process played a crucial role in achieving these rights, with the socialist workplace anchoring these transformations.6 In this dossier, the Zetkin Forum for Social Research, International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR), and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research look at the history and unfinished work of women’s emancipation in the DDR. Despite the less than favourable conditions following the dissolution of the DDR in 1990, this process continues in the present and offers valuable lessons for contemporary struggles.

Legal Equality

New laws and regulations enacted in the DDR replaced bourgeois property and family laws. This took place on various fronts: economically through the expropriation of large corporations and landholdings; legally through the gradual abolition of bourgeois laws; and ideologically through the dismantling of bourgeois moral values. In stark contrast to West Germany, where the supremacy of men was protected by law until the late 1970s – which, for instance, allowed husbands to object to their wife taking up employment – women in the DDR were directly involved in drafting, implementing, and enforcing laws that abolished their subordination.

The Family Code, adopted in 1965, is a result of these efforts. Based on an understanding of the family as ‘the smallest cell of society’, the Family Code established the rights and duties of women, men, and children as equal members of society, both within and outside of marriage.7 As the preamble states:

With the development of socialism in the German Democratic Republic, family relationships of a new kind emerge. Creative work free from exploitation, the comradely relationships between people based on it, and the equal status of women in all areas of life and the educational opportunities for all citizens are important prerequisites for strengthening the family and making it long-lasting and happy. … It is the task of the Family Code to promote the development of family relationships in socialist society.8

The Family Code provided advances in a range of measures, such as making it easier to get a divorce and equitably sharing property at the time of the divorce.9 It also furthered women’s emancipation by mandating that ‘both spouses bear their share in raising and caring for children and running the household’ and that ‘[t]he relationships between spouses must be designed in such a way that women can combine their professional and social activities with motherhood’.10 Although marriage continued to be a life-long commitment, it could also be ended at any time without consequences since ‘the factors that in bourgeois society exert an external compulsion to maintain an unhealthy marriage [had] largely been overcome’.11 This was also reflected in the divorce and marriage rates: while the number of marriages per capita in the DDR was similar to or at times even higher than in Christian-conservative West Germany, the DDR had one of the highest divorce rates in the world, 60 per cent of which were filed by women.12

Furthermore, social reproductive labour that had been largely unremunerated and often invisible became socially managed through free crèches, kindergartens, maternity advice centres, and polyclinics.13 The Act on the Protection of Mothers and Children and the Rights of Women (1950), for instance, required mass organisations and production enterprises to set up day care centres, laundromats, and sewing rooms.14

Hilde Benjamin

(1902–1989) // Hilde, known as ‘Red Hilde’, defended communists persecuted by the Nazis as a lawyer for Red Aid. She was widowed by the Nazi regime when her partner, Georg Benjamin, was killed in a concentration camp in 1942, though this did not prevent her from continuing her work against fascism. Despite losing her right to practice law, she found herself back in the profession after the war and became the vice president of the Supreme Court from 1949 to 1953 as well as the world’s first female minister of justice from 1953 to 1967, promoting administrative and legal reforms such as the Family Code. She also joined the national executive committee of the German Democratic Women’s Federation (DFD) in 1948.

As Hilde Benjamin, the DDR’s minister of justice from 1953 to 1967, explained, it was essential that laws not only provide a framework to guarantee and enforce social rights, but that they also ‘achieve further progress in the development of socialist consciousness’.15 The DDR’s policies did this in a number of ways, such as by socialising childcare and elder care and thereby allowing citizens of the DDR more time to take an active role in building a socialist society.

As a result of this social shift, women increasingly demanded better opportunities for family planning. With the passing of the Act on the Termination of Pregnancy in 1972, for the first time German women could decide whether or not they wanted to have an abortion within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. No motive was required, no assessment prescribed.
The West German press warned that such measures would lead to the ‘destruction of the family’. This did not take place. Instead, the DDR’s policy measures increased the freedom of women, such as by providing grants to assist in the early period of childcare and fully paid maternity leave for 6 months. This was in addition to parental leave for both mothers and fathers for up to 12 months with a payment
of up to 90 per cent of net average earnings. Both forms of leave guaranteed job retention.16

Lykke Aresin

(1921–2011) // A former neurologist and psychiatrist, Lykke became one of the world’s most prominent sexologists and specialists in women’s and reproductive rights, playing a critical role in the DDR’s policies on accessible contraceptive methods and free abortion. She also helped shape the struggle to combat discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and ensure transgender people’s rights under the public health system. She was deeply commitment to popular education and published several books for young readers that provided information about marriage, sexuality, and family planning and contributed to over 200 scientific publications and spoke at numerous conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Furthermore, she was an influential member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the World Health Organisation.

Although the dismantling of bourgeois law and the introduction of the Family Code and other such legislation were decisive steps towards equality, it was recognised that this alone would not achieve social equality. As the SED put it:

The important thing now is the gradual solution of all those problems which determine to what extent women can make use of their equal rights. Without underestimating the increasing cooperation of men in the household, it remains a fact that the main burden is borne by women. … [We must] improve childcare so that women can work.17

These problems were particularly evident in the lack of women in leadership positions and in the burden of domestic and care work.

Work

The increasing numbers of women who entered the workforce following World War II faced various challenges, including a lack of adequate childcare facilities, long commutes, underdeveloped transport infrastructure, unsuitable working hours for mothers, and lingering discrimination regarding their ability to carry out management roles. All of these factors restricted women’s participation in society. The integration of women into the workforce was thus a priority in the DDR, since, as the ethicist Helga Hörz argued, a woman’s position in society could only be ‘changed through her role in the labour process’.18 Hörz argued that incorporating women into the workforce was not only a matter of providing additional income to the household or giving women their own spending money. Rather, the new social character of labour, built through public ownership of the means of production, enabled women to be more engaged in public life. For women, this meant not only more participation in economic life, but also active involvement in social processes and full participation in the political system.

Helga E. Hörz

(1935–) // Helga is a Marxist philosopher and women’s rights activist. She joined the SED in 1952 and became an ethics professor at Humboldt University in East Berlin, where she studied women’s emancipation in the DDR from a philosophical and psychological point of view and taught about the intersections between economics and women’s rights. Her work on and commitment to women’s equality led her to become deputy councillor of the Women’s International Democratic Federation from 1969 to 1990 and to hold important positions as a representative of the DDR at the United Nations, where she played a key role in the drafting and adoption of the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Yet, even as women became integrated into the workforce on an unprecedented scale, it soon became evident that women were predominantly engaged in less complex tasks and were not afforded the chance to pursue additional education and professional development. In its Women’s Communiqué, published in December 1961, the politburo of the SED’s central committee condemned the ‘fact that a totally insufficient percentage of women and girls exercise middle and managerial functions’, blaming, in part, ‘the underestimation of the role of women in socialist society that still exists among many – especially men, including leading party, state, economic, and trade union functionaries’.19 The central committee called upon ‘the entire public’ to overcome these problems but considered trade unions, ‘as a mass organisation of workers’, to bear the primary responsibility of ‘ensuring the development of a correct social opinion on the role of women in socialism’.20

Grete Groh-Kummerlöw

(1909–1980) // Born into a working-class family, Grete was a textile workers’ union activist and member of the Communist Party (KPD). She won a seat for her party in the regional parliament of Saxony in 1930 at age 21, making her the youngest member of parliament in Germany at the time. During World War II, Grete fought in the resistance and was imprisoned. After the war, she immersed herself in the reconstruction and renewal of the labour movement. From 1950 to 1971, she represented the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) in the DDR’s parliament. As head of the FDGB’s social policy department, she played an important role in the reorganisation of the social security system, helping to implement a unified system run by the trade unions and workers of the DDR themselves.21

In the newly founded Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), the revolutionary trade
unionist Grete Groh-Kummerlöw warned, as early as 1946, that ‘[only] with women will we succeed in achieving unity and thus the victory of the working class’.22 Until the 1950s, however, trade unions did not sufficiently address the way enterprises represented women’s interests. In 1952, the SED began to form women’s committees in the workplace, which were to act independently alongside trade unions and exert influence on them. Once these committees emerged, the DFD shifted back to its original focus working in residential areas. The women’s committees advocated for housing, childcare, and an age-appropriate division of labour and against wage differentials.23

The communiqué, frequently referenced in subsequent discussions, vehemently criticised the complacency of the leadership of the party and mass organisations. The party leadership acknowledged its shortcomings and proposed solutions such as introducing women’s ‘advancement plans’. These plans, annually drawn up by a women’s committee in consultation with trade union representatives, created requirements that the enterprise’s management was obliged to follow concerning issues such as education for women, occupational health and safety measures, and the expansion of childcare and leave for pregnant, nursing, and young mothers.24 Such plans were an integral part of the collective bargaining agreement between the union and management, and their implementation and enforcement was overseen by the women’s committees.25

These plans became a crucial tool for women’s committees to advocate for social and professional measures in enterprises and thus enhanced career opportunities for women.26 The incorporation of women’s committees into the trade union structures of the FDGB in 1965 further increased working women’s rights. Despite the challenges it struggled with in its early years, the FDGB emerged as the central organ of women’s representation, surpassing the DFD. By 1987, out of 9.5 million trade union members, 5 million were women, 1.4 million of whom were actively involved in trade union functions, such as the women’s committees.27

By the late 1980s women had reached the same levels of formal qualification as men, with the proportion of women in higher education and technical colleges reaching 55 per cent in 1988.28 Gender parity was also reflected in crucial areas of democratic-political life, influencing the decisions and policies being made about social life. Women accounted for more than 50 per cent of all judges; 35 per cent of all mayors; and 40 per cent of parliament.29 Despite not reaching full gender parity in management positions, by 1986 there were more women in management in the DDR (34 per cent) than there are in Germany today (28.9 per cent in 2022).30 In 1989 (the year before the dissolution of the DDR), 92.4 per cent of all working-age women were employed and most of them were unionised.31

Women enjoyed near wage parity compared to other industrialised societies then and even today, though the DDR did not succeed in eradicating wage differences completely. For production workers, for instance, there was a noticeable difference in wage levels between men and women, which averaged 16 per cent between 1984 and 1988 (compared to 30 per cent in West Germany during the same period).32 There are a number of reasons for this disparity. For one, special monetary premiums were paid to workers engaged in shift or heavy labour, which was most often carried out by men.33 If such bonuses and supplements are deducted from wages, the net gender pay gap falls from 16 to 12 per cent on average in the same period.34 Another factor contributing to this disparity was that, in the DDR, industrial workers (a sector predominantly made up of men) were better remunerated than service workers (predominantly women). Finally, alongside these sector-related wage differentials, the historic lack of workplace training for women, the insufficient number of women in management positions, and the increase in part-time work in the last decade of the DDR’s existence all contributed to women’s lower earnings.

These challenges notwithstanding, it is worth noting that during the DDR’s forty-year existence, the wage level doubled while overall wage differences across social strata remained small. For instance, university graduates earned only 15 per cent more than production workers, in stark contrast to West Germany, where that difference amounted to up to 70 per cent.35 Other notable examples include the fact that only about 5 per cent of wages went towards rent (compared to around 23 per cent in Germany today), childcare and school were free, and food prices were fixed at low levels.

The DDR’s achievements in pay equity continue to impact former East Germany. For instance, a report published by the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in 2018 shows that the gender pay gap between men and women is far smaller in the former DDR (6.3 per cent) than in the West (20.6 per cent), and the proportion of women in leadership positions also remains higher than in the West.36 Nonetheless, the lasting impact of near wage parity in the former DDR is stunted by the fact that the average income in the region remains much lower than in West Germany, even 34 years after so-called reunification.

Housewives’ Brigades

Amidst the atmosphere of post-war reconstruction in the early 1950s, self-organised collectives of unemployed women, often stay-at-home mothers affiliated with the DFD, emerged to take up paid short-term work where labour was urgently needed, following the example of peasant women who organised to help bring in the harvest. DFD activists soon organised brigades in other sectors, too, encouraging more and more women to enter the workforce and to challenge the isolated role of women within the private and individual domestic sphere by promoting collective organisation and integration into the production process.

By 1960, there were 4,031 housewives’ brigades made up of around 30,000 women.37 Most of the brigades went to agricultural production cooperatives in rural areas, though others targeted the industrial, service, and healthcare sectors. Seeing their efficacy, enterprises began to request the brigades. However, after some of them began simply calling in the brigades for short terms to fulfil their quotas, the DFD and the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) made it obligatory for enterprises to set up contracts as a precondition for brigades to be deployed, thereby strengthening the labour rights of the brigade participants and paving the way for their long-term employment.

As the DFD noted, ­there remained a widespread belief that while post-war shortages initially prompted women to seek employment, socialism had progressed sufficiently for women to abandon work and still enjoy a comfortable standard of living.38 In a 1958 article on her experiences agitating amongst housewives, DFD deputy Käte Lüders discussed how men – including party members ­– did not want to give up the ‘domestic comfort’ of their wives willingly caring for them, further reinforcing this dynamic. The housewives’ brigades thus fulfilled two important purposes: first, they revitalised the political debate on women’s isolation in the domestic sphere, and second, they strengthened their participation in the production process and, therefore, their economic independence from men.39

However, with the increasing employment of women, which had already reached 70 percent in 1965, and in the context of the economic upswing after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, the lack of women’s access to professional development and skills training emerged as a far more pressing issue and the brigades ebbed away.40 Skilled workers were urgently needed, and women demanded the vocational training opportunities promised to them.

Domestic Work

Though women’s lives improved by leaps and bounds as a result of the socialist project in the DDR, the double burden of domestic work alongside paid jobs proved to be difficult to eradicate. Measures such as the Family Code sought to create a more equal division of labour in the home, but they were often not consistently implemented. The widespread entry of women into the workforce created an opening to confront this double burden: as a result of their involvement in the production process, women were able to voice their needs and demands as workers while the workplace itself became a social place where reproductive labour could be socialised.

The state set out to socialise domestic work and create the conditions for women to participate more fully in society, rather than being tethered to their home. This is particularly evident with childcare: in West Germany, there was virtually no childcare for women, which often made it impossible for them to take up work or engage meaningfully in life outside of the household (only 1.6 per cent of three-year-old children attended day care in 1986). The DDR, meanwhile, established a comprehensive state care structure that provided free day care, which was attended by 81.1 per cent of children up to age three as of 1986, as well as free kindergartens and after-school care and affordable or enterprise-funded holidays for children and families. As a result, whereas West Germany had a kindergarten placement rate of 67.6 per cent, in the DDR it was 93.4 per cent.41

Though similar efforts were made to further equality in the realm of housework, they were not met with the same level of success. According to the first detailed surveys on hours spent on domestic work, carried out by the Institut für Bedarfsforschung (Institute for Demand Research) in the early 1960s, working women spent an average of 4.6 hours a day on chores at the time – excluding caring for children, the sick, and the elderly. This amounted to 15 hours, or 24 per cent, more time on housework per week than working men.42

In the midst of the economic upswing in the 1960s, optimism prevailed that the time spent on housework could be reduced with the help of new technologies and that work that had been carried out by women individually within the isolation of their home could be socialised. The different solutions proposed to overcome the double burden of housework brought out a debate: one side argued that the best solution to this problem was to socialise housework, while the other argued that improving conditions for domestic work – such as developing and increasing access to new technologies – made an individualised approach to housework the best option.

Herta Kuhrig

(1930–2020) // Herta was a member of the government advisory body Women in Socialist Society and was the scientific secretary of the Humboldt University Scientific Council for Sociological Research. From 1964 until 1990 she was responsible for managing content and scientific research published in the bulletin INFORMATIONEN, which sought to provide a multifaceted view on the position of women in society based on contributions from diverse research fields such as sociology, history, literature, economics, and pedagogy. Upon the request of Minister of Justice Hilde Benjamin, Herta, along with other members of Women in Socialist Society and the lawyers Anita Grandke and Wolfgang Weise, drafted what would become the 1965 DDR Family Code.

Ultimately, policy makers opted for a strategy to automate housework. From the 1970s onwards, the media began to emphasise the participation of the whole family in household chores. While housework became less strenuous due to increased access to improved technologies (such as new heating and washing systems), on the whole, this strategy was not effective: although housework fell from 38 hours per week in 1965 to 31 hours per week at the end of the 1970s, it remained largely unchanged for the duration of the DDR’s existence.43

One effort to address this issue was the ‘housework day’, introduced in 1952 for women who worked full time and were either married or, if single, were mothers who lived at home with their mothers and children under age 16. Women vehemently demanded that the housework day be extended to other sections of the population through petitions, trade union meetings, and the DFD. As a result of these efforts, in 1965 housework days were extended to single mothers with children under the age of 18, irrespective of whether or not they lived with their mothers. Paragraph 185 of the DDR’s Labour Code of 1977 further extended those eligible for housework days to unmarried and childless women aged 40 and over, as well as to single fathers and men whose wives were in need of care.44

The initial decision to reserve the housework day for women alone posed a dilemma. On the one hand, there was a real need to prevent housework from falling solely on women’s shoulders. On the other hand, statistics and the reality of working women’s lives showed only too clearly that women continued to do the majority of this work. Granting housework days to broader sectors of the population was an attempt to counteract this deeply entrenched division of labour. This was the first time that a part of women’s reproductive labour, however small, was paid for by law.

Aftermath

In the late 1980s, an ‘independent’ women’s movement emerged in opposition to the DDR’s women’s mass organisation, reprimanding its perceived stagnation. This was largely a result of the fact that the organised women’s movement in the DDR struggled to engage younger generations and build on the revolutionary fervour of the DDR’s early years. Yet, when so-called reunification took its course, it was the independent movement that was easily and willingly instrumentalised in dialling back the DDR’s achievements: all laws were scrapped, and it became clear that there would be no continuity of the DDR’s socialist policies in capitalist society.

In addition to the step backwards in legal protections for women and the overall well-being of East Germans, the unprecedented privatisation and deindustrialisation of the East German economy presented unique challenges. When the DDR’s social infrastructure was dismantled, women were the first to face unemployment as well as the contempt of their new West German superiors and were ultimately pushed back into a traditional family model in which they depended on men as the sole breadwinners.

The experience in the DDR shows that women made great strides in breaking the centuries-old economic dependence on men. This proved to be a complicated and lengthy process that faced its greatest hurdles in the realm of housework. Though policies in the DDR, especially in the early years, were important steps forward in improving women’s lives, it was impossible to simply impose them ‘from above’. It was the women’s mass initiatives, such as housewives’ brigades, that brought about the necessary change in mentality to win over society at large in favour of women’s emancipation.

This process remained unfinished in the DDR. At the time the DDR dissolved in 1990, housework was largely left to women and wage disparity persisted, as did traditional family roles (albeit less and less pronounced in the younger generations). Nonetheless, the examples discussed in this dossier bear witness to the DDR’s commitment and ability to creatively seek out the instruments needed to advance women’s emancipation under a given set of circumstances. The contradictions that emerged during this process reflect the need to constantly reassess the tactics adopted in this struggle and renew our unwavering commitment to it.

Notes

1 Schröter and Rohmann, ‘Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands’, 503.

2 Enkelmann and Külow, Emanzipiert und Stark, 9; Kaminsky, Frauen in der DDR, 31.

3 Bundesvorstand des DFD, ed., Geschichte des Demokratischen Frauenbundes Deutschlands, 9.

4 Hörz, Der lange Weg zur Gleichberechtigung, 66.

5 Bundesvorstand des DFD, ed., Geschichte des Demokratischen Frauenbundes Deutschlands, 129.

6 For more on the DDR healthcare system, see: Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘Socialism Is the Best Prophylaxis’: The German Democratic Republic’s Health Care System, Studies on the DDR no. 2, 14 February 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-2-ddr-health-care-2/.

7 Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Familiengesetzbuch preamble.

8 Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Familiengesetzbuch preamble.

9 Regarding illegitimate children, see Grandke, Die Entwicklung des Familienrechts in der DDR, 211; Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Familiengesetzbuch, sections 13 and 39.

10 Familiengesetzbuch, sections 10 (1) and 10 (2).

11 Familiengesetzbuch preamble; Kuhrig, Die Gleichberechtigung der Frauen, 29.

12 See the Statistical Yearbook for the Federal Republic of Germany, 1990, 70 and the Statistical Yearbook of the German Democratic Republic, 1990, 404;

Schröter, Ehe und Scheidung in der DDR, 6; Enkelmann and Külow, Emanzipiert und Stark, 113.

13 See: Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘Socialism Is the Best Prophylaxis’.

14 Hörz, Der lange Weg zur Gleichberechtigung, 89.

15 Benjamin, ‘Wer bestimmt in der Familie?’.

16 Hörz, Der lange Weg zur Gleichberechtigung, 103; Kaminsky, Frauen in der DDR, 173.

17 Kranz, ‘Women’s Role in the German Democratic Republic’, 73,

18 Hörz, Die Frau als Persönlichkeit, 23.

19 Ulbricht, ‘Die Frauen’, 1.

20 Ulbricht, ‘Die Frauen’, 2.

21 Kummerlöw, Mit den Aufgaben wächst der Mensch.

22 SED Kreisleitung Plauen, Plauener Arbeiter ausgebeutet und verfolgt, 15.

23 Clemens, ‘Die Kehrseite der Clara-Zetkin-Medaille’, 22–23.

24 VFDG, Der FDGB, 61.

25 VFDG, Der FDGB, 62.

26 Hörz, Der lange Weg zur Gleichberechtigung, 73.

27 Enkelmann and Külow, eds., ‘Mitgliederentwicklung und -struktur’, in FDGB-Lexikon; VFDG, Der FDGB, 61.

28 Schröter and Rohmann, ‘Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands’, 519; Staatliche Zentralverwaltung, 40 Jahre DDR, 97.

29 Aus erster Hand, Gleiche Rechte, 59.

30 The following indicates the percentage of women in all managerial functions: In 1986, more than 34 per cent (Aus erster Hand, Gleiche Rechte, 53); in 1987, 33 per cent (VFDG, Der FDGB, 19); in 1988, 32 per cent (Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik, 40 Jahre DDR, 97); and in 1988/89, 31.5 per cent (Bundesministerium für Familie, 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheit, 23). Dienel, Frauen in Führungspositionen, 154; Statistisches Bundesamt, ‘Frauen in Führungspositionen’.

31 Kaminsky, Frauen in der DDR, 97.

32 Stephan and Wiedemann, ‘Lohnstruktur und Lohndifferenzierung in der DDR’, 556, 550.

33 Stephan and Wiedemann, ‘Lohnstruktur und Lohndifferenzierung in der DDR’, 550.

34 Bundesministerium für Familie, 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheit, 26–27.

35 Stephan and Wiedemann, ‘Lohnstruktur und Lohndifferenzierung in der DDR’, 550.

36 See Wagner, ‘Im Osten’; Bundesministerium für Familie, 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheit, 29.

37 Bundesvorstand des DFD, ed., Geschichte des Demokratischen Frauenbundes Deutschlands, 154.

38 Bundesvorstand des DFD, ed., Geschichte des Demokratischen Frauenbundes Deutschlands, 154.

39 Arendt, ‘Zur Entwicklung der Bewegung der Hausfrauenbrigaden’, 66.

40 Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik, Statistische Jahrbücher (1966), 62 and 518.

41 Bundesministerium für Familie, 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheit, 54–55.

42 Bischoff, Charakter, Umfang und Struktur der Hausarbeit, 87, 35.

43 Kaminsky, Frauen in der DDR, 117.

44 Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Arbeitsgesetzbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.

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Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend [Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth]. 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheit – Gleichstellung und Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in Ostdeutschland und Westdeutschland [Twenty-Five Years of German Unity: Equality and Gender Equality in East and West Germany]. Berlin, 2015. https://www.bmfsfj.de/resource/blob/93168/8018cef974d4ecaa075ab3f46051a479/25-jahre-deutsche-einheit-gleichstellung-und-geschlechtergerechtigkeit-in-ostdeutschland-und-westdeutschland-data.pdf.

Bundesvorstand des Demokratischen Frauenbundes Deutschlands, ed [Federal Executive Committee of the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany]. Geschichte des Demokratischen Frauenbundes Deutschlands [History of the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany]. Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1989.

Clemens, Petra. ‘Die Kehrseite der Clara-Zetkin-Medaille – Die Betriebsfrauenausschüsse der 50er Jahre in lebensgeschichtlicher Sicht’ [The Flip Side of the Clara Zetkin Medal: The Enterprise Women’s Committees of the 1950s from a Life History Perspective]. Feministische Studien 8, no. 1, (1990): 20–34.

Deutsche Demokratische Republik [German Democratic Republic]. Gesetz über den Mutter- und Kinderschutz und die Rechte der Frau [Act on the Protection of Mothers and Children and the Rights of Women]. 27 September 1950. https://www.verfassungen.de/ddr/mutterkindgesetz50.htm.

Deutsche Demokratische Republik [German Democratic Republic]. Familiengesetzbuch [Family Code]. 20 December 1965. https://www.verfassungen.de/ddr/familiengesetzbuch65.htm.

Deutsche Demokratische Republik [German Democratic Republic]. Arbeitsgesetzbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [Labour Code of the German Democratic Republic]. 31 August 1990. https://www.verfassungen.de/ddr/arbeitsgesetzbuch77.htm.

Dienel, Christiane. Frauen in Führungspositionen in Europa [Women in Management Positions in Europe]. München: DJI Verlag Deutsches Jugendinstitut, 1996. https://www.dji.de/fileadmin/user_upload/bibs/Vergriffene_Buecher_Open_Access/Dienel_Frauen_in_Fuehrungspositionen_in_Europa.pdf.

Dowa, Dieter, Karlheinz Kuba, and Manfred Wilke. FDGB-Lexikon – Funktion, Struktur, Kader und Entwicklung einer Massenorganisation der SED (1945–1990) [FDGB-Lexikon: Function, Structure, Cadres, and Development of a Mass Organisation of the SED (1945–1990)]. Berlin, 2009. http://library.fes.de/FDGB-Lexikon/rahmen/lexikon_frame.html.

Enkelmann, Dagmar and Dirk Külow, eds. Emanzipiert und Stark – Frauen aus der DDR [Emancipated and Strong Women from the DDR]. Berlin: Neues Leben, 2019.

Grandke, Anita. Die Entwicklung des Familienrechts in der DDR [The Development of Family Law in the DDR]. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2008. https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/10164/20eFhgZyFh7H2.pdf.

Groh-Kummerlöw, Grete. Mit den Aufgaben wächst der Mensch und auch du wirst wachsen [People Grow With Their Tasks and You Will Grow Too]. Forthcoming 2024.

Hörz, Helga E. Die Frau als Persönlichkeit – Philosophische Probleme einer Geschlechterpsychologie [The Woman as a Personality: Philosophical Problems of Gender Psychology]. Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1968 (with an updated preface, Leipzig: Max-Stirner-Archiv, 2015). http://www.max-stirner-archiv-leipzig.de/dokumente/hoerz-Frau_als_Persoenlichkeit.pdf.

Hörz, Helga E. Der lange Weg zur Gleichberechtigung – Die DDR und ihre Frauen [The Long Road to Equality: The DDR and Its Women]. Berlin: trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010.

Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. ‘Socialism Is the Best Prophylaxis’: The German Democratic Republic’s Health Care System. Studies on the DDR no. 2, 14 February 2023. https://thetricontinental.org/studies-2-ddr-health-care-2/.

Kaminsky, Anna. Frauen in der DDR [Women in the DDR]. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2016.

Kranz, Susan. ‘Women’s Role in the German Democratic Republic and the State’s Policy Toward Women’. Journal of International Women’s Studies 7, no. 1 (November 2005): 69–83. https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1423&context=jiws.

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SED Kreisleitung Plauen, ed. Plauener Arbeiter ausgebeutet und verfolgt – Persönlichkeiten der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung, Kämpfer gegen Faschismus und für ein Leben in Frieden und Wohlstand [Plauen Workers Exploited and Persecuted: Personalities of the Revolutionary Labour Movement, Fighters Against Fascism and for a Life in Peace and Prosperity]. Plauen: Kreiskommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte der örtlichen Arbeiterbewegung. Plauen, 1985.

Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik [State Central Administration for Statistics]. Statistische Jahrbücher der Deutsche Demokratische Republik [Statistical Yearbooks of the German Democratic Republic]. Berlin: Staatsverlag der DDR, 1955–1990. https://www.statistischebibliothek.de/mir/receive/DESerie_mods_00007446.

Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik [State Central Administration for Statistics]. 40 Jahre DDR: Zahlen und Fakten [Forty Years of the DDR: Facts and Figures]. Berlin: Verlag für Agitations- und Anschauungsmittel, 1989.

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The collages in this dossier were created by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research based on reference photographs by Satarupa Chakraborty during the 2023 Joy of Learning Festival in Siddapura. These photographs are intertwined with images cut out from the Joy of Learning Festival Handbook (Kalika Habba Kaipidi), published by the Samagra Shikshana Karnataka (Department of Primary and Secondary Education, Government of Karnataka) in 2022.

Students from various schools in Siddapura and nearby villages participate in a rally to inaugurate the 2023 Joy of Learning Festival in Siddapura.

The People’s Science Movement in India has few parallels in the world in concept, scale, and scope. The movement started out popularising science in a young independent nation in which the majority (87.8%) of the population was illiterate, let alone conversant in modern scientific concepts.1 It went on to craft a complex role for itself, embracing a rigorous understanding of science that encompasses both natural and social phenomena as well as the interactions between them. Since its founding in the 1960s, the People’s Science Movement has worked to democratise the generation of knowledge and its dissemination and integration in Indian society, centring the sociocultural consciousness of the Indian people. The movement sees scientific thinking and the application of scientific principles as necessary in building a society that questions and understands inequalities and eventually chooses the path to break oppressive hierarchies. A consciousness that is imprisoned in religious dogma, that passively accepts tradition and superstition, and that is unable to enquire into and analyse nature and society does not have the scientific tools necessary to build an equal social world.

This dossier, How the People’s Science Movement Is Bringing Joy and Equality to Education in Karnataka, India, focuses on the pedagogy and philosophy of the movement’s work with school children in Karnataka, a state in southern India with a population of 69 million people. It is built upon interviews with teachers and activists of the People’s Science Movement as well as Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s participation in the Joy of Learning Festivals (also known as Kalika Habba) that took place in Karnataka from December 2022 to February 2023.

The Origins of the People’s Science Movement

In its early years, the primary focus of the People’s Science Movement was to popularise science, explaining complex issues in accessible, everyday language and countering superstitious beliefs that pointed to witchcraft as the cause for disease, death, and disaster.2 In this period, the movement was largely made up of a number of scattered organisations, many of them concentrated in the southern state of Kerala. The most significant of them, the Kerala Sasthra Sahitya Parishad (Science Writers Forum of Kerala or KSSP), was formally inaugurated in 1967. Several of the key people involved in this movement studied in the Soviet Union and brought the advances made by the Soviets back to India. M. P. Parameswaran, for instance, studied nuclear engineering at the Moscow Power Institute (1965) and returned to Bombay to set up the Federation of Indian Languages Science Association in 1966, eager to popularise the sciences in his country.

The People’s Science Movement has its roots in India’s national movement for independence, which had a clearly anti-imperialist view of the sciences. In contrast to the colonialist use of science as an instrument for exploitation and profit, the scientists of that era saw their field as a core element of the path for emancipation from drudgery and oppression and sought to combine, as Amit Sen Gupta wrote, the ‘liberating potential of science with the awareness that science can thrive only among people who are truly free’.3 The importance that the newly independent nation gave to the sciences is reflected in the Indian Constitution (Article 51A), which states that ‘It shall be the duty of every citizen of India… to develop the scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and reform’.4

When independent India chose to embark on an autonomous path of development and break from the imperialist centre of gravity, it became imperative to generate scientists, engineers, doctors, and other such modern scientific professionals who could build a strong base for the development of science and technology. This endeavour had to confront the country’s largely backward rural society, which was beset by a multitude of regressive practices. The People’s Science Movement was able to make significant progress in this regard by nourishing intellectuals, from teachers and engineers to doctors, researchers, and scientists who were products of the vibrant culture of post-independence academia rooted in a strong interest in national development, many of them part of the students’ movement or influenced by the socio-political discourses of that milieu.

In the years following India’s independence, the state developed quality educational institutes to form a pool of forward-looking, critically thinking intellectuals who would not only lay the groundwork for the country’s autonomy in scientific research and technological and industrial development but would also be catalysts in breaking the deeply rooted fetters of feudalism. Nonetheless, the truth is that they were largely inaccessible to most of the population, limited in part by the insufficient public resources allotted to them. Even improvements in literacy were – and continue to be – slow, with millions of children growing up without stepping into schools or having stepped out of them too soon.5

In this context, the KSSP, supported by the left movement in Kerala, developed innovative science literacy programmes. One such programme was the formation of cultural troupes known as kalajathas in the 1970s through which activists brought science closer to people, particularly in villages, through art, music, dance, and theatre. This inspired similar campaigns in states across the country as well as the formation of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (Indian Association of Knowledge and Science or BGVS) in various states, including Karnataka. Drawing from the KSSP’s work in Kerala, the BGVS became the primary force driving the People’s Science Movement in Karnataka and a key actor promoting science in many states across the country.

In 1984, a gas leak and explosion at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, spurred the formation of many science literacy groups across India, several of which set out to explain the criminal aspect of the leak and explosion and bring justice to the survivors and victims. Many of these groups began to work together, culminating in the formation of the Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha (Indian People’s Science Association or BJVJ), which sought to increase popular literacy about science across the country. This process led to the formation of a national network of twenty-six science organisations in 1988 called the All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN).

As the AIPSN made its mark in the country, several government agencies approached it to assist with the National Literacy Mission, whose aim was to increase adult literacy in rural India. The AIPSN saw an immense opportunity in the mission to make its science literacy efforts nationwide. Soon, BGVS units in each state formed a network through the AIPSN to assist in the mission while maintaining their independence.

Through these all-India government programmes, the AIPSN was able to grow in northern Indian states, where progressive movements have been historically unable to develop a strong presence. During this adult literacy movement, the AIPSN was able to reach 60,000 villages in various states across India through the BGVS – an unprecedented exercise in which thousands of activists, teachers, and students travelled across the country to teach the people of rural India. Though the People’s Science Movement has a long history of building activities to promote science among children, the incorporation of tens of thousands of schoolteachers into the literacy movement through the BGVS allowed these practices reach classrooms on a much larger scale and propelled the democratisation of the science movement.


The owner of a coconut oil factory explains the production process to students during the 2023 Joy of Learning Festival in Siddapura.

The owner of a coconut oil factory explains the production process to students during the 2023 Joy of Learning Festival in Siddapura.

Neoliberalism and the Science Movement

The BGVS and AIPSN took off in the late 1980s to early 1990s, a period when India’s ruling class was imposing a neoliberal framework on the country. As AIPSN activists fanned across the country to promote literacy and combat superstition as a basis for scientific knowledge, forces of the far right travelled across India to build a campaign to demolish a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, plunging the country into social division. Since then, the AIPSN has worked to intervene in a society that has become increasingly ravaged by the rising legitimacy of religious fanaticism and conservatism as well as the wrecking of knowledge and education systems by neoliberal forces.

These neoliberal forces have changed the long-term direction of India’s education system.6 While the deeply rooted maladies of scarce funding for and access to education persist, this national vision for education has narrowed to do little more than supply a cheap workforce equipped with skills that benefit national and international capital at the expense of a well-rounded education that fosters critical thinking in society. Learning anything beyond the immediate technical skills that are required to feed into industries is not only seen as a serious waste of public resources, but also a threat to existing authoritarian social structures and state actions. In this exam and profit-oriented system, those without resources who cannot complete their education, and those who do get their degrees, are united by the fact that they are being ejected into a cheap, abundant, and docile labour pool. The reduction of government funding under neoliberalism has deprived millions of children of primary education while the families of millions more go into permanent debt to pay for private school. These private schools maximise profit by raising fees and paying teachers minimal salaries while failing to provide conditions that are conducive to education.7

The neoliberal approach to education depletes the constitutional mandate to science and encourages a blind adherence to irrational and often hateful and violent thoughts and actions, including a distorted but prideful view of ancient history and a disregard for the accurate history and systems of science. For instance, textbooks in the state of Gujarat claim that ancient India possessed genetic engineering skills because the children of Kunti (the mother of the Pandavas in the fourth-century epic Mahabharata) were born outside of her womb. Meanwhile, the high court in the city of Allahabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh ruled in 2021 that cows exhale oxygen, and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed in 2014 that ancient India excelled in plastic surgery as evidenced by the Hindu Lord Shiva, who replaced the head of his son Ganesh with an elephant’s head. This logic enables capital to get its docile labour while society gets a population that looks for solutions for its misery in all the wrong places.

It is important to note that, unlike NGOs that operate in the social sphere, the People’s Science Movement keeps its distance from neoliberal funding. For example, the BGVS in Karnataka strictly eschews any corporate and institutional funding, such as from the World Bank and even from United Nations agencies. While it works with the government, it does not take government funds and fully depends on people’s contributions.

The cover of this issue of the BGVS’s monthly magazine, Teacher, in 2021 depicts the neighbourhood schools that the organisation initiated at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Credit: Megha Ramachandra

The BGVS’s Neighbourhood Schools

It was in this context of the onslaught of neoliberalism, the increasing suffocation of public education, and the widening socioeconomic divide between private and public schools, beginning in the 1990s, that the BGVS expanded. Through the strength of activist teachers, the BGVS has made use of every opportunity to challenge, change, and transform the prevalent pedagogical methods in schools in various Indian states. The BGVS has been actively involved in developing and implementing a creative methodology of teaching to counter the elite bias in education that alienates children from learning, the unscientific teaching methods that kill the inquisitiveness of children, and the harmful influence of caste and religious dogma on young minds.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and neoliberal institutions insisted upon online schooling in a context in which most children had no access to the internet or to computers (while those who had access to online education did not learn anything meaningful), the BGVS in Karnataka initiated neighbourhood schools (vatara shalas). Government schoolteachers volunteered to run these schools in community halls and public spaces, such as the courtyards of temples, mosques, or churches, in accordance with pandemic-related health advisories. The initial sixty-odd neighbourhood schools, mostly in rural areas, were possibly the first organised response, at least in India, to address the education disruption after the initial lockdowns were lifted in April 2020, drawing support from parents as well as attention from the media. This compelled the government to announce its support for the neighbourhood schools. By the end of the year, there were more than 35,000 neighbourhood schools across Karnataka.

Through the successful experience of the neighbourhood schools, the BGVS was able to convince the government education department to mitigate, to some extent, the government’s fixation on market-driven ‘learning outcomes’. The pedagogy of the neighbourhood schools inspired large numbers of volunteer teachers to get involved who then helped convince the education department of their importance. This resulted not only in additional government support for the neighbourhood schools but also for the Joy of Learning Festivals as the worst of the pandemic came to an end by 2022.

The Joy of Learning Festivals

Joy is essential for learning. This outlook is encapsulated by the singing and dancing of students and teachers alike as part of the festivals’ methodology to teach science. There are two core components of the festivals’ methodology: first, the four learning corners into which the festivals’ activities are divided, and second, a ‘guest-host’ programme through which children from other villages are paired with students in the local village across barriers such as caste, language, and class, living and working together in pairs for the duration of the festivals. While the guest-host programme is not yet implemented in every festival (and is in fact only present in a minority of them at this stage), it is key to the festivals’ methodology and their goal of breaking down socioeconomic divisions within Indian society, with the intention to increase in scale in future years.

The 2022–2023 Joy of Learning Festivals extended the methodology developed by the neighbourhood schools and built upon the experience of the 620 festivals that the BGVS conducted in 2019, before the pandemic. In contrast to the neoliberal solutions for the knowledge gap that was exacerbated by the pandemic, these children’s festivals are discussed, designed, and implemented by the teachers themselves, with the participation of parents, elected members of village panchayats (local self-governments), school development monitoring committees, and others. More than 35,000 teachers and 1 million children participated in the 2022–2023 Joy of Learning Festivals, which were organised in more than 4,100 clusters (each cluster is a group of schools, grades 8–12, located within a given geographical area).

The children touch, feel, experiment, and explore the subject matter on their own, providing the teacher with an opportunity to explain the mechanics and scientific theories underlying the activity. This approach encourages children to experiment, observe, understand, analyse, and find meaningful patterns in nature and society while working in a collective team. Such activities go beyond a more traditional approach that is limited to lectures and textbooks, drawing in not only the children but also their parents in the small villages where these festivals are held.

Raveendra Kodi, an assistant teacher in the Udupi district in Karnataka, reflected on this form of teaching:

Learning should go beyond the classroom; it should be enjoyable and experimental, and it should develop children’s curiosity and their ability to think creatively and engage critically. We are focused on how to make learning interesting to children.

Uday Gaonkar, a science teacher, cultural activist, and BGVS leader, explained that while children often hold themselves back from asking questions in a typical classroom setting, they usually participate more if they are in a playful environment. This space for open interaction is important for their intellectual growth. The science movement’s pedagogy is, thus, distinct from the conventional classroom method of teaching that often creates a divide between ‘good students’ and ‘bad students’ based on an adherence to uncritical head-nodding over critical thinking and hands-on engagement. Uday Gaonkar reflects on the use of this ‘learning by doing’ approach:

All four corners are divided into two age groups. For example, when children between the ages of 10–13 study a tree, they study it differently than those who are older. The same activities can be performed in different ways by different age groups. The older children use somewhat complex trigonometry formulas, which the younger ones cannot do. But students of all age groups enjoy these activities, as do the teachers. The activities in all corners of learning are designed in such a way that no experts are required; any teacher can facilitate them. These activities help students learn different things without being told what they are learning.

Students participate in activities at the Kagadha Kattari (crafts, or ‘paper and scissors’) corner.

The Four Learning Corners

The festival is organised into four learning corners: ‘let’s find out about the village’ (Uru Tiliyona); science, or ‘let’s do it’ (Madu Adu); language development, or ‘singing and playing’ (Hadu Adu); and crafts, or ‘paper and scissors’ (Kagadha Kattari). All of these learning corners are meant to develop curiosity, observation and interactive skills, group learning, and scientific thinking among children.

1) Uru Tiliyona (‘let’s find out about the village’)

In the Uru Tiliyona corner, students take a short village tour during which they interview the people, learn about their culture and the biodiversity in their communities, study and practice how to conduct measurements, and, finally, prepare a village map. The participants undertake four main activities:

  1. Studying the ecology of a defined space.
  2. Studying a specific object or area, such as a tree, the land, or the surrounding environment.
  3. Making maps of a geographical location.
  4. Interviewing the villagers.

This methodology can be used to study other aspects of village life, such as how electricity is used. In one activity, children visited ten houses and collected basic information on electricity use: how many people live in a given house, how much electricity the household uses, and how much they pay each month for electricity. Based on this information, they calculated the per capita electricity consumption and then shared the results of their study with the villagers.

Another activity taught students about local biodiversity. During one of the festivals, an older woman carrying an armful of leaves paused and helped the teachers explain why a particular type of tree grows in the region and how villagers benefit from it. Students then went to a nearby coconut oil factory, where the owner stopped production for an hour to explain how the oil is made, how coconuts are used to make different products, and how the machines work. ‘These are not only children’s festivals’, BGVS organisers said; ‘These are village festivals’. This brief walk with the children made that abundantly clear, as the entire village interacted with the festival in different ways.

2 )Madu Adu (science, or ‘let’s do it’)

In this corner, children learn how certain experiments lead to definitive results through playful activities rooted in scientific concepts. This learning corner is extremely popular because of its use of stories, song, and dance. Activities include:

  • The Newton-Benham snow wheel, or the disappearing disc, experiment: When a disc displaying primary colours is spun, the colours appear to be white, which facilitates a discussion about visual perception.
  • Learning the science of friction by making and playing with toys whose materials demonstrate sliding resistance.
  • Replicating a conference call using paper cups and strings to learn how sound travels.

3) Hadu Adu(language development, or ‘singing and playing’)

This corner focuses on language development, critical thinking, and collective activities. The activities in this corner bring out myriad expressions through games, songs, performances, and conversations and help children open up to the world through words and other forms of expression. Ashok Thekkatte, a teacher in charge of this corner, explained:

Hadu Adu is a sector for language development, and, through singing, dancing, and some other activities, we encourage children to work in teams. There is one activity where we give the children two rhyming words and ask them to find another two rhyming words, and then they compose poems by themselves. This exercise helps them to gain a command over the language.

4) Kagadha Kattari(crafts, or ‘paper and scissors’)

This corner provides a space for children to experiment and be creative with various materials. The teachers tell stories that the children are inspired to illustrate. This activity is less structured and more open-ended than the other corners, leaving the space for children to lead the activity themselves and use the paper, scissors, and pens that are provided to create different shapes, dolls, and pictures. Through activities such as origami and paper crafts, children learn precision, neatness, and concentration.

A group of students present the map they made after touring the village as part of the Uru Tiliyona (‘let’s find out about the village’) corner activity.

Breaking Barriers

The Joy of Learning Festivals and neighbourhood schools alike have to confront the regressive aspects of rural society, particularly caste hierarchies. For instance, at one of the neighbourhood schools – which dominant and Dalit (oppressed caste) children alike attended during the pandemic – dominant caste families objected to Dalit children being allowed into a village temple where the school was located. The teachers decided to move the neighbourhood school to the Dalit part of the village, which upset some of the dominant caste families, who asked the teachers to move the school back to the temple. The teachers said that they would do this only if the dominant caste parents would agree that Dalit children could enter the temple without problems, to which the dominant caste families agreed. As this anecdote shows, teachers are often able to push back against regressive social structures, experimenting with creative ways to break social barriers and prejudices.

Another approach to breaking deeply rooted discrimination that developed in some of the Joy of Learning Festivals is called the guest-host method. For the duration of the festival, children from one district stay in the homes of children from another district who are often from different socioeconomic and caste backgrounds. For instance, during the Siddapura festival, 150 students from the local primary school and their families hosted 150 children from other parts of Karnataka in their homes, working together during the three days of the festival. Each pair of children lived together, ate together, and participated in the activities together, overcoming the social, cultural, economic, linguistic, and other differences between them.

Gaonkar helped us understand this process, which has been built over long periods of struggle:

It is difficult to quantify and say precisely at what scale our festivals are impactful in society. But we certainly have extraordinary experiences. At a festival in Sri Rangapatna, a student from Mangalore named Mohammad Hafil stayed with another student, Punit, for two nights. Hafil was from a well-to-do family, whereas Punit was from a lower income family. There were naturally resource problems in Punit’s home, including the lack of a toilet facility, and even the foods that each student was accustomed to eating were different. Nonetheless, they became fast friends. Before leaving Punit’s house, Hafil wanted to see Punit’s grandmother, who had already left for work in the morning. So, he asked the officials from the education department to take him to the grandmother’s workplace. After meeting the grandmother, the officials asked her if accepting Hafil in her home was difficult as he was from another religion. Punit’s grandmother simply rejected the question.

Though not every instance leads to a more generous understanding, many of them do. At the parents’ meetings, discussions come up where parents express their reticence to host children from other backgrounds. These discussions are important, particularly because the BGVS activists entertain these hesitations to encourage fellowship rather than to silence these public appearances of the obvious hierarchies in society.

Teachers as Organisers

Teachers are undoubtedly the heart of the Joy of Learning Festivals. They decide on the festival’s venue, coordinate the process with the local government, develop the learning corners, and draw the village into the festival. The teachers who experience the Joy of Learning Festivals then teach more teachers, building up the BGVS and further embedding the Joy of Learning Festivals in the villages and Indian society at large.

The BGVS teachers spend roughly fifteen to sixteen hours working on the first day of the festival in high heat and humidity. In the evening, when the students leave, the teachers meet to assess their work and discuss how to improve the festivals. Such discussions reveal the teachers’ work ethic and their constant efforts to create equality within the classroom and reach the most marginalised students. This act of dedication is the result of a vibrant process of training teachers and engaging parents and the village leadership, followed by a tremendous sense of fulfilment that comes with seeing the students enjoy their education.

Conclusion

The Joy of Learning Festivals showcase the philosophy of the People’s Science Movement. Science and knowledge, in this tradition, are not merely academic. Rather than focusing on individual advancement, this creative social endeavour develops students’ ability to think and reflect critically on the world. By involving the entire village community in the festival and by engaging students in the practice of science (including in the study of their agrarian production and their economic realities), the festivals integrate science in the community as part of a broad cultural process that directly responds to villagers’ and students’ surroundings and material conditions, allowing them to develop an understanding based on facts and observations made in their social context.

Manual work in India has long been devalued and kept separate from theory and knowledge, in large part due to the caste system and then exacerbated by the onslaught of neoliberalism beginning in 1991. This creates an environment in which practice, observation, and experimenting play little role in science education. Occupations that are associated with manual labour are derided, their workers deprived of quality education and kept away from theory. Meanwhile, most often, those who learn theory keep their distance from manual labour, creating a divide that is not conducive to scientific development or the development of a scientific temper.

The way that science and technology are practiced under neoliberalism goes hand in hand with the unscientific social attitudes and ideology propagated by India’s right wing. Teaching and practicing science in a way that is hands on, decentralised, experimental, observational, and enquiry-based is vital to cultivating a scientific temper amongst children. The People’s Science Movement’s conception of science not only takes into account natural phenomena, but also analyses the social relations that inform them.

Based on this understanding, the People’s Science Movement has built an easily replicable model for science education through its Joy of Learning Festivals. Though the neoliberal state is compelled – to a certain extent – to adopt these models, they cannot be implemented on a mass scale when the right is in power.

The uniqueness of the People’s Science Movement is that it operates in the spaces made available due to the failures of capitalism, differentiating it from other class-based organisations that, by definition, confront capital with full force. The People’s Science Movement’s approach allows the socialist project to contest the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism and the social toxicity of the right wing, building new spaces for scientific, rational, and humane consciousness.


Students display a butterfly they made at the Madu Adu (science, or ‘let’s do it’) corner.

Notes

1 Navinchandra R. Shah, ‘Literacy Rate in India’, International Journal of Research in All Subjects in Multi Languages 1, no. 7 (October 2013): 12–16, https://www.raijmr.com/ijrsml/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IJRSML_2013_vol01_issue_07_04.pdf.

2 T. M. Thomas Isaac and B. Ekbal, Science for Social Revolution. The Experience of Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat (Trichur: KSSP, 1988); M. P. Parameswaran, ed., Science for Social Revolution (Thrissur: KSSP, 2013).

3 Amit Sengupta, ‘Learning from the Past and Looking to the Future’, in Science for Social Revolution, 68. Also see, Prabir Purkayastha, Indranil, and Richa Chintan, ed., Political Journeys in Health. Essays by and for Amit Sengupta (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2021) and Prabir Purkayastha, Knowledge as Commons. Towards Inclusive Science and Technology (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2023).

4 The Constitution of India, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India, 26 January 1950, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b5e20.html, 25.

5 National Sample Survey of Estimation of Out-of-School Children in the Age of 6–13 in India, Social and Rural Research Institute, September 2014, https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/upload_document/National-Survey-Estimation-School-Children-Draft-Report.pdf.

6 For more on this neoliberal shift, see: Nitheesh Narayanan and Dipsita Dhar, eds., Education or Exclusion? The Plight of Indian Students (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2022) and Satarupa Chakraborty and Pindiga Ambedkar, eds., Students Won’t Be Quiet (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2022).

7 Public funds are now also being transferred to private schools. The chief minister of the Haryana Equal Education Relief, Assistance, and Grant scheme (CHEERAG), for instance, is encouraging parents to send their children to private schools, for which the government would bear a minimum cost. Simultaneously, the government has introduced fees in its own schools. For more, see Satyapal Siwach, ‘Haryana Teachers Protest Against CHEERAG’, Peoples Democracy, 7 August 2022, https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2022/0807_pd/haryana-teachers-protest-against-cheerag.

In January 2023, a reporter from Yomiuri Shimbun asked the press secretary of Japan’s foreign ministry, Hikariko Ono, for a definition of the term ‘Global South’. ‘The government of Japan does not have a precise definition of the term Global South’, she responded, but ‘it is my understanding that, in general, it often refers to emerging and developing countries’.1

The Japanese government struggled to find a more accurate assessment of the Global South, which it attempted to provide in the Diplomatic Bluebook 2023. In a long section on the idea of the Global South, Japanese officials acknowledge that the former Third World seemed to have developed a new mood. When the countries of the Global North, led by the United States, demanded that the countries of the Global South adopt the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) position on the war in Ukraine (namely to isolate Russia), they refused, accusing the West of ‘double standards’, since, as Japan’s foreign ministry notes, it justifies its own wars while decrying the wars of others. In light of this new mood in the Global South, Japan’s foreign ministry stated the need for a new attitude with ‘an inclusive approach that overcomes differences in values and interests’. As Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi wrote in the preface to the bluebook, ‘The world is now at a turning point in history’.2

This turning point is exemplified by the fact that few states in the Global South have been willing to participate in the isolation of Russia, refusing, for instance, to support Western resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly. Not all the states that have refused to join the West in its crusade against Russia are ‘anti-Western’ in a political sense; rather, many of them are driven by practical considerations, such as Russia’s discounted energy prices. Whether they are fed up with being pushed around by the West or they see economic opportunities in their relationship with Russia, increasingly, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have refused to capitulate to the pressure coming from Washington to break ties with Russia. It is this refusal and avoidance that drove France’s President Emmanuel Macron to admit that he was ‘very impressed by how much we are losing the trust of the Global South’.3

At a Munich Security Conference panel discussion on 18 February 2023, three leaders from Africa, Latin America, and Asia developed their argument about why they are unhappy with the war in Ukraine and the campaign pressuring them to break ties with Russia. As Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, ‘We are promoting a peaceful resolution of [the Ukraine] conflict so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities’. When asked why Namibia abstained from the United Nations vote on the war, Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, ‘Our focus is on resolving the problem… not on shifting blame’. The money used to buy weapons, she said, ‘would be better utilised to promote development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in other places, [and] in Europe itself, where many people are experiencing hardships’.4

A series of reports published by leading Western financial houses repeat Macron’s anxiety about the West’s declining credibility in the Global South. BlackRock notes that we are entering ‘a fragmented world with competing blocs’ while Credit Suisse points to the ‘deep and persistent fractures’ that have opened up in the world order.5 Credit Suisse’s assessment of these ‘fractures’ describes them accurately: ‘The global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganising to pursue its own interests’.6

In order to understand these major changes taking place in the world and the Global North’s bewilderment about the new mood in the Global South, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced dossier no. 72, The Churning of the Global Order, based on research carried out with Global South Insights and our collaboratively produced study, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage (January 2024).7


On the Terms Global South and Global North

The United Nation is made up of 49 countries in the Global North and 145 countries in the Global South. In this dossier, we use the terms ‘rings’ to describe the Global North and ‘groupings’ to describe the Global South, based on the depictions in the figures that follow. The rings of Global North are organised around the United States and its closest allies at the centre, with each ring that encircles this centre, or inner core, made up of states in the Global North that, for different reasons, are not in the inner core. These rings do not suggest any fragmentation of the Global North, which operates as a bloc. The Global South, on the other hand, is not a bloc, but an emerging project that is formed by different groupings, each of which has its own logic, as we will explain below.

The Global North

The war in Ukraine has shed light on and accelerated certain geopolitical shifts. On one side, a group of countries that follows the direction of the United States reacted to the entry of Russian forces into Ukraine as an integrated military, economic, and political bloc. These countries participate in certain platforms, of which NATO and the Group of Seven countries (G7) are the most significant. This reflects a dynamic that has been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 in which NATO and the G7 act together to drive an agenda largely defined by the United States, with Europe and Japan as secondary powers in the alliance.

Over the past few decades, the contradictions between the NATO and G7 countries were smoothed over and faded into the background. Despite secondary differences within these countries’ military, economic, and political positions and capacities (such as the disagreement between the US, UK, and France over who would export submarines to Australia in 2021), the Global North can be best understood as a bloc that is willing to unite around core issues.8

The Egyptian intellectual Samir Amin wrote, in 1980, of the ‘gradual consolidation of the central zone of the world capitalist system (Europe, North America, Australia)’. Soon thereafter, Amin began to use the term Triad to refer to this ‘central zone’ of imperialist powers that emerged after World War II.9 The ruling classes in Europe and Japan, he argued, had subordinated their own national self-interest to what the United States government had begun to call their ‘common interest’. Building on Amin’s conception, we organised the Triad into four rings, with modifications that reflect the current trends in international and regional relations.

These four rings are:

  1. The inner core of US-led imperialist Anglo-American settler states, which is made up of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (all part of the Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council, a network of intelligence agencies bound by undisclosed agreements), as well as Israel. These countries – rooted in forms of white supremacy – are the most advanced in the military, economic, and political arenas, with the United States maintaining dominance over the group.
  2. The next layer is made up of the nine core European imperialist powers: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. All of these countries are members of the ‘Fourteen Eyes’ spy network (formally known as SIGINT Seniors Europe), and all of them are NATO members (with Sweden’s membership all but guaranteed). These powerful European countries nonetheless subordinate their national interests to the inner core, operating almost as vassal states. Take the case of Germany, which – despite having one of the largest economies in the world and dominating the European Union – has nonetheless vitiated its ability to take care of its citizens since the war in Ukraine began in 2022 so as not to challenge US hegemony over European foreign policy. As the economist Michael Hudson described it, this is ‘the third time in a century that the United States has defeated Germany’.10
  3. The third ring is made up of Japan and the secondary European powers, such as Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Greece, and Finland. Although loyal to the United States, these countries do not have as much influence on the world order as the European imperialist powers based on their military, economic, and political capacities. Some of them, like Portugal, Finland, and Iceland, are part of NATO but are less integral to US military strategy. In the case of Portugal, for instance, despite being a former colonial power, its relatively smaller GDP is a factor in its exclusion from the ring of secondary European powers.
  4. The fourth, outer ring is made up of nineteen countries in the former Eastern Bloc. These countries, which were not colonial powers, were drawn into the imperialist bloc in the post-Cold War era mainly through economic subordination and with NATO’s eastern expansion. Some of these countries are governed by pro-NATO right-wing regimes (i.e., Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia), which play a frontline role in the West’s efforts to contain Russia. Others attempt to keep their distance from NATO (such as Serbia), though Western pressure often leaves them with little choice.

In 1945, the US began to consolidate its hegemony over the Global North countries through three major axes:

  1. The United States’ military domination of Europe through NATO and the spread of US military bases in the defeated axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan).
  2. Japan, Western Europe, and Anglo-American settler states’ economic integration with and dependence on the United States. This began with the Marshall Plan (1948) in Europe and the initial military occupation of Japan (1945–1952).
  3. The political subordination of the European, Japanese, and white settler state elites to the US elite structure by selecting which political parties would be permitted to be in power. This was accomplished through the creation of a pro-US global elite by, for instance, opening US universities to elite students from these parts of the world and forming a set of networks (such as the Bilderberg Meeting in 1954) that sought to create a common understanding of the world fashioned by the United States.11

In addition to the Global North’s subordination to the United States along these three axes – which took great effort and struggle to achieve – three other factors are key to understanding both the concept of the Global North and the logic of the four rings into which we have divided these countries.

1. A shared history of brutality. The term Global North is not a neutral geographical term. In fact, it is decidedly not geographical, given the inclusion of countries such as Australia and New Zealand in the inner core. Rather, the term Global North is synonymous for other terms such as the West and the advanced countries. These are all polite designations for the most adequate term: the imperialist bloc. It is worth noting that most of these countries – whether the US-led Anglo-American core (such as the United Kingdom and the United States); the core European powers (such as Germany and Italy); or secondary European powers (such as Portugal and Austria) – have shaped the modern world through a shared history of violence that opened with the Atlantic Slave Trade and continued with the use of nuclear bombs against the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. There is no comprehensive account of the hundreds of millions of people killed by colonialism.12  

A core feature of this violence is the drain of wealth from the colonised regions of the world to the colonial powers. This drain not only lined the coffers of these powers and paid for the opulent infrastructure that still exists today; it also shaped the neocolonial system that continues to leech wealth from the colonised states long after formal colonialism ended.

2. The drain of wealth from the South to the North. Despite making up only 14.2% of the world population, the 49 countries of the Global North account for 40.6% of the world’s GDP based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).13 By controlling capital and the production of raw materials, intellectual property, and science and technology – all part of the legacy of colonialism – the Global North states continue to ensure that they accumulate a greater share of the planet’s wealth. One example of the enormous colonial theft of wealth is the nearly $45 trillion that the British drained from India between 1765 and 1938, which accounts for almost the entire period of British rule in India (1757­–1947). This wealth flooded the British banking system, enabled capital accumulation for British industrialisation, and created built in advantages that have lasted for generations.14 Meanwhile, average life expectancy declined by 20% between 1870 and 1921, and the literacy rate when India won its independence in 1947, after three hundred years of colonialism, was a mere 12.2%.15

A recent paper shows that, based on unequal exchange, $152 trillion was plundered from the Global South between 1960 and 2017. The authors point out that, in 2017 alone, the Global North appropriated $2.2 trillion worth of commodities in the Global South – ‘enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over’.16 Imagine if we could calculate the entire drain of wealth from the (former) colonies and the social impact this had on their health and education systems.

3. A common condition of militarisation and intelligence. The role of intelligence networks is frequently underestimated in assessing the power of the Global North. The category of ‘intelligence’ is no longer merely about espionage of the old type but now includes digital surveillance and warfare (including cyberattacks on key infrastructure). Each of the Global North countries participate in high-level military coordination and intelligence sharing, driven by the inner core. The closer a country is to the inner core, the more synchronised the level of intelligence and military coordination. This does not mean that the countries in the outer rings are not yoked into the systems of the inner core, but only that they are not invited into the inner sanctum of information and weapons systems. The structure of the four rings is reflected in global intelligence networks, as exemplified by the distinctions between the Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes intelligence networks. The Five Eyes intelligence network (made up of five of the six inner core countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States – with Israel as a de facto ‘sixth eye’) works closely with but maintains a distinction from the Nine Eyes countries (Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway, added onto the Five Eyes countries) and, finally, with the Fourteen Eyes countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, added to the Nine Eyes countries), which are privy to an increasingly depleted level of intelligence sharing the further they are from the inner core.

The Global South

Unlike the Global North, the Global South is not an integrated bloc. The countries of the Global South have different economic realities, military capacities, political systems, and governments, often with conflicting political traditions. Though several of these countries share certain characteristics and interests, the concept of the Global South is not defined by their commonalities but by a set of other factors. Nonetheless, these countries share the facts that:

  • They are former colonies and semi-colonies that have been subject to five hundred years of humiliation.
  • They, in some cases, have and do pursue socialist projects, for which they have been punished by the imperialist bloc.
  • They are – for a variety of reasons – victims of imperialist overreach using extra-economic force, such as coups and sanctions.
  • They have often come together around various common interests, such as to seek debt relief, establish their right to build economic democracy, and access global health measures, including vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite these commonalities, it would be an overreach to call them – as we did the Global North – a bloc. Instead, we think of the Global South as being made up of six groupings with interlocking relationships (as well as antagonistic disputes amongst some of them). These groupings are:

1. Socialist independent states. This grouping includes six countries (China, Viet Nam, Venezuela, Laos, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Cuba) that remain committed to the socialist trajectory, with all of its complex zigs and zags. Since 2016, China, a key member of the group, has had the largest GDP (PPP) in the world and an economy that is almost three times greater than that of India (a country with a comparable population).17 The Chinese people have achieved the greatest feat in modern times in terms of human development by lifting 800 million people out of poverty.18

2. Strongly sovereign seeking states. This grouping is defined by states that have, more recently and despite the many internal differences between them, taken steps to assert their sovereignty but have not established a formal socialist process. Many of these states, such Eritrea and Mali, are part of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter, which formed in July 2021 under the leadership of the Venezuelan government. The West has, in turn, punished this posturing through extreme hybrid warfare.19 Russia, a special case in this grouping, is a primary target for regime change and coercive measures that seek to dismember and denuclearise it.

3. Current or historic progressive states. The societies in these countries have been shaped by national liberation movements – such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa – and by movements against dictatorships – such as in Brazil – the impact of which has imprinted itself deeply onto their political cultures. Despite the limitations of the governments in this grouping, their severe internal contradictions, and the difficulties of becoming emancipated from the global capitalist system, they have not wilted before US interference. However, none of these countries benefitted from a socialist revolution that might have weakened their national bourgeoisie through substantial land reform or through socialising advanced sectors of the economy, for instance.

4. New non-aligned states. These countries, with rising GDPs, are outgrowing their dependence on the West. The size and scale of their economies have given them some independence to pursue national economic interests without actively advancing political sovereignty. They have realised that the US seizure of foreign reserves and use of sanctions against at least 31.5% of the world population have become severe threats to the global majority and that the United States is no longer either a market of last resort or a major provider of foreign direct investment.20

5. The diverse Global South. This grouping includes the 111 countries that lack any clear political, economic, or military unity. They vary in the degree to which they align with the Global North.

6. Heavily US militarised states. The two countries that make up this grouping – the Republic of Korea and the Philippines – are effectively military colonies of the United States, though their populations strain against the limitations of being subordinated to US military and security needs.

Together these 145 countries (which includes Palestine as a UN observer) account for 85.8% of the world population and 59.4% of world GDP (PPP).21 As we will see in the final section, these six groupings are part of major regional and international projects (such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Union of South American Nations and BRICS10 and the G77, respectively) that reflect the new mood in the Global South ­– one that is shifting toward regionalism and multilateralism and away from the singular dominion crafted by the imperialist bloc.

On the Idea of the Five Controls

The Marxist assessment of imperialism over the past century has been shaped by Vladimir Lenin’s theoretical and practical contributions, rooted in the experience of the Russian Revolution. In Lenin’s classic work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), he argued that, through its more competitive stage, capitalism advanced to produce oligopolies in important sectors – such as finance – and that these oligopolies clashed with each other, drawing their states into a conflict over markets in the colonies and into direct military confrontations with each other. The wave of formal decolonisation that began after the end of World War II in 1945 – which had a prior history in Latin America in the 1800s but was then restarted with the Cuban Revolution (1959) – created new conditions for imperialism. The territorial retreat of the imperialist powers was not matched in any way by a loss of their control over the world economy. To the contrary, they had fashioned what Kwame Nkrumah called neocolonialism.

Over the past few years, however, we have witnessed the slow attrition of the West’s control over the world economy as well as the gradual delegitimisation of the entire neocolonial structure. To better understand this attrition, we adopted a method that Samir Amin developed almost thirty years ago to assess the nature of imperialist power.22 Amin argued that the neocolonial structure did not require Western-based transnational corporations to own most of the world’s assets. Instead, he explained, what was needed was for them to have monopoly control over many of the assets in key sectors and ensure that the ultimate beneficiary of these assets would be the Triad, or the Global North, and its ruling classes. Amin identified five forms of control that lie at the heart of the neocolonial structure:

  • Control over natural resources
  • Control over financial flows
  • Control over science and technology
  • Control over military power
  • Control over information

In The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory (July 2023), we argued that the West’s control over natural resources, financial flows, and science and technology is being challenged by the emergence of the Global South’s major economies: China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and Mexico, which were all among the top thirteen largest economies in the world by GDP (PPP) in 2022.23 China’s impressive rise out of abject poverty has been key to weakening the Global North’s hold over these first three controls.

Two exaggerations by the United States and the imperialist bloc from the mid-1990s to the 2010s also contributed to weakening this hold:

1. US wars, from the global war on terror to the wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

2. US economic overextension, from the over-credit in the US housing market to the lax regulation of the Western banking system.

These US wars and the Third Great Depression of 2007–2008 provoked a crisis of the Global North’s leadership of the world system. It is in this context that Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that the world does not need ‘one master’.24 Great doubts began to arise across much of the Global South about the role of the US as the buyer of last resort, the anchor for the world monetary system, and the political stabiliser of the world order.

New developments in China and Russia, which were taking place at the same time as these US wars and the chaos in the world capitalist system, began to accelerate new changes:

1. China. In the last years of the Hu Jintao government (2003–2013), China’s leadership began to reassess its reliance upon the US market and US political leadership. The formation of BRICS in 2009 was part of this new posture. This reassessment was then translated into a new policy framework under the leadership of Xi Jinping. This included establishing alternatives to the US market and leadership, such as by creating an internal market through large-scale capital investment, eradicating extreme poverty, and building the One Belt, One Road (later Belt and Road) Initiative. Furthermore, China began to use the BRICS process to encourage the formation of new monetary systems and new political leadership.

2. Russia. Towards the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the Russian government began to undo the damage that the destruction of the Soviet Union had done to its people. Firstly, the government, led by Putin, began to claw back the energy sector from the ‘oligarchs’ and organise the basis of the economy around principles of self-sufficiency, including holding capital within the country and not allowing profits to be taken out into the Western-controlled banking system. Secondly, the government began to increase Russia’s role in OPEC+ (the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as ten non-members) and build up its energy sector in order to sell oil and natural gas to Europe in a context in which the Global North’s wars on Iraq and Libya and sanctions-driven hybrid war on Iran interfered with Europe’s major sources of energy.

The economic magnetism of China and Russia – in the context of a long-term economic crisis in the Global North – led countries of the European Union to become more integrated with Eurasia. This took place on two levels: European countries began to rely increasingly on Russian energy (a third of Germany’s energy needs were fulfilled by Russia, for example) and on investment and technology from China (18 European Union countries joined the Belt and Road Initiative, including Italy, Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic).25 Europe’s integration with Asia was historically logical and necessary and, alongside the rise of China, threatened the general unipolar structure of the Global North as well as the neocolonial structure of the world economy. Unable to roll back this integration and the rise of China, the US, alongside its allies in the Global North, accelerated a hybrid war against both China and Russia. The frontlines of this war were initially economic (through a trade war, for example) but quickly began to focus on two areas: Ukraine and Taiwan. The war in Ukraine had two important consequences on the world order: first, it increased the cost of food and fuel across the globe, and second, it was met by a refusal by many developing countries to bow down to the West and its posture on the war. Together, these consequences generated a new mood in the developing world and the emergence of a new non-alignment.

The Global North’s control over military power and information, however, has not withered. At a time of economic listlessness and political fragility, the Global North – led by the United States – is exercising the remainder of its power with great force and, in doing so, endangering the planet’s existence. As our research shows, the Global North countries – especially the United States – expend significant amounts of their budgets on the military, building systems that threaten every aspect of human life and wasting human ingenuity on ways to destroy life rather than affirm it.

The Control of Arms

Unable and unwilling to build a social and political project to address the dilemmas of humanity on a global scale, the United States and its bloc have instead pursued a strategy to maintain their domination over the planet. This dominance began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist state system in Eastern Europe in 1991 as well as with the weakening of the Third World through the debt crisis, which started to spiral with Mexico’s default in 1982. Intellectuals in the United States began to speak as if this dominance would last for eternity, with the ‘end of history’ pronounced against any challenge to the US order. However, cracks in this narrative began to widen as the G7’s dominion, with the US at the helm, was deeply shaken by its military overreach in the global war on terror (especially the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003) and by the Third Great Depression of 2007–2008 (triggered by the collapse of Western housing markets).

The United States and its allies made every effort in the second decade of the twenty-first century to reassert their control over the planet. NATO’s war on Libya in 2011 sent a strong signal of Western assertion, which was a prelude for the discussions about using a global NATO as a platform to advance Western military aggression, from the South China Sea to the Caribbean. Sanctions attempted to discipline anyone who would cross the lines drawn by the United States and its allies, locking countries out of the international financial system and thereby depriving entire populations of access to medicine, food, and other basic goods. (It is worth noting that sanctions, which have increased by 933% over the last twenty years, have become a favourite form of US-led intervention).26 Finally, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned with a renewed austerity agenda, which was deepened even during the pandemic, forcing dozens of poor countries to pay more to wealthy bondholders than they did to their own health care and education systems.27

In 2018, the United States declared an end to the war on terror and clearly stated in its National Defence Strategy that its main problems were the rise of China and Russia. US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis spoke openly about the need to prevent the rise of ‘near peer rivals’ – China and Russia – and suggested that the entire panoply of US power be used to bring them to their knees.28

Not only does the United States have hundreds of military bases that encircle Eurasia; it also has allies, from Germany to Japan, that provide it with forward positions against both Russia and China. In 2015 and 2019, respectively, the naval fleet of the US and its allies began aggressive ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises against the territorial integrity of both China (in the South China Sea) and Russia (mainly in the Arctic). These manoeuvres, as well as the 2014 US political intervention in Ukraine and massive 2015 US arms deal with Taiwan, further threatened Russia and China’s sovereignty. Then, in 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which upset the apple cart of nuclear arms control. This withdrawal, alongside the US’s stated goals in the 2018 National Defence Strategy, showed that the US was contemplating the use of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ against both Russia and China.

Thus far, US allies in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Australia and the Republic of Korea, have not been eager to allow intermediate nuclear weapons into their territory, although these weapons could be positioned in US bases elsewhere, from Guam to Okinawa. It is impossible to understand Russia’s intervention in Ukraine without understanding this longer history of threats perceived by Moscow. It is not beyond reason to worry that the United States might position its intermediate nuclear weapons in Ukraine – whether or not Ukraine joins NATO.29

To affirm their position of domination over the world order, the United States and its allies have increased military spending beyond belief. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) calculated that, in 2022, US military spending was roughly $877 billion, or roughly 39%, of estimated global military spending.30 However, as a recent report published in Monthly Review shows, this figure is vastly underestimated: actual US military spending is closer to $1.537 trillion – nearly double SIPRI’s calculation and the official US numbers.31 Adding in the 2022 estimated expenditures of other NATO states ($360 billion) and all US-dominated, non-NATO military allies ($234 billion), based on official figures, brings the total military spending of the US-led military bloc to $2.13 trillion, though this could well be below actual spending. This calculation brings the global military spending in 2022 to $2.87 trillion. In other words, the US-led military bloc accounts for 74.3% of world military spending, and the US spends 12.6 times per capita above the world average (Israel, coming in second, spends 7.2 times above the world average per capita, with the other imperialist powers spending two to three times more than the world average).32

China, meanwhile, accounts for 10% of world military spending ($292 billion), and its per capita military spending is 22 times less than that of the United States.33 Fear mongering about Chinese military spending is not substantiated by the facts. What is substantiated by facts is that China spends more of its social wealth on infrastructure and industry than on military waste. Meanwhile, the US spends a mere $252 billion on education, for instance, according to the Centre on Budget and Policies Priorities, but $1.537 trillion on the military, part of which goes to pay for its estimated 902 military bases across the world.34

The only area in the world that is free of the US military apparatus is large sections of Eurasia: China, India, Iran, and Russia. Since 1992, the United States has dreamt of vanquishing this region, including through the use of military power. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, cautioned that ‘potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances’. ‘For America’, Brzezinski wrote, ‘the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia’, which, he said, ‘is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played’.35 To avoid this scenario, Brzezinski and others warned that the US should try to win over either China or Russia to isolate the other and to thereby dominate the Eurasian ‘chessboard’. However, for the past several decades, the United States has done just the opposite, electing instead to pressure both China and Russia through its New Cold War, which has, as Brzezinski predicted, brought these two countries together into a strategic bilateral and multilateral alliance. Furthermore, US Congressional Research Service data reports that the US Armed Forces have been deployed to 101 countries between 1798 and 2023.36 According to the Military Intervention Project, between 1776 and 2019, the US carried out at least 392 military interventions worldwide. Half of these operations were undertaken between 1950 and 2019, and 25% of them occurred in the post-Cold War period.37 In 2022 alone, 317 imperialist forces were deployed to countries in the Global South and 137 to Global North allies for a total of 454 deployments.38

Perhaps the single best evidence of the racial, political, military, and economic plans of the Western powers that have manifested through the New Cold War can be summed up by a recent declaration of NATO and the EU:

NATO and the EU play complementary, coherent, and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security. We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.39

 On the Emergence of New Organisations

On the last day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 2023, the five founding states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) welcomed six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.40 Though the new right-wing led government of Argentina under Javier Milei officially withdrew from joining BRICS on 29 December 2023, the ten BRICS countries now encompass 45.5% of the world population, with a combined global GDP (PPP) of 35.6%. In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10% of the world population, their share of the global GDP (PPP) is 30.4%. While the countries that today form BRICS10 are responsible for 44% of global industrial output, their G7 counterparts account for a mere 21.6%.41 All available indicators, including harvest production and the total volume of metal production, show the immense power of the newly expanded BRICS10. Celso Amorim, advisor to the Brazilian government and one of the architects of BRICS during his former tenure as foreign minister, said of the new development that ‘[t]he world can no longer be dictated by the G7’.42

Certainly, the BRICS10 nations, for all their internal hierarchies and challenges, now represent a larger share of the global GDP than the G7, which continues to behave as the world’s executive body. Twenty-three countries applied for membership before the South Africa meeting (including seven of the thirteen countries in OPEC), though over forty expressed an interest in joining BRICS, including Indonesia, the world’s seventh largest country in terms of GDP (PPP).

It is important to note that BRICS10 does not operate independently of new regional formations that aim to build platforms outside the grip of the West, such as the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Instead, BRICS10 membership has the potential to enhance regionalism for those already within these regional forums.

Why did BRICS welcome such a disparate group of countries, including two monarchies, into its fold? When asked to reflect on the character of the new full member states, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, ‘What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country. We can’t deny the geopolitical importance of Iran and other countries that will join BRICS’.43 This is the measure of how the founding countries made the decision to expand their alliance.

At least three key issues lie at the heart of BRICS’s growth: control over energy supplies and pathways, control over global financial and development systems, and control over institutions for peace and security.

Control over Energy Supplies and Pathways

BRICS10 has now created a formidable energy group. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are also members of OPEC, which, with Russia, a key member of OPEC+, now accounts for 26.3 million barrels of oil per day, just below 30% of global daily oil production.44 It was China’s role in brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April that enabled both of these oil-producing countries to join BRICS. Egypt, another new addition to BRICS10, though not an OPEC member, is nonetheless one of the largest African oil producers, with an output that accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s oil production.45 What is at stake here is not just the production of oil, but the establishment of new global energy pathways.

The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the development of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, have already created a web of oil and natural gas platforms around the Global South, integrated into the expansion of Khalifa Port and natural gas facilities in Fujairah and Ruwais (in the United Arab Emirates). There is every expectation that BRICS10 will begin to coordinate its energy infrastructure with other energy producers. For instance, tensions between Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil volumes have simmered this year as Russia exceeded its quota in an attempt to compensate for Western sanctions placed on it as a result of the war in Ukraine. Now these two countries will have another forum, outside of OPEC+ and with China at the table, to build a common energy agenda. This expanding platform also threatens to undermine the petrodollar system, with more countries ­­– such as Saudi Arabia – planning to sell oil to China in renminbi, or RMB (China’s two other main oil providers, Iraq and Russia, already receive payment in RMB).

Control over Global Financial and Development Systems

Both the discussions at the BRICS summit and its final communiqué focused on the need to strengthen a financial and development architecture for the world that is not governed by the triumvirate of the IMF, Wall Street, and the US dollar. However, BRICS does not seek to circumvent established global trade and development institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF. For instance, in its concluding declaration of the summit, BRICS reaffirmed the importance of the ‘rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation at its core’ and called for ‘a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced [IMF] at its centre’.46 Its proposals do not fundamentally break with the IMF or WTO; rather, they offer a dual pathway forward: first, for BRICS to exert more control and direction over these organisations, of which they are members but have been subordinated to a Western agenda, and second, for BRICS states to realise their aspirations to build their own parallel institutions (such as the New Development Bank, or NDB). Saudi Arabia’s investment fund alone is worth close to $1 trillion, which could partially resource the NDB.47

BRICS’s agenda to improve ‘the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture’, BRICS chair Cyril Ramaphosa explained, is mostly being carried forward by the ‘use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems’.48 The concept of ‘local currencies’ refers to the growing practice of states using their own currencies for cross-border trade rather than relying upon the dollar. Though approximately 150 currencies in the world are considered to be legal tender, cross-border payments almost always rely on the dollar (which, as of 2021, accounts for 40% of flows over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, network).49

Other currencies play a limited role, with the Chinese RMB comprising 2.5% of cross-border payments.50 However, the emergence of new global messaging platforms – such as China’s Cross-Border Payment Interbank System, India’s Unified Payments Interface, and Russia’s Financial Messaging System (SPFS) – as well as regional digital currency systems promise to increase the use of alternative currencies. For instance, cryptocurrency assets briefly provided a potential avenue for new trading systems before their asset valuations declined, and BRICS10 recently approved the establishment of a working group to study a BRICS reference currency.

Following the expansion of BRICS, the NDB said that it will also expand its members and that, as its General Strategy, 2022–2026 notes, 30% of all of its financing will be in local currencies.51 As part of its framework for a new development system, its president, Dilma Rousseff, said that the NDB will not follow the IMF policy of imposing conditions on borrowing countries. ‘We repudiate any kind of conditionality’, Rousseff said. ‘Often a loan is given upon the condition that certain policies are carried out. We don’t do that. We respect the policies of each country’.52

The entry of Ethiopia and Iran into BRICS10 shows how large Global South states are reacting to the West’s sanctions policy against dozens of countries, including two founding BRICS members (China and Russia). China has long traded with Ethiopia, whose capital city, Addis Ababa, is the headquarters of the African Union. Drawing Ethiopia into BRICS ensures that this large country (with a sizeable population and important agricultural land) will not drift back into the Western orbit.

Control over Institutions for Peace and Security

In their communiqué, the BRICS nations write about the importance of ‘comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council’.53 Currently, the UN Security Council has fifteen members, five of which are permanent (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). There are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America, or the most populous country in the world, India. To repair these inequities, BRICS offers its support to ‘the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, India, and South Africa, to play a greater role in international affairs’.54 The West’s refusal to allow these countries a permanent seat at the UN Security Council has only strengthened their commitment to the BRICS process and to enhance their role in the G20.

Three major interregional platforms, still in an embryonic stage, define the new regionalism and multilateralism:

  1. BRICS10 (an expansion of the 2009 formation of BRIC), which is largely strategic but also an economic powerhouse, has ten official members and several unofficial partners.
  2. Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), which was largely formed around security issues in Central Asia, has advanced into conversations about development and trade.
  3. The Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter (2021), which is mainly a political platform, brings together twenty UN member states that are facing the brunt of illegal US sanctions, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Many of these states attended the BRICS summit as invitees and are eager to join BRICS10 as full members.

It is no accident that there are three countries, all primary targets of pressure campaigns by the imperialist bloc, that are in all three of these organisations: China, Iran, and Russia.

There are several shared challenges and opportunities that have emerged in the Global South and that have brought many of its countries together around the need for a common framework for discussion and collaboration. These common interests include the need for:

  • Multilateralism and regionalism that is centred on the creation of Global South-anchored cooperation.
  • New modernisation that is centred on constructing regional and continental economies that use local currencies in place of the dollar for trade and reserves.
  • Sovereignty, which would create barriers to Western intervention. This includes military entanglements and digital colonialism, both of which facilitate US intelligence interventions.
  • Reparations, which would entail collective bargaining to compensate for the West’s century-old debt traps and abuse of the excess carbon budget as well as its much longer-reaching legacy of colonialism.

Tectonic changes are taking place in the world, accelerated by the wars in Ukraine and the rapidly escalating genocide in Palestine. These changes are shaped, on the one hand, by the Global North’s loss of economic power alongside its increase in militarisation and, on the other, by the Global South’s new mood regarding sovereignty and economic development. This dossier is a preliminary exercise, based on original research and analysis, to make sense of these changes and – consequently – the new mood in the Global South.


Notes

1 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, press conference by Foreign Press Secretary Ono Hirariko, 25 January 2023, https://www.mofa.go.jp/press/kaiken/kaiken24e_000202.html.

2 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Diplomatic Bluebook 2023: Japanese Diplomacy and International Situation in 2022, 29 September 2023, https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/other/bluebook/2023/pdf/en_index.html, i and 3.

3 Emmanuel Macron (President of France), ‘France in the World’, Munich Security Conference, Germany, 17 February 2023, https://securityconference.org/en/medialibrary/collection/munich-security-conference-2023/.

4 Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila (Prime Minister of Namibia), Francia Márquez (Vice President of Colombia), Mauro Luiz Iecker Vieira (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil), Enrique Manalo (Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines), and Christoph Heusgen (Moderator, former German Ambassador to the United Nations; Chairman of the Munich Security Conference), ‘Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order’, Munich Security Conference, Germany, 18 February 2023, https://securityconference.org/en/medialibrary/collection/munich-security-conference-2023/.

5 BlackRock Investment Institute, 2023 Global Outlook: A New Investment Playbook (New York: BlackRock, 2 October 2023, https://www.blackrock.com/ca/institutional/en/literature/market-commentary/bii-2023-global-outlook-ca.pdf?switchLocale=y&siteEntryPassthrough=true, 13; Credit Suisse, Investment Outlook 2023: A Fundamental Reset (Zürich: Credit Suisse, 2022), https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news-and-expertise/investment-outlook-2023-a-fundamental-reset-202211.html#:~:text=We%20now%20expect%20the%20euro,manages%20to%20avoid%20a%20recession, 14.

6 Credit Suisse, Investment Outlook 2023, 14.

7 Read our full report, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, Studies on Contemporary Dilemmas no. 4, 23 January 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism.

8 Flavia Krause-Jackson, Ania Nussbaum, and Kitty Donaldson, ‘The French Won’t Forget Being Snubbed Over Submarines’, Bloomberg, 22 September 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-22/how-france-can-respond-to-australia-u-s-u-k-submarine-deal; Vijay Prashad, ‘Clear Away the Hype: The US and Australia Signed a Nuclear Arms Deal, Simple as That’, Peoples Dispatch, 22 September 2021, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/09/22/clear-away-the-hype-the-us-and-australia-signed-a-nuclear-arms-deal-simple-as-that/.

9 Samir Amin, Class and Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 104; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Resurrecting the Concept of the Triad, newsletter no. 22, 1 June 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/triad/.

10 Michael Hudson, ‘America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century’, Counterpunch, 1 March 2022, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/01/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/.

11 Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020).

12 Nonetheless, there is evidence that by 1600, at least 56 million Indigenous people in the Americas had perished due to colonial violence and the introduction of deadly pathogens; at least 15.5 million Africans were captured and sold in the Atlantic Slave Trade; at least 10 million people died in the Congo between 1515 and 1865 due to the rapacity of Belgian colonialism; and between 1880 and 1920 alone (a small sliver of British colonialism in India), at least 165 million Indians died as a result of British colonial violence. See: Alexander Koch et al., ‘Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492’, Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (1 March 2019): 13–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004; Steven J. Micheletti et al., ‘Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas’, The American Journal of Human Genetics 107, no. 2 (6 August 2020): 265–77, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2020.06.012; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Fritz Blackwell, ‘The British Impact on India, 1700–1900’, Association for Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (Fall 2008), https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-british-impact-on-india-1700-1900/; and Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel, ‘Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wage, Human Height, and Mortality since the Long 16th Century’, World Development 161 (January 2023): 12.

13 Global South Insights own elaboration based on data from ‘World Development Indicators’ [WDI], World Bank, accessed 20 October 2022, https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/ and ‘World Economic Outlook’ [WEO], International Monetary Fund (IMF), accessed 20 October 2022, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2029/October.

14 Utsa Patnaik, ‘Revisiting the “Drain”, or Transfers from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism’, Agrarian and Other Histories – Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2019).

15 Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, ‘Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wages, Human Height, and Mortality Since the Long 16th Century’, World Development 161 (September 2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106026; Navinchandra R. Shah, ‘Literacy Rate in India’, International Journal of Research in All Subjects in Multi Languages 1, no. 7 (October 2013): 12–16, https://www.raijmr.com/ijrsml/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IJRSML_2013_vol01_issue_07_04.pdf.

16 Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, ‘Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018’, New Political Economy 26, no. 6 (2021).

17 Global South Insights own elaboration based on IMF WEO.

18 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China’, Studies on Socialist Construction 1, 23 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.

19 For more on hybrid war, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future, dossier no. 36, 4 January 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-36-twilight/ and Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America, dossier no. 17, 3 June 2019, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-17-venezuela-and-hybrid-wars-in-latin-america/.

20 Global South Insights own elaboration based on ‘World Population Prospects 2022’ [WPP], Department of Economics and Social Affairs, United Nations, 1 July 2022, https://population.un.org/wpp/ and ‘What Are Sanctions?’, SanctionsKill Campaign, September 2022, https://sanctionskill.org.

21 Global South Insights own elaboration based on UN WPP and IMF WEO.

22 Samir Amin, ‘The Challenge of Globalisation’, Review of International Political Economy 3, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 216–259. Also see: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Globalisation and Its Alternative: An Interview with Samir Amin, notebook no. 1, 29 October 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/globalisation-and-its-alternative/.

23 Global South Insights own elaboration based on IMF WEO; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, dossier no. 66, 4 July 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-66-development-theory/.

24 Vladimir Putin, speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy Munich Security Conference, Munich, Germany, 10 February 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034.

26 Francisco R. Rodríguez, ‘The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions’, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 4 May 2023, https://cepr.net/press-release/new-report-finds-that-economic-sanctions-are-often-deadly-and-harm-peoples-living-standards-in-target-countries/; The Treasury Sanctions Review 2021, US Department of the Treasury, 18 October 2021, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-2021-sanctions-review.pdf, 2.

27 A World of Debt, United Nations, 12 July 2023, https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt. For more on the debt crisis, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Life or Debt: The Stranglehold of Neocolonialism and Africa’s Search for Alternatives, dossier no. 63, 11 April 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-63-african-debt-crisis/.

28 Jim Mattis, ‘Remarks by Secretary Mattis on the National Defence Strategy’, US Department of Defence, 19 January 2018, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/1420042/remarks-by-secretary-mattis-on-the-national-defense-strategy/.

29 For more on Ukraine, see: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, This Is Not the Age of Certainty. We Are in the Time of Contradictions, newsletter no. 14, 7 April 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ukraine-2/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, We Are in a Period of Great Tectonic Shifts, newsletter no. 11, 17 March 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/shifting-world-order/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, In These Days of Great Tension, Peace Is a Priority, newsletter no. 9, 3 March 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ukraine/.

30 ‘World Military Expenditure Reaches New Record High as European Spending Surges’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 24 April 2023, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2023/world-military-expenditure-reaches-new-record-high-european-spending-surges.

31 Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, ‘Actual US Military Spending Reached $1.53 trillion in 2022 – More than Twice Acknowledged Level: New Estimates Based on US National Accounts’, Monthly Review, 1 November 2023, https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/actual-u-s-military-spending-reached-1-53-trillion-in-2022-more-than-twice-acknowledged-level-new-estimates-based-on-u-s-national-accounts/.

32 Global South Insights own elaboration based on adjusted figures from ‘SIPRI Military Expenditure Database’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), accessed October 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex; and Monthly Review.

33Global South Insights own elaboration based on adjusted figures from SIPRI and Monthly Review.

34 ‘Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?’, Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, 28 September 2023, https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go; ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/. For more on US military bases, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity’, dossier no. 42, 5 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-42-militarisation-africa/.

35 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 55; 30–31.

36 ‘Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023’, Congressional Research Service, 7 June 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738.

37 Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 4 (2023): 752–779. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027221117546?icid=int.sj-full-text.citing-articles.1.

38 The Military Balance 2023, International Institute for Security Studies, 15 February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/the-military-balance/.

39 Jens Stoltenberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and Charles Michel, ‘Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 10 January 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_210549.htm.

40 To read more about BRICS, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, BRICS: Uma alternativa ao imperialismo? [BRICS: A New Alternative to Imperialism?], 31 August 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/brasil/brics-uma-alternativa-ao-imperialismo/.

41 Global South Insights own elaboration based on UN WPP, World Bank WDI, and IMF WEO.

42 ‘BRICS’ Credibility Growing as World Not Willing to Live by G7 Dogma – Brazilian Adviser ’, TASS, 22 August 2023, https://tass.com/world/1663753?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com.

43 Anthony Boadle, ‘Brazil’s Lula Says BRICS to Pick New Members Based On Geopolitical Weight’, Reuters, 25 August 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/brazils-lula-says-brics-pick-new-members-based-geopolitical-weight-not-ideology-2023-08-24/#:~:text=%22What%20matters%20is%20not%20the,join%20BRICS%2C%22%20he%20added.

44 Sean Hill and Owen Comstock, ‘What Is OPEC+ and How Is It Different from OPEC?’, US Energy Information Administration, 9 May 2023, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56420#:~:text=OPEC%20and%20OPEC%2B%20countries%20combined,instability%20in%20crude%20oil%20output.

45 ‘Egypt: Oil Production’, The Global Economy, accessed 15 November 2023, https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Egypt/oil_production/#:~:text=Oil%20production%2C%20thousand%20barrels%20per%20day&text=The%20latest%20value%20from%202022,423.53%20thousand%20Barrels%20Per%20Day.

46 BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development, and Inclusive Multilateralism, XV BRICS Summit II Declaration, Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 August 2023, https://brics2023.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Jhb-II-Declaration-24-August-2023-1.pdf, 3.

47 Abeer Abu Omar and Vivian Nereim, ‘Saudi Sovereign Fund Targets $1.1 Trillion in Assets by 2025’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-24/saudi-sovereign-fund-targets-1-1-trillion-in-assets-by-2025?leadSource=uverify%20wall; Jiaxing Li, ‘Saudi’s US$700 Billion Wealth Fund Is a Fan of Alibaba, Pinduoduo, Flat Glass Stocks as Middle East-China Ties Spur New Deals’, South China Morning Post, 23 June 2023, https://www.scmp.com/business/markets/article/3224986/saudis-us700-billion-wealth-fund-fan-alibaba-pdd-flat-glass-stocks-middle-east-china-ties-spur-new.

48 Cyril Ramaphosa, media briefing remarks announcing the outcomes of the XV BRICS Summit, Johannesburg, South Africa, 24 August 2023, https://brics2023.gov.za/2023/08/24/brics-chair-president-cyril-ramaphosas-media-briefing-remarks-announcing-the-outcomes-of-the-xv-brics-summit/.

49 Hector Perez-Saiz, Longmei Zhang, and Roshan Iyer, ‘Currency Usage for Cross-Border Payments’, IMF Working Papers 72, 24 March 2023, https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2023/072/article-A001-en.xml.

50 Perez-Saiz, Zhang, and Iyer, ‘Currency Usage’.

51 General Strategy for 2022–2026: Scaling up Development Finance for a Suitable Future, New Development Bank, accessed 15 November 2023, https://www.ndb.int/about-ndb/general-strategy/.

52 Michael Scott, ‘BRICS Bank Strives to Reduce Reliance on the Dollar’, Financial Times, 22 August 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/1c5c6890-3698-4f5d-8290-91441573338a.

53 BRICS and Africa, XV BRICS Summit, 2.

54 BRICS and Africa, XV BRICS Summit, 3.

Research for this document has been conducted collectively for over a year and has received contributions from many scholars and socialist practitioners. This document was compiled with data and charts provided by Global South Insights (GSI), with editing and coordination by Gisela Cernadas, Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, Tica Moreno, and Deborah Veneziale. The data and charts for Part IV of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.

Introduction

It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfilment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism.1 For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight.

In the face of violent repression, such as Brazil’s Carajás Massacre in 1996, the Landless Workers’ Movement led the reclamation of land for popular agrarian reform through occupation and production, challenging agribusiness behemoths, such as the US multinational Monsanto.2 A ‘soldier who shook the continent’, Hugo Chávez won the popular vote in 1999, a sharp left turn that was followed by others in Latin America. This included a wave of mass mobilisation of millions of workers, peasants, Indigenous, women, and students that defeated the proposed US Free Trade Areas of the Americas in 2005, a direct challenge to nearly 200 years of the US Monroe Doctrine.3

In 2002, Nigerian women gathered at the gates of Shell and Chevron to protest environmental destruction and exploitation in the Niger Delta. Haitians refused the centuries of denigration in mass demonstrations following the US ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and US occupation in 2004. Millions of Nepalese celebrated the toppling of the monarchy through armed resistance under the leadership of the communists in 2006. When fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in 2010, the Tunisian people revolted against the neo-liberal system that had caused him to take such extreme measures.

In subsequent years, changes – sometimes small and imperceptible, at other times volatile and explosive – unfolded. These involved both popular movements and state actors, in some cases extremely powerful ones. The US was confronted by a rising economic powerhouse in China, growing economies in the Global South (which overtook the Global North’s GDP in PPP terms in 2007), years of domestic capital investment neglect, the financialisation of the economy, and the loss of manufacturing superiority.

The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 signalled internal fracturing of US domestic politics. Internationally, the US failed to achieve soft regime disruption in China and de-nuclearisation or regime change in Russia. After a temporary reduction in military spending with the end of the disastrous war on Iraq (2003–2011), the US shifted to the use and threat of military power as a central pillar of its response to these changes.

Hegemony is historically lost in three stages: production, finance, and military.4 The United States has lost hegemony in production, though it still has some remaining areas of technological hegemony, including those related to the military. It is seeing its financial hegemony challenged, though still in the very early stages and revolving around the status of the US dollar. Even though the economic and political aspects of its decline might be accelerating, it still retains military power – creating a temptation for the US to attempt to overcome the consequences of its economic decline by military or military related means.

The US has defined China as its strategic competitor. The minimum programme of the US is the containment and economic diminishment of China, sufficient to guarantee the US’s own perpetual future economic hegemony.

From its own point of view, US capitalism is rational in its attempts to limit China’s rise. Failure to do so would erode the relative advantage the US has in controlling higher levels of productive forces and the resulting monopoly privileges that control entails. There is almost complete alignment amongst the US state actors to continue to manage decoupling from China (despite the near impossibility of fully re-modernising US productive forces domestically) and to advance military preparations against China.

The February 2022 movement of Russian troops into Ukraine – a result of the continued violations of US assurances on the non-expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the continuing civil war between Kyiv and Donbas – marked an explicit new phase in world military alignment for the US. In a series of rapid-fire moves, the US openly subordinated all the Global North countries and, in so doing, further subordinated the military apparatus of those states. It established itself as the open military hegemon of what is euphemistically called NATO+, which includes all but three members of the former Eastern Bloc. Those who attended the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a member or observer – including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea – are de facto members of NATO+. Only Israel (excused from attendance for political expediency) and a few smaller countries of the Global North did not attend.

Beginning in October 2023, Israel began a campaign of displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and genocide of Palestinians with the full and shameless support of the United States government. The developments in Ukraine followed by the recent escalations in Gaza are significant markers reflecting that there has been a qualitative change within the imperialist system. The US has now completed its economic, political, and military subordination of all the other imperialist countries. This has consolidated an integrated, militarily focused imperialist bloc. It aims to maintain a grip on the Global South as a whole and has turned its attention to dominating Eurasia, the last area of the world that has escaped its control.

It is not a matter of exaggeration to say that the Global North has declared a state of open hostility and war on any section of the Global South that does not comply with the policies of the Global North. This is seen in the joint declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation published on 9 January 2023:

We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.5

The Palestinian people in Gaza are certainly feeling the palpable barbarity of NATO+ and the forced ‘mass consensus’ of which the Global North is capable. As Palestinian liberation leader Leila Khaled put it recently:

We know that they speak about terrorism, but they are the heroes of terrorism. The imperialist force everywhere in the world, in Iraq, in Syria, in different countries… are preparing to attack China. All of what they say about terrorism turns to be about them. People have the right to resist with all means to it, including the armed struggle. This is in the Charter of the United Nations. So, they are violating the rights of people for resistance because it’s their right to restore their freedom. And this is, and I say it always, a fundamental law: where there is repression, there is resistance. People will not live under occupation and repression. History taught us that when people resist, they can keep their dignity and their land.6

***

Imperialism has begun its transformation to a new stage: Hyper-Imperialism.7 This is imperialism conducted in an exaggerated and kinetic way, whilst also subject to the constraints that the declining empire has foisted on itself. The spasmodic quality of its exertion is felt by the millions of Congolese, Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemeni living under US militarism, whose heads instinctively jerk for cover at sudden sounds.

Yet, this is not the full-blooded march across the globe that the Cold War initiated, fought in proxy battles that were followed by economic imperialism through the World Bank and other development institutions. It is the imperialism of a drowning billionaire who firmly believes he ought to be back on his yacht. It flexes the muscles of power that are still strong – the military. However, absent productive power and knowing that financial power is at a tipping point, the full suite of imperial technologies of control that the US once had is no longer at its disposal. It, therefore, channels its efforts through the mechanisms it has most at hand: culture (the control of truth) and war.

The tactics of Hyper-Imperialism are shaped partly by the modernisation of hybrid warfare, which includes lawfare, hyper-sanctions, seizure of national reserves and assets, and other manners of non-military warfare. New technological tools of surveillance and targeted communication characterising the digital age are deployed to wage imperialist control of the battle of ideas. This has involved implementing more perverse and covert methods against the truth, such as the political imprisonment of WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange, who exposed numerous crimes against the Global South.8

The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc composed of 49 countries. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. In the military arena, Turkey (as a NATO member), the Republic of Korea and the Philippines (de facto militarised colonies of the US) are included in our definition of the ‘US-led Military Bloc’, even though they are part of the Global South.

Over the last twenty years, the Global North has endured a significant relative economic decline, along with a political, social, and moral decline. Its false ‘moral’ claims of civil rights and ‘press freedom’ are now complete mockeries as they seek to make illegal the public (including online) support for Palestinian rights. This full-on support for the humiliation and destruction of the darker peoples of the world is reminiscent of past centuries, exposing what can be described as collective ‘white fragility’.

The Global South countries comprise former colonies and semi-colonies, a few non-European independent states, and current and former socialist projects. The struggles for national liberation, independence, development, and total economic and political sovereignty still need to be completed for most of the Global South.

Despite the limitations of the terminology, we will use the term ‘Global North’ and occasionally ‘the West’ (an often-used hollow phrase) interchangeably with the more accurate term of the ‘US-Led Imperialist Camp’. We will analyse the Global North in four ‘Rings’. The rest of the world is currently known as the ‘Global South’, much of it was previously called the ‘Third World’. We will analyse the Global South in six ‘Groupings’ that are determined by the relative degree to which a country is a target of regime change and the role its government plays in publicly advancing international, anti-imperialist stances (both in Figure 1). The Global North is engaged in much higher levels of generalised conflict with the rest of the world, the Global South.

PART I: The Rise of a Complete US-Led Global North Military Bloc

Shifts and Consolidation

The US-Led Military Bloc has had two internal changes in the last three decades:

  1. The further expansion of the bloc to include all Eastern Europe countries (only missing Belarus).
  2. The challenge to retain the full subordination of the Western European capitalist states, which abandoned any fundamental, and in many cases even the pretence of, independence.

The latter became evident in 2018 by the Western European states’ genuflection to Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal – a significant blow to their economic interests. Further down, we will discuss the history of this process.9

The centre of the ‘US-Led Military Bloc’, as we call it, is NATO. It also includes Japan, Australia, Israel, New Zealand, three Global South countries, and the few other European countries who are not NATO members.

The US-Led Military Bloc is the world’s only bloc, a de facto and de jure military alliance with a central command. There is no other bloc of its kind. Its clarity and unity of purpose are sharply evident. The US has abandoned many important anti-nuclear proliferation treaties over the last ten years (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and Open Skies Treaty in 2020).10 This has allowed military planners to potentially prepare for the placement of intermediate-range nuclear missiles capable of obliterating Moscow in minutes.

Military Spending

In the November 2023 issue of Monthly Review, a well-researched paper by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, using only US official economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Office of Management and Budget (OMB), revealed that the actual US economic military spending is over twice that acknowledged by the US government or even the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).11

The actual 2022 US military expenditure was US$ 1,537 billion.12

To calculate the world total military expenditure, we have selected SIPRI’s published numbers as our primary source for all countries, except for the US.13 For the US alone, we use the figures from Monthly Review. In 2022, SIPRI adjusted the Chinese government reported national defence budget number of $229 billion to $292 billion, a 27.5% increase.14 Starting in 2021, SIPRI began a new methodology for revising China’s military spending.15 SIPRI changed their calculations for China’s military spending both for previous years and current years.16

SIPRI adjusted the US annual military budget reported by the OMB for the year 2022 by 14.5% up from US$ 765.8 to 876.9 billion.17 This was about half of the percentage increase added to China.

SIPRI’s treatment of China’s military spending is quite different from how it deals with the US, as it adopts a much more circumspect approach to US calculations.

Even if SIPRI doubled the military spending reported by China itself to US$ 458 billion, it would represent 2.6% of its GDP. This is significantly below the actual 6% spent by the US and, even then, China’s military spending would be only 29.8% of that of the US, with a population over four times greater than the US .18

Additionally, unlike the US, China does not have 902 overseas foreign bases.19 US bases and interventions create a drain not only on the annual budget but also on long-term economic debt. Additional details can be found in the endnote.20

What emerged from our analysis was a series of clear findings. The first is that the US controls, through NATO and other means, an astounding 74.3% of all military spending worldwide (Figure 2). This amounts to over US$ 2 trillion.21

Figure 3 shows that imperialist countries account for 12 of the top 16 military budgets in the world.

Figure 4 shows the 16 highest military per capita spending by Global North countries versus the three largest Global South military spenders. The United States spends 21 times more on its military per person than China does on its military.22 There can be no doubt as to the significance of these findings.

Figure 5

Countries with military spending exceeding 20 billion USD

Global North and Global South, 2022

Country Name (GSI) Military SpendingUS Dollars (mil.) Percentage of
GDP (CER)
Per Capita>world avg. (times)
US-Led Military Bloc
United States 1,536,859 6.0% 12.6
United Kingdom 68,463 2.2% 2.8
Germany 55,760 1.4% 1.9
France 53,639 1.9% 2.3
Rep. Korea 46,365 2.8% 2.5
Japan 45,992 1.1% 1.0
Ukraine 43,998 27.4% 3.1
Italy 33,490 1.7% 1.6
Australia 32,299 1.9% 3.4
Canada 26,896 1.3% 1.9
Israel 23,406 4.5% 7.2
Spain 20,307 1.4% 1.2
Global South
China 291,958 1.6% 0.6
Russia 86,373 3.8% 1.7
India 81,363 2.4% 0.2
Saudi Arabia 75,013 6.8% 5.7
Brazil 20,211 1.1% 0.3
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on IMF, UN, SIPRI & Monthly Review

Figure 5 lists all countries that have military budgets exceeding US$ 20 billion, 11 of which are in the Global North compared to six (out of 145) countries in the Global South. For this chart, Republic of Korea is listed under the US-Led Military Bloc.

It is clear that the Global South, in contrast to the Global North, is not a bloc and certainly not a military bloc. The Global South thus faces the extreme monopoly of military spending by the US-Led Military Bloc. This represents a clear and present danger to all countries of the Global South; it presents an imminent danger to the continued existence of humankind and the planet.

In turn, the single most important aspect of state power – that is, military power – the absolute central danger to the working classes of all countries, especially to the darker nations of the world, lies in the US-Led Imperialist Camp. Objectively, there is no such thing as sub-imperialism or non-Western imperialist powers (such concepts are subjective deceptions that cloud over the factual realities).

US and UK Military Bases

In March 2002, Monthly Review published an article with a list and map of countries with known US military bases, arguing that the extent of the US empire could be depicted by its bases.23 This created a storm in some US military circles. Others have expanded on this work in subsequent years, including David Vine and World Beyond War (which has made an interactive map publicly available). 24

The information about the location of these bases opened a window onto the absolutely pervasive nature of US military hegemony. The location and number of bases is valuable for understanding the shape and trajectory of imperialism by illuminating its frontiers and showing its role in policing them.

There are 902 known US military bases and 145 known UK military bases described below.25

Due to the secrecy of the US military and government, there is a lack of data on US military functions that occur inside these bases and the actions launched from US military forces located there. This makes a full qualitative analysis of US foreign military activities incomplete. Some of the analytical deficiencies include that:

  • Listed bases exclude the facilities and locations of the many privatised military functions that the US has created over the last 40 years. Companies such as DynCorp International, Fluor Corporation, AECOM, and KBR, Inc. run operations worldwide, including in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.26
  • They do not include ‘unofficial’ projects by the US military like the commandeering of Terminal 1 in Kotoka International Airport in Ghana’s capital city, in which US soldiers do not need passports or visas to enter (only their US military ID) and US military aircrafts are ‘free from boarding and inspection’.27 Terminal 1 is thus a de facto US military base. Ghana has ceded national sovereignty to the US.28
  • They exclude essential projects for the US military-industrial-digital communications complex. Many undersea cable terminus locations are controlled by US intelligence-cleared officials only. Control of the undersea cable communications of the world is one of the key US intelligence priorities.29 This is part of the NSA ‘Collect It All’ program to gather all communications of the world and store them in places like the Bluffdale Utah Data Centre (code-named ‘Bumblehive’), the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative data centre.30
  • They exclude secret military projects and locations (including host-nation facilities known as ‘lily pads’), although some have been exposed and included.31
  • There is little information regarding US military movements between locations, the nature of the activities carried out (such as troop movements or targeted assassinations), and the volume of goods, planes, and vessels.
  • Not all bases are equal in scale or function, assessing relative importance is near impossible. Sometimes a single building is classified as a base because it is discontiguous from other buildings a kilometre away. Some bases are massive and destructive to everything in their path – like the military facilities in Guam, destroying the natural environment and the lives of people living there. Others are known as small spy network installations.

The result of these limitations is a tendency to report on what is measurable, not what is unknown but strategic.

First, we provide a map using World Beyond War data that shows which countries have bases without showing the exact number in each country. This helps to reduce possible incorrect comparisons. The existence of even one US base within a country means that the country has already ceded some national sovereignty to the US. Second, for completeness, we include below two charts (one for the Global North and one for the Global South) that list countries with known bases as per World Beyond War.

Figure 6 shows the US has at least 902 foreign military bases. They are heavily concentrated in bordering regions or buffer zones around China and seriously undermine the sovereignty of Global South countries.32

Figure 7

United States military bases in Global North countries and territories

2023

Number of bases Country/territory
50+ Germany (171), Japan (98)
20-49 Italy (45), United Kingdom (25)
5-19 Australia (17), Belgium (12), Portugal (9), Romania (9), Norway (8), Israel (7), Netherlands (7), Greece (5), Poland (5)
1-4 Bulgaria (4), Iceland (3), Spain (3), Canada (2), Georgia (2), Hungary (2), Latvia (2), Slovakia (2), Cyprus (1), Denmark (1), Estonia (1), Greenland (1), Ireland (1), Kosovo (1), Luxembourg (1)
Total 445
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on World Beyond War

US foreign military bases not only exist in the Global South, but also have a significant presence in the Global North (Figure 7). More than two-thirds of known bases are concentrated in the two countries defeated in World War II: Germany and Japan.

Figure 8

United States military bases in Global South countries and territories

2023

Number of bases Country/Territory
50+ Rep. Korea (62)
20-49 Guam (45), Puerto Rico (34), Syria (28), Saudi Arabia (21)
5-19 Panama (15), Turkey (12), Philippines (11), Bahrain (10), Iraq (10), Marshall Islands (10), Bahamas (9), Belize (9), Honduras (9), Niger (9), Guatemala (8), Jordan (8), Kuwait (8), Oman (8), Pakistan (8), Egypt (7), Colombia (6), El Salvador (6), Somalia (6), Northern Mariana Islands (5), Peru (5), Qatar (5)
1-4 Cameroon (4), Costa Rica (4), Virgin Islands (U.S.) (4), Argentina (3), Central African Republic (3), Chad (3), Kenya (3), Mauritania (3), Nicaragua (3), Palau (3), Thailand (3), United Arab Emirates (3), American Samoa (2), Brazil (2), Diego Garcia (2), Djibouti (2), Dominican Republic (2), Gabon (2), Ghana (2), Mali (2), Singapore (2), Suriname (2), Tunisia (2), Uganda (2), Yemen (2), Antarctica (1), Aruba (1), Ascension (1), Botswana (1), Burkina Faso (1), Burundi (1), Cambodia (1), Chile (1), Cuba (1), DR Congo (1), Indonesia (1), Netherlands Antilles (1), Samoa (1), Senegal (1), Seychelles (1), South Sudan (1), Uruguay (1), Wake Island (1)
Total 457
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on World Beyond War

Figure 8 lists the locations of US foreign military bases in Global South countries and territories. The Republic of Korea hosts 62 permanent US military bases.

Figure 9

United States foreign military structures

No. of buildings, building area, land area, and no. of bases

2023

Country/territory Building Internalm2 Buildingstotal number Areahectares Military Basestotal number
Japan 10,339,000 12,079 41,715 76
Germany 9,135,000 12,537 2,682 93
Rep. Korea 5,631,000 5,832 12,262 62
Italy 2,011,000 2,032 945 31
Guam 1,382,000 2,807 25,322 45
United Kingdom 1,364,000 2,883 3,253 14
Kuwait 676,000 1,503 2,549 6
Qatar 661,000 663 2
Cuba 588,000 1,540 11,662 1
Turkey 478,000 817 1,356 8
Spain 419,000 889 3,802 2
Puerto Rico 411,000 794 7,042 29
Bahrain 390,000 468 83 9
Belgium 362,000 479 10
Marshall Islands 286,000 633 551 6
Greenland 220,000 197 94,306 1
Djibouti 171,000 379 459 2
Netherlands 151,000 150 5
United Arab Emirates 128,000 400 5,059 3
Portugal 114,000 170 532 6
Honduras 92,000 336 1
Singapore 86,000 120 3
Romania 70,000 179 177 4
Bahamas 62,000 179 219 6
Greece 61,000 85 41 4
Saint Helena 43,000 124 1,402 1
Australia 41,000 83 8,124 5
Bulgaria 39,000 93 2
Virgin Islands (U.S.) 26,000 29 5,964 5
Jordan 17,000 31 3,978 1
Cyprus 16,000 38 1
Israel 13,000 19 2
American Samoa 11,000 10 2 1
Niger 11,000 45 1
Poland 11,000 20 3
Curaçao 9,000 15 17 1
El Salvador 6,000 14 14 1
Northern Mariana Islands 5,000 17 6,499 10
Peru 5,000 7 1
Norway 3,000 4 1
Iceland 2,000 7 425 1
Kenya 2,000 5 1
Canada 91 1
Total 35,548,000 48,712 240,533 468
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on the Dept. of Defense

Figure 9 shows the scale of the US military footprint: 36 million square metres in 49,000 buildings covering 245,000 hectares. Ranked by number of buildings, the three Axis powers are in the top four.

Whilst the sun now happily sets without concern for the British Empire, Figure 10 shows how large the UK network of bases remains, with its focus on West Asia and Africa.

US and UK Military Invasions, Interventions, and ‘Deployments’

NATO countries conduct extensive military deployments and interventions worldwide, supported by their vast network of bases.

Figures 11 and 12 are for the year 2022 only. Imperialist forces deployed 317 military operations in Global South countries and 137 in Global North ally nations, totalling 454 (45 of which are not UN member states). The imperialist nations who carried out the highest number of military deployments include the US (56), the UK (32), France (31), Italy (20), Germany (17), Spain (15), Canada (13), and the Netherlands (13) (Figure 11).33

Figure 12 shows how Africa and West Asia remain the focal points of Western schemes, with the following five nations suffering the most military deployments in 2022 alone: Mali (31), Iraq (30), Lebanon (18), the Central African Republic (13), and South Sudan (13).34

Looking at the geography of US and UK bases and Global North deployments, it is clear where the frontiers of US policing lie and how Eurasia and regions that buffer it are the battlegrounds of our time.

The US and its Global North allies, especially the UK, have had centuries of interventions as indicated in Figures 13 and 14. Since Congressional Research Services (CRS) is an official US government publication, it serves as a primary source of data on US military intervention. It is used to demonstrate the scale and historical longue durée of US military intervention. However, it must be noted that CRS does not include secret missions and does not aggregate its data to differentiate between various types of US Armed Forces’ overseas interventions. The data is not organised based on the qualitative and quantitative nature or scale of the instances. The listed instances (over 480) vary greatly in size, duration, legal authorisation, and significance.35

The Military Intervention Project (MIP) uses a more comprehensive definition of military intervention that encompasses ‘united instances of international conflict or potential conflict outside of normal peacetime activities in which the purposeful threat, display, or use of military force by official US government channels is explicitly directed toward the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state actor’.36 MIP has not published their database, so exact instances of all the military interventions they identify are not yet publicly available. As such, this report has only accessed summary data from the publication ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’ (2023) and could not produce a map based on MIP.

As seen in Figure 13, as of June 2023, the acknowledged data from the US Congressional Research Service shows that the US Armed Forces have been deployed to 101 countries between 1798 and 2023.37 Figure 14 exposes the UK who has militarily invaded 170 countries and territories between 1169 and 2012.

According to MIP, between 1776 and 2019, the US carried out over 392 military interventions worldwide.38 Half of these operations were undertaken between 1950 and 2019, and 25% of them occurred in the post-Cold War period.39 The pace of US military interventions has clearly accelerated since 1991.

On International Working Women’s Day in 1950, Claudia Jones, a black communist and immigrant woman, addressed a rally of activists in the US. In different circumstances but with the same spirit, we share this report with the aim, to quote Jones, of ‘heightening [our] consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day, against monopoly oppression, against war and fascism’.40

PART II: Evolution of Imperialism

The New Stage of Imperialism

The US dollar monopoly and the switch from creditor to debtor nation that began in the 1970s, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, ushered in a period where the United States attempted to create a self-crafted unipolar world order. Unipolarity could not be fully established because states – which the US called ‘rogue states’ – refused to submit to this new system.41

Over the past fifteen years, the project of US unipolarity has been greatly weakened. The period between the ‘great financial recession’ of 2008 and the February 2022 conflict between NATO and Russia has consolidated a quantitative and qualitative change in global imperialism.

A key historical question flowing from this has been the depth and consequences of inter-imperialist rivalries. This has deep strategic and political implications: will other imperialist powers break with the US on fundamental issues or subordinate their own interests to those of the US?

Today, the facts show these differences are no longer strategic. Imperialism has consolidated a new stage of existence best described as Hyper-Imperialism. Later, we explain why we chose this term.

Some of the features of this new stage include the following:

  • China has emerged as the largest and most dynamic economy in the world. The growth of the Global South exceeds that of the Global North. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in Asia is significantly higher than in the G7 countries.
  • Despite its remaining economic strengths, the US is facing meagre growth and is declining relative to the rise of the Global South (with China’s growth being a major locomotive). This is evidenced by total GDP, industry, trade, infrastructure, and 5G communications. The US is making aggressive attempts to curtail China’s economic growth and its role in global initiatives such as BRICS10. The US is leading the world into increased protectionism.
  • The US has rapidly advanced hybrid warfare, including US sanctions (inflicted on more than one in four countries around the world).42 The US seizure of national reserves (from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Afghanistan) has been a rude awakening to many in the Global South.
  • The US has now set its sights on the domination of Eurasia, where the West faces Russia and China, two powerful countries with a combined strong economic, technological, military, energy, and food capacity. The complete demilitarisation of the long border between China and Russia and their announced ‘no limits’ partnership is a testament to both countries’ common interests in peace and security.
  • There is a clear and present danger that imperialism will continue its militarist path and rely on its military dominance to offset its growing relative economic and political decline. The political and military interests of the imperialists have now become paramount. Short-term economic losses are being taken. 43 The interests of individual capitalists or groups are secondary.
  • US dollar hegemony, financialisation, and technological ability allow finance to move trillions of dollars in trades in milliseconds, which has changed the mechanics of capitalist accumulation and its ownership. European and Japanese capitalists invest their capital in the same structures as those of their US class brethren, albeit under the control of the latter.
  • The US enhanced its already vast ‘soft power’ infrastructure based on the rise of a new generation of advanced social media and video streaming, under the full control of US monopolies, all of whom are explicitly integrated into the US military industrial digital complex.
  • The contradictions between the imperialist countries are now non-antagonistic and secondary. Germany, Japan, France, and all other imperialist powers must subordinate their short-term and medium-term interests to the fundamental interests of the United States. Their work is coordinated in NATO+. Official policy documents state that their strategy on China is to de-risk. Yet, Germany’s Bundestag officials, for example, are leading the calls for the isolation of China, even though that entails a considerable loss of markets for ‘German’ manufacturers.44 There is also a simultaneous internal drive to re-militarise Germany.
  • New multilateral institutions and alternative development financing models emerging from the Global South are gaining momentum. This is evident by the breadth of support for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the growing interest in joining BRICS, now BRICS10. Nearly 80% of UN member states participate in the BRI, comprising around 64% of the global population with their combined economies representing 52% of the world’s GDP (Purchasing Power Parity) in 2022.45 BRICS10 countries now encompass 45.5% of the world population, with 35.6% of the share of the world GDP (PPP). In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10% of the world population, their share of the global GDP (PPP) is 30.4%.46
  • The Global South is losing confidence in the US and Europe’s economic, political, and moral leadership. China, not the US, facilitated Saudi Arabia and Iran’s breakthrough diplomatic agreement. Russia and China now conduct most of the trade between the two countries in their own currencies. BRICS10 is setting up a working group to explore alternatives to the use of the US dollar, including international payment systems and a possible new reserve currency. On the vote for the UN resolution on a ceasefire in Gaza (A/ES-10/L.25), the Global North was outnumbered, with 14 votes against and 120 in favour.
  • For the first time in over 600 years, there is now a credible economic and political alternative to the domination of world affairs by the Europeans and their descendant white-settler colonial states. First, is the socialist grouping led by China. Second, are the growing aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernisation, and multilateralism, emerging from the Global South.

Given these shifts, leaders of the US political ruling class at the Centre for New American Security (CNAS) – the Washington-based think tank and the US government’s intellectual core – have defined US geo-strategy as the dual defeat of Russia and China, which would mean that the Global North would gain control of Eurasia. The size, share of natural resources, military power, geographic proximity, and independence from imperialist domination of China and Russia are the key factors in their respective global outlook and strategic partnership.

These objective factors are much more dominant than the ideological ones. The US wants to accomplish their unfinished mission of de-nuclearising Russia. There are maps hanging in Washington that have been drawn to show both countries broken up into small chunks, vassal states of the West, without independence and certainly without nuclear weapons.

As pictured in Figure 15, China, Russia, the DPR Korea, and Iran are the four nuclear (or potentially nuclear) powers that are the centre of the frontline attack from imperialism. China and Russia are the top two targets, the former due to its economic strength and the latter due to its nuclear arsenal. Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Belarus are also immediate targets for regime change.

The world faces a very difficult and dangerous moment. Countries in the Global South are highly diverse and heterogeneous, do not form a bloc, and are not ideologically aligned. They certainly have no military alliances. Some – the Republic of Korea and the Philippines – have become enmeshed in the US military sphere.

What they do have is a shared history. They have suffered hundreds of years of colonial and semi-colonial abuse by the Global North. The whiter nations have spent the last fifty years trying to airbrush from history the terror they unleashed on the world’s darker peoples, including those who live within their own borders.

Western media revels in the vast differences within the Global South. The Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement, despite being weaker, continue to exist. The developments stronger sense of shared identity amongst Global South countries cannot be easily dismissed. The demand for national sovereignty is deeply democratic. It remains a crux matter for improving the lives of the popular classes in the Global South and is also a necessary step towards socialism.

The First World War (WWI) ushered in the Russian Revolution (1917), followed by the creation of the Soviet Union, the world’s first fully functioning workers’ state and a wave of revolutionary national liberation struggles. The Second World War (WWII) ended with the creation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (1948) and the People’s Republic of China (1949), which were followed by another wave of national liberation struggles that included important socialist victories, such as in Viet Nam (1954 and 1975) and Cuba (1959).

We are not living in a comparable period of revolutions today. Yet, there is a clear new mood and an awakening of the spirit to advance the incomplete national liberation projects that began in the two previous periods. The domination of the Western neo-colonial system is being questioned. We are witnessing ‘changes not seen in 100 years’ and entering a new period of history.

Summarily, we can say there are eight main contradictions evident in the world:47

  • Moribund US-led imperialism vs. emergent China-led socialism.
  • Parasitic rent-seeking capital vs. societies’ requirements for environmentally sustainable development, industry, agriculture, and employment.
  • US-led imperialism vs. the urgent necessity for national sovereignty of the socialist and capitalist countries within the Global South.
  • The ruling classes of the Global North vs. the bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries in the Global South.
  • The white supremacist ruling class of the G7 (and the rest of the Global North) vs. the popular classes (workers, peasants, and lower petty bourgeoise) in the darker nations of the Global South.
  • The bourgeoisie and upper strata of the Global South capitalist countries vs. the popular classes of the Global South.
  • Western imperialism vs. the future of the planet and human life.
  • The internal contradiction between the Global North bourgeoisie vs. millions of the working class (poor and increasingly growing sections of the skilled and semi-skilled) in the Global North.

As we have already begun to do with the military, we attempt here to analyse this new stage of imperialism, the internal functioning of the imperialist camp, and to examine the Global South’s composition and connotations to understand the world’s primary contradictions today.

Conquest, Racism, and Genocide: The Common History of the Imperialist Camp

The wealth of the Global North originated from historical theft through violent dispossession over centuries (Figure 16).48 Economic stagnation and demands for growth spurred the looting of resources from other regions. This began as early as the military invasions of the Crusades against Arab and Muslim areas of West Asia (1050–1291).

The end of the European Medieval Warm Period (which lasted from about 950AD to 1250AD), and the catastrophe of the Black Death (1346–1353) tilted things in favour of peasants, away from the aristocracy. The peasant rebellions and charters of the forest throughout Europe were a sign that capitalism’s future was far from sealed.

Europe then commenced its trajectory as a world hegemon through its militarised maritime powers, beginning as early as 1415 with Portugal’s invasion and capture of Ceuta, a fortified Moroccan port ­­– a date we use to mark the now over 600 years of Western domination. The first European colonial power, Portugal, used Genovese capital to fund its expeditions, and the rest of Europe followed suit in the 1400s.

The conquests of the darker nations of the world, the subsequent dispossession of peoples from their lands, and the subordination of their labour saw racial ideologies emerge. This ideological layer infiltrated the base and superstructure of both European societies and the peoples they conquered. It is most pronounced in the white settler colonial states, which were racial projects from the very beginning of their existence. Within these white settler colonial states, the US and Israel now represent the most acute, permanent, and deeply ingrained history of racial-religious projects.

Economic analysis shows that the real rise in capitalist investment in the UK began when slavery’s profits and plunder of countries such as India enabled the historic rise in fixed capital investment and was decisive in so-called capitalist primitive accumulation and the financing of the ‘industrial revolution’. In a 2022 study, Utsa Patnaik indicated that the UK extracted US$ 45 trillion (using a compound interest rate formula since it remains unrepaid) from India between 1765 to 1936.49 The overwhelming bulk of leading UK institutions profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racial ideological underpinning, in turn, has shaped the later development of both capitalism and imperialism.

Over the centuries, Europe created several further white-settler colonial projects outside its historic core in the Americas and Australasia, including in Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The ‘successful’ ones did not do so by settling on uninhabited land, the myth of terra nullius, but rather through genocide and military conquest in creating majority white populations and states. Germany perpetrated the first twentieth century genocide, murdering approximately 80,000 Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia between 1904 to 1908. Five of these remain today: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel, all projects of Britain – the latter having begun its colonial conquests in the mid-1500s in Ireland. . Britain’s role in the Americas resulted in the creation of the United States of America. The infamous British Balfour Declaration (1917) was central to the formation of Israel at the expense of the then-UK colony Palestine. The Zionist mission needed to create in Israel a barrier to the ‘barbaric hordes’ of Asia. No other nation is as influential in the US as Israel. The US, due to its size and role, remains the dominant force of world terrorism, but Israel has an outsized role in violence and military spending. It has nuclear weapons that the Western media conveniently downplays.

From creation to modern times, the US has been defined as a racial project. In American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1992), David E. Stannard estimated that within the first 150 years of the European conquest of the Americas, as many as 100 million Indigenous people may have died because of the conquest and its aftermath, including disease, warfare, and enslavement.

By 1860, nearly four million black people were slaves in the US alone.50 In 2022, over 720,000 black people were incarcerated in US prisons and jails. Black people represented 38% of the prison population despite being only 12% of the US population. The US has nearly 20% of all prisoners in the world despite having only 5% of the world’s population.51 Over 500 years after slavery began (with the earliest recorded arrival of a slave ship in 1519), the US still puts tens of thousands of black people in solitary confinement, despite this being considered a form of torture by the United Nations.52 It was only in 2013 that the state of Mississippi officially ratified the 13th amendment which abolished slavery – first officially noted in the constitution on 6 December 1865.53 We can only understand the ideology of the US ruling class by recognising the racialised character of its class structure.

The 2023 NATO declaration and the unified support for Israeli genocide against the Palestinians is ample proof that imperialism cannot be divorced from historic racial aspects. For over 600 years, European and white-settler states have sought to and succeeded in dominating the whole world.

Since WWII, the US has sought to extend this rule for at least a millennium. Initially, all the states within the imperialist camp were white. With the absolute defeat of Japan in WWII, including using atomic bombs, Japan was assimilated into the imperialist camp, eventually achieving what the South Africans coined ‘honorary white’ status. This was particularly possible because Japan was a previously fascist power that also tied its imperialist expansion to racialised practices.

Imperialism also has racialised patriarchal foundations, which trace back to how the sexual division of labour, the control of women’s reproductive capacities, and the exploitation of women’s unpaid work were reshaped within Western colonisation, as preconditions for the international expansion of capital accumulation.54 From then to now, gender-based subordination and violence have been used extensively in warfare and conquest, from the sexual slavery of tens of thousands of ‘comfort women’ during Japan’s military occupation in China and Indonesia, to the current sexual exploitation that unfolds inside the US military bases in the Philippines.55

It is not an accident that the United States shows up in seven of the eight categories of historical violence in Figure 16. This process did not begin in the 1890s with the development of modern imperialism. It can be traced back to 1492 with the first European invasion of the Americas.

In October 2023, out of 193 members of the UN, only the United States and Israel voted against ending the illegal embargo and blockade against heroic Cuba. When an initial draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza was drafted on 16 October 2023, not one single white member of the US House of Representatives initially signed it.56 There is a throughline from the Portuguese slave traders in West Africa to the Israeli and US genocidaires in Palestine.

History and Definition of ‘Hyper-Imperialism’

Pre-History

The pre-history of modern imperialism began in 1415 with the advent of European maritime expansion. Africa was the first victim, followed by the colonisation of the Americas and the genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples, and then the rapid dependence by Europe (and its settler states) on blood-soaked capital from human slavery, which lasted 400 years.

Britain’s existence as a modern power started with the vampiric dependency on the blood of slaves and colonial labourers. The British were responsible for millions of deaths in the Atlantic slave trade and its colonial conquests. Slave labour in the Americas – as well as the British capture of a good part of Spanish and Portuguese colonies’ surplus – provided the ‘special’ ingredient to so-called primitive or originary accumulation (‘ursprüngliche Akkumulation’, the term used by Marx in Capital).57

US imperialism, in addition to starting as a racial project, has a unique path of capitalist development, including the following:

  • A highly profitable capitalist form of slavery.
  • A state unbridled in its expansion in a large territory, without any holdovers from feudalism.
  • The only major imperialist country whose territory was not militarily attacked by other imperialists.
  • An imperial power beginning after Europe had already divided the world.
  • A self-defined unlimited power through the Monroe Doctrine (1823), as well as concepts such as Manifest Destiny and US exceptionalism.

Since the advent of modern industry, the capitalist world system has consisted of two successive periods of dominance by a single capitalist power – first the UK and then the US. From the late eighteenth century to WWII, Britain was considered the dominant force in international finance. However, this openly collapsed when Britain abandoned the pound’s convertibility to gold and ended the gold/pound standard in 1931. In reality, US dominance was clear from WWI and acknowledged US hegemony began in 1945, with Europe in tatters. At the core of the imperialist system, therefore, is what can be called the Anglo-American Project.

The size of the US economy overtook Britain’s in the 1870s, but US per capita GDP (PPP) did not equal Britain’s until the twentieth century. By 1913, the US economy was twice the size of Britain’s in GDP (PPP).58 However, it was not until 1945 (with the US being five times greater than the UK) that US hegemony was fully and formally established. At that point, the US was manufacturing more than half of the products in the world.

History

Vladimir Lenin’s work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), drawing heavily on the work of Rudolf Hilferding’s 1910 book Finance Capital, explained the rise of finance capital during the last period of the nineteenth century – marking the shift from classical liberal capitalism to finance-driven imperialism.59 The increase in the organic composition of capital meant that greater and greater outlays of capital were needed to expand production. This went beyond the ability of most individual capitalists engaging in classical competition, leading to domination by oligopolies and monopolies with the reorganisation of the financial system to meet their requirements.

In parallel with this were technological changes. The switch from steam power to electric power in the 1890s saw a leap in the productive forces and of factory production: higher energy efficiency, lower maintenance, decentralisation, a reconfigured factory floor layout, mass production, and a massive increase in the division and socialisation of labour. This type of rapid change in the productive forces happened again later with the invention of the transistor and the rise of computers.

Lenin noted five characteristics of this new stage: the rise of finance capital and the financial oligarchy; the concentration of production and monopolies; the export of capital; the rise of monopolist cartels, which ‘shared’ the world among themselves; and the completion of the territorial division of the whole world amongst the largest capitalist powers, along with the increasing conflict between the imperialist states.

These developments meant that a new, highest, and last stage of capitalism had begun, i.e., the stage of modern imperialism. There cannot be another new stage of capitalism (as a system with no competition would not be capitalism).

Lenin’s book was written on the eve of the Soviet Revolution. Once the Soviet Union was formed, the conflict between labour and capital changed qualitatively and was no longer solely a domestic contradiction within countries but included contradictions between states with a different class basis.

Modern imperialism fully inherits the history of the European project’s domination and exploitation of the world. Lenin defines super-profits, a result of modern imperialism, as ‘a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world’.60

Post-WWI, international capitalist divisions again intensified during the Great Depression (1929–1939), as various imperialist powers locked their economies behind tariffs and other barriers. Before the end of WWII, the US-led reorganisation of the global financial system was agreed to in Bretton Woods in July 1944. The convertibility of the main currencies into the US dollar and the US dollar into gold established the supremacy of the new ‘green gold’. To make sure its regulations were implemented and followed, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), later, the World Bank, were established. These two institutions have been key pillars of US domination over the Global South since then.

Post-World War Two

1945 saw the decisive victory by the United States among the capitalist powers, and the US dollar began its domination. The period from 1945 to 1971 was an expansionary phase of US imperialism. The US did suffer significant political losses during this period, including a number of newly formed socialist projects. However, confident of its own productive supremacy, the US began a radical reorganisation of the global capitalist system after WWII. It dismantled tariffs and other protectionist measures that it deemed unnecessary to its own advancement (but retained subsidy measures that advantaged its own capitalist firms). The post-WWII new ‘globalised’ organisation of world capitalism differed significantly in its international structure from the pre-1945 capitalist system. It achieved a more rapid development of the productive forces than the era of the previous colonial empires. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, behind the veneer of free trade, there were always monopolies, as Karl Marx said with respect to Britain. The US further developed this domination through imperialist monopolies guarded by an international military apparatus.

Formed in 1949, NATO initially had three objectives: first, to stop the spread of the communist spectre into Western Europe; second, to guarantee the military subordination of all other imperialists to the US; and third to create a military bloc to contain and eventually overthrow the socialist bloc countries. The US also began the domestication of the European elite and elicited their support for the North Atlantic project through economic integration and dependency (symbolised by the Marshall Plan beginning in 1948) and political subordination (such as through institutions like the Bilderberg Meeting, beginning in 1954).61

The US had three objectives in the colonial world. First, finalise the defeat of European control and remove barriers to US economic interests. Second, prohibit their alignment with the socialist bloc. Third, defeat any communist-inspired or -led revolutionary projects.

Outside a few exceptions, such as Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, the US never had the full aim or desire to rule or manage the full scope of political, economic, and social relations at the local level in what was then called the Third World. Using military power, covert operations, economic inducements, and American ‘soft power’, the US developed a strategy of neo-colonialism: nominal political independence and near-total economic subordination. The first institution responsible for the conscription of Europeans into the US hegemonic project post-WWII, the IBRD, pivoted to its work in the Global South once the Marshall Plan kicked in.

Neo-liberalism

The next phase of imperialism is generally called neo-liberalism. It emerged as a response to the economic stagnation that began in the 1960s (which became acute by the crisis of 1974) and the political threat of left-led Third World Projects.62 Neo-liberalism was first experimented with in Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976) by the ‘Chicago Boys’ under Milton Friedman. Both were implemented through bloody coup d’états that killed tens of thousands of people to eradicate support for left projects, with support from the US. The elections of Margaret Thatcher (1979) in UK and Ronald Reagan (1980) in the US paved the way for its global ascendancy.

The US had become, in current terms, a debtor nation by 1981. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 enabled the US to engage in a more naked imperialist projection, especially in the military realm. Salient features of neo-liberalism included the following:

  • The world experienced economic globalisation and the financialisation of monopoly capitalism, with ‘Super-Imperialist’ financial monopoly privileges created by the US sustaining the removal of the US dollar from the gold standard.
  • The US aggressively extended its intellectual property rights over the whole world and achieved near-perpetual global monopolies. The tangible goods economy was subordinated to the virtualised economy. Large areas of petty production were ruthlessly destroyed.
  • The International Monetary Fund and World Bank consistently pursued austerity policies that impoverished and saddled the Global South with large levels of debt. That debt could only be repaid through exporting things that the Global North would pay for in US dollars. Unlike any other bank, the World Bank got to author its creditors economic policy, shrinking the state, and deflating local currency to secure the primacy of the US dollar. Privatisation, enclosures of the public sector, the withdrawal of the state role in the economy and society (especially in the Global South), and increased casualisation of labour were core demands of their policies. This resulted in increased poverty and inequality, such as the intensification of women’s unpaid reproductive work.63
  • The disarticulation of factory production and supply chains (helped by huge technology changes and US subsidised oil prices) created not only massive increases in productivity but huge advantages to global capital and its multinational corporations at the expense of the working class. Capital was easily able to move parts of production between various small, weak Global South countries, and late-entrant industrial Global South countries like Brazil and South Africa suffered de-industrialisation. Socialism and China’s large size protected it from this fate.
  • There was a shift from production to speculative finance and monopoly-rent seeking capital. A strong deregulation of financial markets all over the world – and a revolution in communication technologies – made possible huge flows of financial speculative capital in real time.
  • A new advanced form of monopoly production and circulation became evident in multiple sectors of the economy. Notably, within the rise of digital monopoly capital, a few monopolies and oligopolies, such as Google, dominate the whole world (except for China, Russia, Iran, DPR Korea, Cuba and a few others).
  • There was a growth in the coercive state, growing high levels of inequality, and a rise in neo-fascist populism.
  • The rise of Western cultural, political, and foreign policy hegemony was possible due to the pervasiveness and economic monopoly status of US technologies, including Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter.64

Michael Hudson’s work on Super Imperialism (1972) describes the great defeat of the rest of the world when the US abandoned the gold standard.65 Rather than buy gold to maintain their currencies, the US forced other central banks to recycle their dollar surpluses into buying US Treasury bonds. This enabled it to force the rest of the world to pay its debts, including the debts incurred from the war against the people of Viet Nam. The US became a debtor nation but was able to outsource its debt through the instrument of the Dollar-Wall Street complex.

Technology and Soft Power

Accompanying this process were tremendous changes in technology and the development of the productive forces. Semi-conductors, for example, saw a 100-billion-fold increase in transistor density between 1954, when the first single working silicon transistor was created, and in June 2023, with the release of the Apple M2 Ultra chip with 134 billion transistors.66

The US tech sector power came into existence, first, due to the importance of technological advancement to the military-industrial complex and, second, to the US dominance in world trade that allowed them to flex their commercial muscles to reinforce the centrality of Silicon Valley. Thus, Silicon Valley is both an enabler of core state military intelligence functions and one of the beneficiaries of it.

The underlying nature of what is called the ‘network effect’ allowed for rapidly established ‘natural’ monopolies and oligopolies in many technology areas. Like phone exchanges of a hundred years ago, once a company like Google passed a threshold of market share in search functions and monetised it, they became an oligopoly. Technologies like cloud computing enabled Amazon to move from being solely a retail industry monopoly to challenging Google and Microsoft in new markets.

The term ‘soft power’ was developed by Joseph Nye in the late 1980s, but it is just a label for the extension of the aspect of Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony to US imperialism. The following ‘industries’ are part of US global hegemony: culture, information, entertainment, non-profits (NGO’s), academia, and think tanks. All of these rely on a common centralised communications industry, which covers undersea optical cables, satellites, telecommunications networks, massive data centres, digital communications firms like Twitter (X), Facebook, and Google.

There have been approximately five stages of communications technologies in the last century:

  1. Mass medium radio, the telephone, and ‘talkies’ (1920–1950).
  2. Television and the rise of Madison Avenue advertising (1950–1970).
  3. Digital revolution, the widescale growth of the Internet (which actually began as a US military project in 1969) (1980–2000).
  4. Mobile and first-generation social media (2000­–2005).
  5. Pervasive mobile, smart devices, and OTT streaming video monopolies, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, CGI, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and soon, AI influenced media (2005–present).

Each of these five generations of technologies were commercialised and then ‘weaponised’ under the watchful eye of US military and intelligence agencies. Hollywood is infamous for these ties. The fifth generation of technologies represent a quantitative and qualitative leap in capacity. US tech and media companies, proxies for US hegemony, now effectively control the bulk of voices that the youth of the Global South hear. While X may be declining and was mainly a space for the chattering classes, Facebook and Instagram and streaming services like Netflix penetrate the lives of billions of the working class.

Let’s take the case of India. During the first ten months of 2023, there were 510 million unique internet viewers in India, who spent a total of 371 billion (B) hours with 2.9 trillion views. 105B of these hours were spent on social media, 74B on entertainment, 10.5B on news, 10B on retail, and 12.8B on other (mainly finance). During the month of October 2023, those ages 18–24 years old spent on average 940 minutes on Instagram, 708 on YouTube, 387 on Facebook, and 117 on X. For all ages the time spent on Facebook, Instagram, and X has more than doubled since January 2020. During October 2023, the following OTT video streaming led in millions(M) of viewers: 170M – Disney, 99M – MX Player (Indian firm reportedly under talks with Amazon), 92M ­– JioCinema (Reliance, Paramount, and James Murdoch), and others like ZEE5, Netflix, and Sony. Despite the rise of Bollywood, Hollywood is still present in India.67

Globally, Western media has used four types of censorship with social media: Shadow banning or ghosting (secret suppression of viewers), white and blacklists (prioritising desirable content; deprecating or eliminating unwanted content), private non-visible algorithmic manipulation, and now even direct removal and suppression of content and/or users.

An estimated 73% of internet traffic is conducted by so-called ‘bad bots’, including state-controlled fake user accounts by the United States and Israel in particular.68 More than half of this traffic uses evasion techniques to mimic human behaviour. These techniques are systematically deployed for a range of US soft-power campaigns, including for elections and popular sentiment.

The Financial Times, noting ‘America’s cultural supremacy’, worries on behalf of the empire thus: ‘To retain immense cultural reach is a wonderful cushion for a post-peak superpower. The trick is to not fall asleep on it’.69

However, the level of detailed control of every single phone call, message, and key stroke by US intelligence results in very high stakes for the Global South. Digital sovereignty requires serious attention and cannot be dismissed.

Fictitious Capital

Karl Marx critically analysed the rise of fictitious capital in Volume III of Capital.70 The latest report from the Bank for International Settlements reports that the total notional value of outstanding derivatives (the three types of which are interest rate, foreign exchange, and equity) reached US$ 715 trillion at the end of June 2023, up 16% in six months, over four times the world GDP (PPP), and over seven times the world GDP in current exchange rate (CER) terms.71 The gross market value of these derivatives was nearly US$ 20 trillion.

Hedge funds such as Bridgewater Associates and private equity firms such as BlackRock engage in this hyper-speculation. One analogy used to help explain derivatives is that if you stand between two mirrors at a slight angle to each other, you can see a long series of images of yourself. You remain real, but the images are ephemeral.

Whilst the capital is fictitious, the results are not. The expropriation of the natural goods and companies of the Global South now happens at a scale of trillions of US dollars at a speed of milliseconds.72

2008–2022: A Transition

The defeat of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a new feeling of eternal confidence in imperialism from US capital. Now they could expropriate the markets of the former Soviet Union and have the sense of accomplishing Manifest Destiny. The idea of the ‘end of history’ and the emergence of the sentiment of unilateralism dominated the thinking of the Council of Foreign Relations and other strategic US institutions.

Confronted with a decline in the rate of capital creation in their economies, and as financialisation and intellectual property rights enhanced the prevalence of monopolies, a larger proportion of capital avoided productive investments and increasingly sought short-term gains, becoming even more speculative.

The 2007–2008 financial crisis – what we call the start of the Third Great Depression – meant that previous tools to fight stagnation proved increasingly ineffective. China’s imperviousness to this crisis added to the alarm of the Global North. The following 14 years saw a transition period marking the end of the neo-liberalism phase. From the early 2000s until 2022, major shifts began to take place. Some accelerated the consolidation of capital – others signalled the beginning of an existential crisis of capital:

  1. The most important single change was the rise of China as the largest economy in the world when measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).
  2. The Global South moved from 40% of world GDP to 60% when measured in PPP.
  3. The Third Great Depression led to a further drop in GDP growth rates. By 2022, 10-year average per capita growth rates in Europe were less than 1% and in the US 1.5%.
  4. European and Japanese capital were ‘de-nationalised’, accelerated by the rapid changes to the capital markets. They are now fully integrated, dependent on, and subordinate to the US on fundamental issues.
  5. China consolidated itself as a socialist project and the Western hope for a new ‘Chinese Gorbachev’ completely failed.
  6. NATO countries increased the number of their global military interventions but were confronted by a series of defeats such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even, to an extent, Syria.
  7. The US decision to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and use Ukraine as a proxy at the centre of the move to control Russia resulted in an important military conflict between nuclear powers.
  8. The US, facing relative economic and political hegemony, began to massively expand the use of sanctions, lawfare, tariffs, and seizure of foreign currency reserves.
  9. To attempt to stop China’s technological advance, the US began using tariffs and protectionism. It began a full-fledged soft power attack on China and started a New Cold War.
  10. Major voices in the US ruling class openly talk of the possibility of using its military hegemony to block China. Since they have also ‘lost’ Russia, at least with Vladimir Putin in power, the US is focused on planning how to complete their historic mission to subordinate Eurasia once and for all. This would ultimately entail the de-nuclearisation and potential dismemberment of both Russia and China.

Periodisation of Imperialism

Imperialism has changed over the last 100 years. We can roughly describe a few key periods as follows:

  • 1890–1916: The rise of modern imperialism.
  • 1917–1939: The birth of the Soviet Union, the decline of British hegemony, continued extreme inter-imperialist rivalry, the rise of fascism, the spread of socialist ideas across the world, and the Great Depression.
  • 1940–1945: The worldwide battle against fascism, and German and Japanese Aggression.
  • 1945–2008: The establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the era of US hegemony within the imperialist camp, the advance of national liberation struggles in the Global South and end of direct colonialism, the rising importance of socialist projects like Cuba and Viet Nam, dramatic changes in the productive forces, and numerous wars in which the US murdered tens of millions. This period could be subdivided into two parts: the so-called golden era of US imperialism during the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1970s and the turn to stagnation and neo-liberalism.
  • 2008–2023: The false hope of US unilateralism was replaced with an awareness that a powerful non-white socialist project would, within a lifetime, overcome the US economically. In 1918, on the 73rd day of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Vladimir Lenin left his office at the Smolny Institute (Petrograd) and danced in the snow. He celebrated the fact that the Soviet experiment had outlasted the Paris Commune. On 18 November 2023, the People’s Republic of China marked 27,077 days of existence, exceeding the duration of the Soviet socialist project. As noted by President Xi Jinping, we are entering a period not seen in 100 years.

In summary, these changes show a transition to what is best described as a new stage of imperialism: Hyper-Imperialism.

PART III: The World Defined

The Global North Defined

The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc at present composed of 49 countries, as pictured in Figure 17. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. This US-led bloc is the imperialist camp in today’s world.

As pictured in Figure 18, the Global North is fundamentally a North Atlantic project, with two outlying countries – Australia and Japan.

Inspired by Samir Amin’s concept of the Triad but expanding and modifying it to suit the realities of the present, the organisation of the Global North bloc can be best understood as layers of four concentric rings.73 The position of each country within each ring depends on its rapport with the United States and how close its intelligence services are to those of the US, which is explained below.

GN Ring 1: Six Core US-Led Anglo-American Imperialist Countries

Figure 19

Ring 1: US-led Anglo-American core

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General US Intelligence Relations
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bil.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
5 Eyes 9 Eyes 14 Eyes
United States 1945 338 25,463 2.1% 76,343 Y Y Y
United Kingdom 1945 68 3,717 1.5% 54,824 Y Y Y
Canada 1945 38 2,265 1.8% 58,316 Y Y Y
Australia 1945 26 1,629 2.4% 62,026 Y Y Y
Israel 1949 9 502 4.1% 51,990
New Zealand 1945 5 266 3.1% 51,962 Y Y Y
Total 6 countries 485 33,843 70,326
Percentage of World 6.1% 20.7%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 19

Ring 1: US-led Anglo-American core

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military
NATOyr. joined NATO+ Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
; world avg. (times)
US Bases
excl. US
Intra-Imperialist
Deployments
Military
Deployments
to GS
Nuclear
weapons
power
United States 1949 Y 1,536,859 12.6 22 34 Y
United Kingdom 1949 Y 68,463 2.8 25 8 24 Y
Canada 1949 Y 26,896 1.9 2 6 7
Australia Y 32,299 3.4 17 8
Israel 23,406 7.2 7 Y
New Zealand Y 2,829 1.5 4
Total 1,690,752 51 36 77
Percentage of World 58.9%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, World Beyond War, IISS

Ring 1 (listed in Figure 19) represents the inner core of imperialism. The white English-speaking victors of  WWII, the Five Eyes (US, UK in 1946, Canada in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956) established themselves as the Praetorian Guard of what can be called the Anglo-American Project. It is composed of the UK and the white settler states it spawned. Israel, treated by the US as the sixth eye, is unofficially part of the inner core. The cohesion of countries in this ring remains; an example is the trilateral security alliance AUKUS, created in September 2021.

A fundamental key to understanding the Global North is the special relationship between the United States and Israel. They are white settler states, founded on and justified by white supremacy and religious zealotry, and are the core of Ring 1 of the Global North. The US was established by white, religious extremists who, in 1690, conceived and established their colonial settlements as ‘plantations of religion’.74 They believed that only they, the white Puritans, could realise God’s plan in the ‘American wilderness’. Their genocide against the native Americans and enslavement of Africans were viewed as the inevitable and obvious outcome of their racial and religious superiority.

Israel was the creation of British and US imperialism and was organised by the leaders of the Zionist movement. It was described by the military expert for The Guardian, Herbert Sidebotham, during WWI as follows: ‘The only possible colonists of Palestine are the Jews… at once a protection against the alien East and a mediator between it and us, a civilisation distinct from ours yet imbued with our political ideas’.75 For the imperialists, ‘freedom from discrimination’ was only the pretext for the formation of the Judaic and white supremacist state of Israel.

As indicated earlier, between 1776, the year of independence from the British, and 2019, the US has spent 228 of 245 years in war/conflict, and only 17 years in ‘peace’.

During its history, the United Kingdom’s forces (or forces with a British mandate) have invaded, had some control over, or fought conflicts in 171 of the world’s 193 countries that are currently UN member states, or nine out of ten of all countries. 76

In its 72 years of existence, Israel has ‘officially’ started 16 military conflicts with the Palestinians and other Arab nations. One-fourth of them were under the rule of Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999; 2009–2023). Of course, not included in these ‘official’ statistics are the multiple incursions by Zionist settlers and their army brethren against Palestinians.

Israeli white racialism and religious demagogy have morphed from ideological justifications into material forces that have contributed to the qualitative change in imperialism today. This is exemplified by, among other things, the per capita military spend of the US, which is 12.6 times that of the world’s average, with Israel’s 7.2 times, the two largest in the Global North. In the first month following 7 October 2023, Israel killed more civilians than all the civilian deaths in the Ukraine since 2022 and detonated more tons of explosives than the combined weight of the two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.77

The US Congressional Research Service reported that: ‘Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II… Israel is the first international operator of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Department of Defence’s fifth-generation stealth aircraft, considered to be the most technologically advanced fighter jet ever made’.78 Adjusting for inflation, US aid to Israel from 1951 to 2022 totalled US$ 317.9 billion.79

Nonetheless, it is the US — not Israel — who is driving the agenda in the region following 7 October 2023. Blinken’s ‘shuttle diplomacy’ sets the rules and tones for Israel’s military operations and the ‘proportionate’ actions against the Palestinian resistance and regional powers. The US provides the necessary political and military support for Israel to eliminate the Palestinian resistance ‘permanently’, deter Iran and its allies, and push forward normalisation with Arab neighbouring countries. All these US interventions seek to lay the ground for building the planned India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which is not only an economic corridor but essentially an ideological and political plan to block China’s increasing integration and influence in the region. Therefore, Israel constitutes a ‘central junction’ for the US-programmed IMEC, which is outlined within the framework of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment (PGI), a Global North world plan, aiming essentially at countering China’s BRI and any form of Global South long-lasting cooperation.

GN Ring 2: Nine Core European Imperialist Powers

Figure 20

Ring 2: European core

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General US Intelligence Relations
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
5 Eyes 9 Eyes 14 Eyes
Germany 1973 83 5,370 1.2% 64,086 Y
France 1945 65 3,696 1.1% 56,305 Y Y
Italy 1955 59 3,059 0.4% 51,827 Y
Spain 1955 48 2,272 1.4% 47,711 Y
Netherlands 1945 18 1,244 1.9% 70,728 Y Y
Belgium 1945 12 735 1.5% 63,268 Y
Sweden 1946 11 695 2.4% 66,091 Y
Norway 1945 5 427 1.6% 78,014 Y Y
Denmark 1945 6 419 2.1% 71,332 Y Y
Total 9 countries 306 17,918 58,334
Percentage of World 3.8% 10.9%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 20

Ring 2: European core

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military
NATOyr. joined NATO+ Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Bases
excl. US
Intra-Imperialist
Deployments
Military
Deployments
to GS
Nuclear
weapons
power
Germany 1955 Y 55,760 1.9 171 8 9
France 1949 Y 53,639 2.3 5 26 Y
Italy 1949 Y 33,490 1.6 45 5 15
Spain 1982 Y 20,307 1.2 3 3 12
Netherlands 1949 Y 15,607 2.5 7 6 7
Belgium 1949 Y 6,867 1.6 12 2 6
Sweden Y 7,722 2.0 2 7
Norway 1949 Y 8,388 4.3 8 2 7
Denmark 1949 Y 5,468 2.6 1 4 4
Total 207,247 247 37 93
Percentage of World 7.2%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, World Beyond War, IISS

As listed in Figure 20, the countries in Ring 2 are the closest to the US-led inner core, namely Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Ring 2 is defined by each country’s proximity and affinity, and the trustworthiness of their intelligence functions to those of the United States.

‘Politics is a concentrated expression of economics’, Lenin explained.80 The military function is the essential expression of this political concentration. Post-WWII, and with the advent of the Internet and social media, the control of communications and all its related functions has become a qualitatively new strategic intelligence asset of the state and has further advanced the US’s dominant hegemonic control of vast portions of the world.

Thanks to the work of Wikileaks and the bravery of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, the world was given its first public view into the secret world of intelligence relations among the imperialist forces.81

Instructively, the US prioritised its level of trust beyond the Five Eyes and the hidden special relationship with Israel. Subsequently, secretly but formally, the US created the Nine Eyes, which added Denmark, Norway, France, and the Netherlands. The Europeans were unwilling to have it be known, even privately, that Israel was a formal member. In addition, Israel did not fully trust many European powers with intelligence, so all parties allowed the US to continue having its special relationship with Israel.

Fifty years after WWII, the United States continued to exclude the former fascist powers of Germany, Italy, and Spain from the Five and Nine Eyes. Following the end of WWII, the US built an international system that was premised on the subordination and integration of the former fascist powers and the rest of Europe. This process of subordination and integration was evident in the military apparatus constructed by the United States, with NATO as one of the lynchpins. Establishing a system of US military bases in the defeated powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – allowed Washington to set aside any talk of a sovereign military or diplomatic project for the defeated.

In 2001, five other countries (Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden) were added to the Nine Eyes to become the Fourteen Eyes.82 Between 2005–2009, the US became increasingly alarmed about Russia and China. The unofficial ‘Pivot to Asia’ had begun; the official launch was delayed until Barak Obama took office in 2012.83

GN Ring 3: Japan and Fourteen Lesser European Imperialist Powers

Figure 21

Ring 3: Japan + secondary European Powers

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General US Intelligence Relations
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
5 Eyes 9 Eyes 14 Eyes
Japan 1956 124 6,145 0.5% 49,090
Switzerland 2002 9 754 1.9% 86,262
Ireland 1955 5 684 8.9% 132,359
Austria 1955 9 604 1.2% 66,889
Portugal 1955 10 439 1.6% 42,692
Greece 1945 10 393 0.6% 37,526
Finland 1955 6 324 1.0% 58,445
Luxembourg 1945 1 91 2.6% 141,333
Cyprus 1960 1 47 2.5% 51,774
Malta 1964 1 31 6.1% 59,408
Iceland 1946 < 1 25 3.2% 67,176
Andorra 1993 < 1 5 1.3% 66,155
San Marino 1992 < 1 3 1.8% 79,633
Liechtenstein 1990 < 1
Monaco 1993 < 1
Total 15 countries 176 9,543 53,935
Percentage of World 2.2% 5.8%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 21

Ring 3: Japan + secondary European Powers

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military
NATOyr. joined NATO+ Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Bases
excl. US
Intra-Imperialist
Deployments
Military
Deployments
to GS
Nuclear
weapons
power
Japan Y 45,992 1.0 98 3
Switzerland 6,145 2.0 2 8
Ireland 1,164 0.6 1 3 4
Austria Y 3,626 1.1 3 3
Portugal 1949 Y 3,500 0.9 9 1 6
Greece 1952 Y 8,105 2.2 5 4 5
Finland 2023 Y 4,823 2.4 1 6
Luxembourg 1949 Y 565 2.4 1 1 3
Cyprus 494 1.1 1 1
Malta 87 0.5 1
Iceland 1949 Y 3
Andorra
San Marino
Liechtenstein
Monaco
Total 74,501 118 15 40
Percentage of World 2.6%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, World Beyond War, IISS

Ring 3 (listed in Figure 21), though made up of 15 countries, has a special focus on Japan, which has become a decisive front-line asset in the effort to curtail and suppress China and Russia. However, we have added here other secondary Western European powers, who, although loyal to the United States, are less strategic than others. A few of them, like Portugal, Finland, and Iceland, are part of NATO. Portugal is the only former fascist colonial power not in Ring 2 due to its small importance to US military intelligence (they are not in the Fourteen Eyes) and its smaller GDP.

Therefore, the third ring of the imperialist camp includes Japan and another 14 European countries (Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta, Iceland, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Monaco).

In the past several centuries, countries in the first three rings of the imperialist camp, other than Ireland, have caused massive human disasters. The United Kingdom, the US, and the Netherlands appropriated wealth through the African slave trade. Europeans implemented colonialism worldwide; the entirety of the Americas, nearly all of Africa, and more than half of Asia were dominated by colonisers. Anglo-Saxon white immigrants forcibly expelled or murdered Indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. There were several imperialist attempts to break up China, including the First Opium War, when Hong Kong was ceded in 1842, and then Taiwan at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. In 1884–1885, European colonisers arbitrarily partitioned Africa at the Berlin Conference. This violent methodology of the partitioning has continued unabated until today, as evidenced by the 2011 partition of Sudan and by the ongoing destruction of the country and its people. In 1919, they dismantled the Austro-Hungarian and German empires through the Treaty of Versailles, transferred rights of some areas of China (Shandong) to Japan, handed German colonies in Africa to victorious European powers, and re-established a world order led by Anglo-American forces. As a result of internal crises and imperialist rivalries, fascist states arose within this camp, triggering WWII and leading to the death of at least 50 million Soviet and Chinese people. In the final stages of WWII, the US used atomic bombs on civilians. To this day, the US still refuses to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons and has unilaterally withdrawn from key nuclear and missile treaties.

Since the end of WWII, Japan has become a strategic US ally. With the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida accepted the dominance of the US military over his country. During the Cold War, Japan played a significant role in containing the Soviet Union and China on the Eastern front, and this role continues today. Japan is the second country with the most US military bases as of July 2023 (98), only after Germany (171). To date, none of the German bases are in the former German Democratic Republic.

Although not officially a NATO member, since 2014, Japan has cooperated with NATO on an individual basis – most recently agreeing to the Individually Tailored Partnership Program in July 2023 – and has participated in the past two NATO summits. Japan also regularly participates in meetings held at NATO Headquarters in Brussels between NATO Allies and the four partners in the Indo-Pacific region at the level of ambassadors. This practical incorporation can be explained by the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, which states that ‘cooperation with partners in this region is key to addressing the increasingly complex global security environment, including Russia’s war on Ukraine, the shift in the global balance of power and the rise of China, and the security situation on the Korean Peninsula’.

In addition, Japan is the only G7 member not part of NATO. In 2022, China was labelled by the Japanese government as ‘the greatest strategic challenge ever to securing the peace and stability of Japan’ and announced plans to double official military spending to 2% of the GDP (on par with NATO countries) by 2027, overturning Japan’s post-WWII cap, which had official limited military spending to 1% of GDP.84

GN Ring 4: Nineteen European Former Eastern Bloc Integrated into NATO

Figure 22

Ring 4: European former Eastern Bloc

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General US Intelligence Relations
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
5 Eyes 9 Eyes 14 Eyes
Poland 1945 40 1,643 3.7% 43,624
Romania 1955 20 737 3.5% 38,703
Czech Republic 1993 10 519 2.2% 47,955
Ukraine 1945 40 449 -4.0% 12,886
Hungary 1955 10 408 3.3% 42,121
Slovakia 1993 6 219 2.3% 40,211
Bulgaria 1955 7 205 2.3% 31,857
Serbia 2000 7 164 2.6% 24,564
Croatia 1992 4 155 2.4% 40,128
Lithuania 1991 3 133 3.2% 47,107
Slovenia 1992 2 103 2.6% 48,757
Georgia 1992 4 75 4.2% 20,243
Latvia 1991 2 73 2.5% 39,167
Bosnia & Herzegovina 1992 3 64 2.9% 18,518
Estonia 1991 1 60 2.9% 44,630
Albania 1955 3 52 2.8% 18,164
North Macedonia 1993 2 41 2.2% 20,129
Moldova 1992 3 40 2.9% 15,710
Montenegro 2006 1 16 2.7% 25,862
Total 19 countries 167 5,156 32,662
Percentage of World 2.1% 3.1%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 22

Ring 4: European former Eastern Bloc

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military
NATOyr. joined NATO+ Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Bases
excl. US
Intra-Imperialist
Deployments
Military
Deployments
to GS
Nuclear
weapons
power
Poland 1999 Y 16,573 1.2 5 4 7
Romania 2004 Y 5,187 0.7 9 2 9
Czech Republic 1999 Y 4,005 1.1 6 6
Ukraine Y 43,998 3.1 1
Hungary 1999 Y 2,572 0.7 2 4 4
Slovakia 2004 Y 1,994 1.0 2 3 4
Bulgaria 2004 Y 1,336 0.5 4 2 2
Serbia 1,426 0.5 1 4
Croatia 2009 Y 1,309 0.9 3 5
Lithuania 2004 Y 1,732 1.8 2 4
Slovenia 2004 Y 735 1.0 4 4
Georgia Y 360 0.3 2 2
Latvia 2004 Y 849 1.3 2 1 3
Bosnia & Herzegovina Y 184 0.2
Estonia 2004 Y 811 1.7 1 5
Albania 2009 Y 289 0.3 4 1
North Macedonia 2020 Y 225 0.3 2 4
Moldova Y 48 < 0.1 1 4
Montenegro 2017 Y 98 0.4 2 1
Total 83,732 27 42 69
Percentage of World 2.9%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, World Beyond War, IISS

Ring 4 is composed of the European members of the former Eastern Bloc and the Eastern European members of the former Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon, which lasted from 1949 to 1991). They are a new category within imperialist camp and thus not included by Samir Amin in his seminal work on the Triad.

Ring 4 (listed in Figure 22) of the imperialist camp includes Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Albania, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Montenegro (except Belarus). Five countries were formal republics of the Soviet Union.

These countries were not previously part of the imperialist camp. To expand its hegemony, the US has targeted this region militarily, politically, and culturally. Serbia, part of the former Yugoslavia, was subjected to a 78-day NATO bombing in 1999. Despite not being a NATO member to this day, Serbia was compelled to participate in joint military exercises with NATO countries in June 2023.

Romania’s entrance to NATO did not involve a referendum. Instead, the ruling government modified the constitution, allowing senators to make the decision without consultation from the Romanian people.

US and western European expansion were done mainly through economic subordination and NATO’s eastern expansion. Fourteen are NATO members, whilst four (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) attended the NATO Vilnius meeting in June 2023. Some of these countries are governed by pro-NATO right-wing regimes (examples include Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia), and actively playing the role of frontline troops against Russia.

The Global South Defined

Outside the 49 countries of the Global North imperialist camp, making up the vast majority of the world’s population, are 145 countries that constitute the Global South (Figure 23).

The use of the term ‘Global South’ has primarily been a loose, imprecise reference. The actions over the last four years of the now fully aligned and integrated US-led Military Bloc have, however, created a large group of countries that are the ‘Rest of the World’. The ‘Rest of the World’ are thus aligned initially by ‘negative unity’, i.e., all its members are excluded. Consequently, they have become a negation of the imperialist camp. These countries include Russia and Belarus, which are not developing countries but are heavily targeted for regime change and subjugation.

The Global South includes mainly so-called ‘less developed’ or ‘developing’ countries, geographically associated with countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. It implicitly refers to countries that have been historically marginalised in the global economic system and are all grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. These countries were often called the Third World.

The Global South lacks cohesion, an agreed on collective identity, and unified organisation and action. Unlike the integrated Global North bloc, the Global South is not a unified group or bloc. These 145 countries each have distinct ideologies and political agendas, with differences in proximity and orientation towards each other and Global North countries. Various disputes exist among some of them, ranging from territorial disputes (take the case of Eritrea and Ethiopia) to intra-regional political power struggles (take the historical case of Saudi Arabia and Iran).

Much of the Global South pursues sovereignty, peace, and development, yet these countries rarely reach a global consensus on any issue. Often, this points to differences in the degree of proximity of any given country to the inner core of the Global North. As such, we arrange these countries in ‘groupings’ based on some common attributes rather than in an integrated, layered ring, or distinct blocs.

However, this does not mean that the Global South is – as some Western perspectives would have it – a fabricated concept devoid of substance. The Global South (Figure24) is former colonies or semi-colonies of the Global North imperialist camp, having suffered centuries of oppression and humiliation under imperialism. A handful of these countries share, to varying degrees of commitment or realisation, a socialist political orientation. Objectively, China’s current 2022 per capita income (U$12,850) makes it a developing country.85 It is also because of this common historical background that Xi Jinping in his BRICS Business Forum 2023 speech (read by Wang Wentao) stated: ‘As a developing country and a member of the Global South, China breathes the same breath with other developing countries and pursues a shared future with them’.86

The genealogical roots of the Global South can be traced to the Third World Project that attempted to shift the international balance of forces in favour of the interests of the newly politically independent but economically indentured countries in the mid-20th century. This included efforts of the Bandung Conference (1955), Non-Alignment Movement (1961), Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (1966), and the pursuit of a New International Economic Order (1974) through the formation of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (1964) by developing countries.87

These countries hold historical and contemporary marginalisation in the global economic and political order in common. One of the most poignant but devastating examples of this commonality is the environmental and ecological damage that the Global North has visited upon Global South countries. Resource extraction and financial speculation on land and crops has led to deforestation, habitat destruction, soil degradation, and water pollution. This has created significant loss of biodiversity and large swathes of uncultivatable agricultural land – destroying local ecosystems and species and resulting in widespread hunger.

In addition, Global North multinational corporations are responsible for air, water, and soil pollution through nefarious methods; neo-liberalism ensures that there are no regulations to prevent these practices. Prohibited in the Global North but widespread in the Global South, agrochemicals and the generation of hazardous and other waste materials have increased health risks, especially to Indigenous people, women, children, and elders.88 Manufacturing, mining, energy, and transportation companies continuously emit greenhouse gases, the greatest contributor to climate change, putting the Global South in imminent danger of catastrophe. Direct Foreign Investment by Global North multinational corporations have decimated the environment, destroyed agricultural lands, and increased the precarity of all working peoples. At the same time, the Global North uses the climate crisis to push more land grabbing and privatisation of biodiverse resources through the financialisation of nature.89

All these 145 countries are now enduring the immense pressure of imperialist over-expansion. Some of the common challenges these countries continue to face include but are not limited to historical underdevelopment, primary sector dependence, limited industrialisation, external debt, trade imbalances, technological gaps, infrastructural deficit, and disproportionate environmental crisis.

Disillusioned by the challenges mentioned above, growing sections of the new bourgeoisie in Global South countries – who emerged through rapid economic growth over the past two decades, particularly in Asia – are gradually losing confidence in the political, economic, and moral leadership of both the United States and Europe. New centres of economic power, such as China, offer alternative development and investment models (e.g., through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative) and have become more attractive to the Global South bourgeoisie.

Among the 145 countries of the Global South, six groupings of countries can be identified. While each grouping has some identifiable shared traits, importantly, the grouping number correlates to the descending order of countries considered to be a threat to the US-led Anglo-American imperialist bloc. Membership in the groupings is dynamic and can change according to the political and economic conjuncture.

GS Grouping 1: Six Independent Socialist Countries

Figure 25

Grouping 1: Socialist Independent

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General Colonial History
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
Colonial
Status
Main
colonial
Powers
Year of
Independence
China 1945 1,426 30,217 6.2% 21,404 Semi Colony UK
Japan
US
1949
Vietnam 1977 98 1,321 6.1% 13,284 Colony France
Japan
1945
Venezuela 1945 28 197 -11.8% 7,302 Colony Spain 1811
Laos 1955 8 69 5.1% 9,207 Colony France 1953
DPR Korea 1991 26 Colony Japan 1945
Cuba 1945 11 Colony Spain 1959
Total 1,597 31,804 20,577 6 Col+SemiCol
Percentage of World 20.0% 19.4%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 25

Grouping 1: Socialist Independent

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military US Military Target
Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Sanctions
List
US Military
Intervention
hist.
US Bases
China 291,958 0.6 Y Y
Vietnam Y
Venezuela 5 < 0.1 Y Y
Laos Y Y
DPR Korea Y Y
Cuba Y Y 1
Total 291,963 5 6 1
Percentage of World 10.2%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, CRS, World Beyond War
Figure 25

Grouping 1: Socialist Independent

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 3

Country International Affiliations UN Votes
Friends of
UN Charter
Shangai
Coop. Org.
BRICS10 Gaza Ceasefire
10/2023
Russia Whitdrawal
02/2023
China Y Full Original Y Abstain
Vietnam Y Abstain
Venezuela Y Did not vote Did not vote
Laos Y Y Abstain
DPR Korea Y Y N
Cuba Y Y Abstain
Total 5 1 1 5 Y 5 N+Abstain
Source: Global South Insights

All six countries in Grouping 1 (Figure 25) are advancing socialism to varying degrees, and often take progressive international positions. Five of the six are in the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter.

China is the critical member in this grouping. Its GDP, measured by purchasing power parity, ranks first globally, almost tripling India’s. China’s GDP (PPP) corresponds to 119% of the United States’.90 It has made the most significant advancement in human development by lifting 850 million people out of extreme poverty in the last four decades.91 Though it does not seek hegemony over the world system, it is viewed by the US and its allies as the prime threat to their hegemony, labelled in recent years as a ‘near-peer’ competitor in US State and Defence Departments’ strategy documents. China not only represents an economic threat but, with the resurgence of a stronger communist party under President Xi Jinping, represents a major political threat with its overt revitalisation of socialist and communist traditions. China is thrust by its national and social interests and its historical support for the Global South into the role of supporting counter-hegemonic processes and projects. China continues to publicly state a commitment to ‘narrowing the North-South gap’.92

While China represents the major economic and political challenge to Global North hegemony today, Cuba and Venezuela represent the frontline of historical, socialist resistance. Cuba continues to push back against the suffering caused by the over six decades of the US-led economic embargo and blockade. Cuba and heavily sanctioned Venezuela have made no attempt to hide their pursuit of a socialist agenda. DPR Korea remains the West’s ‘bogeyman’ in the east, while Laos and Viet Nam have long-standing communist parties at the helm of their governments and are undergoing rapid economic development.

Ever since the founding of the Soviet Union, the world’s left forces have faced a contradiction between the needs of the state and people of the socialist projects and the needs of the working class in specific countries or regions. Strategic thinking by the working-class leaders in all countries is required to keep ‘contradictions amongst the people’ non-antagonistic and ensure that the decisive blow is directed at the centre of imperialism. Pursuing the dictum that communists have ‘no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’, requires an investigation of the concrete.93 For example, defeats such as the fall of the Soviet Union are catastrophic for all workers. Numerous tactical decisions must be made to take advantage of the cracks in the imperialist camp to protect socialist projects and movements, whether in power or not.

GS Grouping 2: Ten Strongly Sovereign Seeking Countries

Figure 26

Grouping 2: Strongly Sovereign Seeking

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General Colonial History
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bil.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
Colonial
Status
Main
colonial
Powers
Year of
Independence
Russia 1945 145 4,770 0.8% 33,253 Independent
Iran 1945 89 1,617 2.0% 18,865 Semi Colony UK 1979
Belarus 1945 10 210 0.1% 22,679 Independent
Burkina Faso 1960 23 58 4.9% 2,549 Colony France 1960
Mali 1960 23 57 4.1% 2,514 Colony France 1960
Guinea 1958 14 44 5.8% 3,025 Colony France 1958
Niger 1960 26 40 5.7% 1,518 Colony France 1960
Syria 1945 22 Colony France 1946
Afghanistan 1946 41 Semi Colony UK, US 2021
Eritrea 1993 4 Colony Italy 1993
Total 395 6,795 20,938 8 Col+SemiCol
Percentage of World 5.0% 4.1%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 26

Grouping 2: Strongly Sovereign Seeking

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military US Military Target
Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Sanctions
List
US Military
Intervention
hist.
US Bases
Russia 86,373 1.7 Y Y
Iran 6,847 0.2 Y Y
Belarus 821 0.2 Y
Burkina Faso 563 0.1 1
Mali 515 0.1 Y 2
Guinea 441 0.1 Y
Niger 243 < 0.1 Y 9
Syria Y Y
Afghanistan Y Y
Eritrea Y Y 28
Total 95,802 8 6 40
Percentage of World 3.3%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, CRS, World Beyond War
Figure 26

Grouping 2: Strongly Sovereign Seeking

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 3

Country International Affiliations UN Votes
Friends of
UN Charter
Shangai
Coop. Org.
BRICS10 Gaza Ceasefire
10/2023
Russia Whitdrawal
02/2023
Russia Y Full Original Y N
Iran Y Full New Y Abstain
Belarus Y Observer Y N
Burkina Faso Did not vote Did not vote
Mali Y Y N
Guinea Y Abstain
Niger Y Y
Syria Y Y N
Afghanistan Observer Y Y
Eritrea Y Y N
Total 6 4 2 9 Y 7 N+Abstain
Source: Global South Insights

Countries in this grouping (Figure 26) are not socialist states but are prime targets of US-led regime change. These countries are fiercely defending their sovereignty and that of others (as seen by seven out of the nine voting against the US-backed resolution for Russian withdrawal in February 2023 and their full support of a ceasefire in Gaza).

Although these nations have different reasons for doing so, they face some of the most acute situations of the struggle for national sovereignty. They are on the frontline of the Global South’s struggle against imperialism. Whilst they are all either fully or partially economically dependent on the West, they are actively pursuing political independence. They are, therefore, subjected to extreme hybrid warfare from imperialism; put simply, most of these countries are included in US intelligence’s critical targets for regime change.

Particularly since the US-backed, right-wing coup in Ukraine in February 2014, followed by Crimea’s annexation for unification, Russia has been a primary target for regime change by the imperialist camp. The US and its allies have dedicated considerable resources towards weakening, dismantling, and denuclearising Russia; the US has provided more than US$ 90 billion in military assistance to Ukraine for the campaign against Russia from February 2014 to February 2022.94 Belarus is geopolitically and economically aligned with Russia (such as through the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, formed in 1992, as well as the Union State of Belarus and Russia, formed in 1996) and, therefore, remains within the crosshairs of US intelligence.

Since the 1978 and 1979 revolutions that ousted US-aligned leaders, Afghanistan and Iran have been targets of US military intervention and political interference. Iran has been an obstacle to Western advances in the region, with its nuclear energy programme, strong regional influence in proxy conflicts, and consistent anti-Western (and anti-Israeli) posture. Afghanistan was invaded by the US in 2001, with the US spending two decades and over US$ 2 trillion (US$ 300 million a day) to gain a foothold in central Asia – eventually withdrawing in 2021.95 Since 2011, Syria has been a battleground for US attempts to secure control over the whole of West Asia, a war that proves journalist Patrick Seale’s 1965 definition of Syria – ‘the mirror of rival interests’.96

This group is growing, with countries such as Eritrea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger taking bolder steps to protect their national sovereignty. Eritrea has had a long-term hostility towards the US and being a target of US intervention via Ethiopia. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have rejected the neo-colonial presence of France in the Sahel and removed their Western-aligned political leaders. They have established both the Sahel Economic Alliance and the Alliance of Sahel States, aiming for economic and military cooperation. However, their political situation is still unstable, and they are struggling to guarantee their actual independence from imperialist powers.

GS Grouping 3: Eleven Countries Current or Historic Progressive

Figure 27

Grouping 3: Current or Historic Progressive

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General Colonial History
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
Colonial
Status
Main
colonial
Powers
Year of
Independence
Brazil 1945 215 3,837 0.5% 18,897 Colony Portugal 1822
Colombia 1945 52 966 3.2% 18,720 Colony Spain 1819
South Africa 1945 60 953 0.9% 15,728 Colony UK 1931
Algeria 1962 45 584 1.8% 12,900 Colony France 1962
Nepal 1955 31 144 4.5% 4,787 Independent
Bolivia 1945 12 119 3.2% 9,936 Colony Spain 1825
Honduras 1945 10 70 3.1% 6,832 Colony Spain 1821
Nicaragua 1945 7 48 2.9% 7,229 Colony Spain 1821
Zimbabwe 1980 16 41 1.6% 2,603 Colony UK 1980
Palestine 5 34 1.9% 6,364 Colony Israel, UK
Namibia 1990 3 29 1.4% 11,080 Colony Germany, S. Africa 1990
Total 456 6,826 15,397 10 Col
Percentage of World 5.7% 4.2%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 27

Grouping 3: Current or Historic Progressive

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military US Military Target
Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Sanctions
List
US Military
Intervention
hist.
US Bases
Brazil 20,211 0.3 Y 2
Colombia 9,938 0.5 Y 6
South Africa 2,995 0.1
Algeria 9,146 0.6 Y
Nepal 428 < 0.1
Bolivia 640 0.1 Y
Honduras 478 0.1 Y 9
Nicaragua 84 < 0.1 Y Y 3
Zimbabwe 182 < 0.1 Y
Palestine Y Y
Namibia 369 0.4
Total 44,471 3 7 20
Percentage of World 1.6%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, CRS, World Beyond War
Figure 27

Grouping 3: Current or Historic Progressive

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 3

Country International Affiliations UN Votes
Friends of
UN Charter
Shangai
Coop. Org.
BRICS10 Gaza Ceasefire
10/2023
Russia Whitdrawal
02/2023
Brazil Original Y Y
Colombia Y Y
South Africa Original Y Abstain
Algeria Y Y Abstain
Nepal Dialogue Y Y
Bolivia Y Y Abstain
Honduras Y Y
Nicaragua Y Y N
Zimbabwe Y Y Abstain
Palestine Y
Namibia Y Abstain
Total 5 1 2 10 Y 6 N+Abstain
Source: Global South Insights

The countries listed in Figure 27 are allocated to this grouping based on two essential concerns: the relative degree to which they are targets of regime change and their role in publicly advancing international anti-imperialist stances. Those in this grouping are either the next in line for regime change (following Grouping 2) or are playing a clear role in speaking out against the interests of the imperialist camp.

Regarding countries that pursue progressive agendas, examples include Brazil under the Workers’ Party (PT) and South Africa under the tripartite alliance (which includes the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions), with the former showing leadership in building alternative intergovernmental institutions such as the South American Nations Union (UNASUR) in 2008, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2011, and the IBSA Dialogue Forum, which was supplemented by BRICS by 2009, with the latter playing an important role in building the African Union. These countries sometimes defend progressive international positions such as standing with Cuba against US sanctions in international organisations. Nepal abolished the monarchy in 2008, established a republic led by the left and has made significant strides in legally and politically emancipating historically marginalised communities.

Palestine has been under occupation and siege for over seven decades. Algeria has staunchly supported Palestinian self-determination and independence and, within the African Union, has been influential in promoting progressive stances on African unity and economic development. Following the popular coup in Niger, Algeria was the only African state to promptly advocate for non-military solutions to political crises.

These countries attempt to find a path of sovereign development within a global capitalist system yet confront severe internal contradictions. For example, South Africa was forced into significant economic concessions in the 1990s, including deindustrialisation and privatisation, leading to catastrophic results. Today, 57% of South Africans live below the poverty line, 46% are unemployed, and the share of manufacturing to the GDP has decreased from 25% in 1981 – during apartheid rule – to 12% in 2022.97

Unlike China, for example, these nations have seen their revolutionary potential curtailed – or their revolutions did not culminate in socialism – but have tried to pursue progressive agendas in domestic, regional, and/or international spheres. These countries are considered by the US to have political positions that are inimical to the hegemony of the Global North. Many of these countries have experienced US interventions, hybrid warfare, sanctions, and government overthrows. Recent instances of these interventions include the coups in Honduras (2009), Brazil (2016), and Bolivia (2019). Zimbabwe continues to face US sanctions.

GS Grouping 4: Five New Non-Aligned Countries

Figure 28

Grouping 4: New Non-Aligned

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General Colonial History
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
Colonial
Status
Main
colonial
Powers
Year of
Independence
India 1945 1,417 11,901 5.7% 8,398 Colony UK 1947
Indonesia 1950 276 4,037 4.2% 14,687 Colony Netherlands 1945
Turkey 1945 85 3,353 5.3% 39,314 Independent
Mexico 1945 128 3,064 1.2% 23,548 Colony Spain 1810
Saudi Arabia 1945 36 2,150 2.5% 66,836 Independent
Total 1,942 24,505 12,634 3 Col
Percentage of World 24.3% 15.0%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 28

Grouping 4: New Non-Aligned

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military US Military Target
Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Sanctions
List
US Military
Intervention
hist.
US Bases
India 81,363 0.2
Indonesia 8,987 0.1 Y 1
Turkey 10,645 0.3 Y Y 12
Mexico 8,536 0.2 Y
Saudi Arabia 75,013 5.7 Y 21
Total 184,543 1 4 34
Percentage of World 6.4%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, CRS, World Beyond War
Figure 28

Grouping 4: New Non-Aligned

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 3

Country International Affiliations UN Votes
Friends of
UN Charter
Shangai
Coop. Org.
BRICS10 Gaza Ceasefire
10/2023
Russia Whitdrawal
02/2023
India Full Original Abstain Abstain
Indonesia Y Y
Turkey Dialogue Y Y
Mexico Y Y
Saudi Arabia Dialogue New Y Y
Total 3 2 4 Y 1 Abstain
Source: Global South Insights

With sizable economies of scale, the non-alignment that characterises countries in this grouping is economic, not political (Figure 28). These non-socialist countries are not reviving the political project of the Non-Aligned Movement. Most of these countries have had 50 years or more of independence from former colonial rulers and today have very different relationships to them.

Economically, all five non-aligned countries have significant GDPs (all ranking in the top 20 largest economies in GDP (PPP) terms in 2022) and are taking increasingly independent economic measures.

These countries have recognised that the US hoarding of foreign exchange reserves and sanctions against countries with 30% of the world’s population poses severe threats. Today, more than one in four countries are subject to UN or Western government sanctions, while 29% of the global GDP is produced in sanctioned countries, up from 4% in 1960s.98

Politically, they are ambivalent. Militarily, Indonesia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia maintain very close relations with the United States. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest purchasers of advanced US weapons. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a less reliable partner for the West, notwithstanding Turkey being a NATO member.

This grouping shows highly contradictory behaviours on the international stage. They show some degree of slowly decreasing economic dependence on and alignment with the West and/or are prepared to oppose it on some key issues.

Despite India’s alignment with the US in organisations such as the QUAD, or its reactionary positions on Israel in its war on Gaza, since the start of the war in Ukraine, India has refused to accede to some important US demands, such as refusing to implement US sanctions against Russia. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar vocally defended his government’s refusal to accede to Washington’s pressure, saying at a press conference in June 2023, ‘A lot of Americans still have that NATO treaty construct in their heads… It seems almost like that is the only template or viewpoint with which they look at the world… That is not a template that applies to India’.99 The conflict with Canada, and now with the US, over alleged Indian intelligence operations in their countries, is complicating the plan of the US to gain the support of India against China. The big national bourgeoisie of India is beginning to assert their interests.

Saudi Arabia differs from the US when its economic self-interests dictate, e.g., increasing Saudi-China investments (including oil deals paid in Chinese yuan) and using its partnership with Russia at OPEC+ to define the global price of oil. However, simultaneously, at the run-up to the Arab League summit in November 2023, Saudi Arabia blocked Algerian efforts to close US bases, blocked Iranian proposed military aid to Palestine, stopped a proposed trade boycott, and refused to curtail oil shipments to Israel. The Pentagon, CIA, and Saudi Arabia were front-line allies in the recent war against Yemen that took tens of thousands of lives. The US Special Forces provided Saudi pilots with the bombing coordinates of their targets.100

Indonesia, home to the largest Islamic population in the world, has had a compounded average growth rate of the GDP (PPP) of 4.2% between 2012 and 2022.101 According to IMF forecasts, by 2030, Indonesia could be the fifth largest economy in the world by GDP (PPP). Its state-owned enterprises’ assets as a share of GDP increased from 43% in 2014 to 54% in 2018.102 In 2020, Indonesia banned the exports of raw nickel, a key component of lithium batteries. Indonesia accounted for 39% of global nickel production in 2022. Its total exports in current terms surged from US$ 183 to US$ 323 billion between 2020 and 2022.103 On 2 February 2023, during the Mandiri Investment Forum in Jakarta, President Joko Widodo warned, ‘We must remember the sanctions imposed by the US on Russia. Visa and Mastercard could be a problem’. He also stated that, ‘If we use our own platforms, and everybody is using them, from ministries and local administrations to municipal governments, then we can be more secure’. Yet, in November 2023, the US (an active participant in the torture and assassination of 500,000+ Indonesian communists) and Indonesia signed an agreement upgrading their relations to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.104 Indonesia withdrew its application to join BRICS in 2023 and has expressed public interest in becoming an OECD member.

Confronted with a war of aggression under international law, 1846 was the de facto moment that consolidated the emerging US imperial project in Mexico. Forced to exchange land for peace and cede 50% of its territory, the new Mexico-US border became a historical line that internally constitutes an inexorable and preordained determination. On the other hand, Mexico has a history that relentlessly returns to its anti-colonial roots, Indigenous culture, and anti-imperialist modern history. Very little analysis is given to the complex interdependency of Mexico and the US, e.g., in population, culture, economics, but perhaps more significant in terms of geopolitical security for the viability of US hegemony.105 The government of López Obrador is, at multiple levels, an attempt of the Mexican social movements to launch a low intensity counter-neo-liberal reform. The concentration is on recovering the public property of all strategic resources, launching a new agrarian reform, and reclaiming land as social property. The current agrarian reform in Mexico guaranties by law the registration of 50.6 % of the territory as social communal property in the hands of campesinos and Indigenous communities (29,803 agrarian communes on 99.7 million hectares). However, the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, formerly the North America Free Trade Agreement) represents a constant impediment to the uncoupling or disentanglement of Mexico’s political position vis-à-vis the emerging Global South. In June 2023, the US began preliminary proceedings (through USMCA arbitration) to block the presidential decree that would take various measures to ban genetically modified corn, which makes up 96% of US corn exports.106 The US is exhibiting more aggressive and interventionist policies to undermine the long and hard-fought historical gains of Mexican sovereignty. In 2022, Mexican President López Obrador refused to attend the VIII Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles after news emerged that the United States would not invite Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan leaders to the meeting.

The five countries in this grouping have differing political, economic, or military perspectives and different nuanced levels of closeness to the Global North. However, their growing new national bourgeoisies are gradually seeking alternative economic relations and occasional political divergences with the US, albeit out of self-interest and self-preservation. The question of the new national bourgeoisie emerging in the Global South is outside the scope of this text; it will be addressed in our 2024 research on capital formation and ownership in the Global South.

GS Grouping 5: One Hundred and Eleven Diverse Global South Countries

Figure 29

Grouping 5: Diverse Global South

Select information for top 20 countries, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General Colonial History
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
Colonial
Status
Main
colonial
Powers
Year of
Independence
Egypt 1945 111 1,676 4.3% 16,174 Colony UK 1922
Pakistan 1947 236 1,520 4.0% 6,695 Colony UK 1947
Thailand 1946 72 1,482 1.8% 21,154 Semi Colony UK, France
Bangladesh 1974 171 1,343 6.5% 7,971 Colony UK 1971
Nigeria 1960 219 1,281 2.2% 5,909 Colony UK 1960
Argentina 1945 46 1,226 0.3% 26,484 Colony Spain, UK 1816
Malaysia 1957 34 1,137 4.1% 34,834 Colony UK 1957
United Arab Emirates 1971 9 835 3.1% 84,657 Colony UK 1971
Singapore 1965 6 719 3.3% 127,563 Colony UK 1965
Kazakhstan 1992 19 603 2.9% 30,523 Independent
Chile 1945 20 579 2.2% 29,221 Colony Spain 1818
Peru 1945 34 523 2.8% 15,310 Colony Spain 1821
Iraq 1945 44 505 2.7% 11,948 Colony UK 1932
Morocco 1956 37 363 2.4% 9,900 Colony France, Spain 1956
Ethiopia 1945 123 358 8.4% 3,435 Independent
Uzbekistan 1992 35 340 5.9% 9,634 Independent
Sri Lanka 1955 22 320 1.8% 14,267 Colony UK 1948
Kenya 1963 54 311 4.5% 6,151 Colony UK 1963
Qatar 1971 3 309 2.2% 109,160 Colony UK 1971
Myanmar 1948 54 261 3.3% 4,847 Colony UK 1948
Total 2,242 21,171 9,687 103 Col+SemiCol
Percentage of World 28.1% 12.9%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 29

Grouping 5: Diverse Global South

Select information for top 20 countries, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military US Military Target
Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Sanctions
List
US Military
Intervention
hist.
US Bases
Egypt 4,646 0.1 Y 7
Pakistan 10,337 0.1 8
Thailand 5,724 0.2 Y 3
Bangladesh 4,806 0.1
Nigeria 3,109 < 0.1
Argentina 2,578 0.2 Y 3
Malaysia 3,671 0.3
United Arab Emirates 3
Singapore 11,688 5.4 2
Kazakhstan 1,133 0.2
Chile 5,566 0.8 Y 1
Peru 2,845 0.2 Y 5
Iraq 4,683 0.3 Y Y 10
Morocco 4,995 0.4 Y
Ethiopia 1,031 < 0.1 Y Y
Uzbekistan
Sri Lanka 1,053 0.1 Y
Kenya 1,138 0.1 Y 3
Qatar 15,412 15.9 5
Myanmar 1,857 0.1 Y
Total 131,182 17 63 192
Percentage of World 4.6%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, CRS, World Beyond War
Figure 29

Grouping 5: Diverse Global South

Select information for top 20 countries, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 3

Country International Affiliations UN Votes
Friends of
UN Charter
Shangai
Coop. Org.
BRICS10 Gaza Ceasefire
10/2023
Russia Whitdrawal
02/2023
Egypt Dialogue New Y Y
Pakistan Full Y Abstain
Thailand Y Y
Bangladesh Y Abstain
Nigeria Y Y
Argentina Y Y
Malaysia Y Y
United Arab Emirates Dialogue New Y Y
Singapore Y Y
Kazakhstan Full Y Abstain
Chile Y Y
Peru Y Y
Iraq Abstain Y
Morocco Y Y
Ethiopia New Abstain Abstain
Uzbekistan Full Y Abstain
Sri Lanka Dialogue Y Abstain
Kenya Y Y
Qatar Dialogue Y Y
Myanmar Dialogue Y Y
Total 3 17 3 77 Y 20 Abstain
Source: Global South Insights

There are 111 countries that are not included in the previous Global South four groupings above, due to multiple diversities. Figure 29 lists the twenty largest economies; the full list is in the appendix. They do not share the same political views nor governmental systems. Eswatini, Qatar, and Bhutan are still governed by monarchies, whilst Libya, Syria, and Somalia do not have a single governing authority. A handful of countries have abandoned socialist agendas after being hamstrung by Western development finance, such as in the case of Angola and Mozambique. Due to imperialist political and economic intervention, a series of countries in this grouping suffer severe governmental dysfunctionality (breakdown of governance, authority, and law), and are almost entirely unable to provide for their people.

The economic performance of these countries varies significantly. For example, despite Nigeria being the second largest economy in Africa and having a GDP (PPP) fourteen times that of Cambodia, the former has seen a 0.4% negative annual average growth rate between 2012 and 2022, while the latter grew by an annual 5.3%.

Among these countries, they have different levels of military allegiance to the Global North. Egypt has been a strategic partner of Israel and the United States since 1979, while Bangladesh, Comoros, and Djibouti participated in submitting a referral to the International Criminal Court regarding the situation in the State of Palestine on 17 November 2023.

They have a range of internal conflicts and territorial disputes, such as in the case of Morocco’s colonial occupation of Western Sahara, beginning in 1975.106 Others, for example the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti, are subjected to UN military interventions, where other Global South countries take part.

Countries in Grouping 5 participate in diverse multilateral platforms with both Global South and Global North nations. Membership in this grouping can change should a country develop more distinctive characteristics. For example, whilst Argentina has played historically progressive roles in the region, the recent right-wing drift currently precludes membership in that grouping today. Therefore, this is not a static or permanent position.

GS Grouping 6: Two De Facto US Military Colonies

Figure 30

Grouping 6: Heavily US Militarised

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General Colonial History
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
Colonial
Status
Main
colonial
Powers
Year of
Independence
Rep. Korea 1991 52 2,780 2.7% 53,845 Colony Japan 1945
Philippines 1945 116 1,171 4.9% 10,495 Colony Spain, US 1946
Total 167 3,951 24,210 2 Col
Percentage of World 2.1% 2.4%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 30

Grouping 6: Heavily US Militarised

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military US Military Target
Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Sanctions
List
US Military
Intervention
hist.
US Bases
Rep. Korea 46,365 2.5 Y 62
Philippines 3,965 0.1 Y 11
Total 50,331 2 73
Percentage of World 1.8%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, CRS, World Beyond War
Figure 30

Grouping 6: Heavily US Militarised

Select information, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 3

Country International Affiliations UN Votes
Friends of
UN Charter
Shangai
Coop. Org.
BRICS10 Gaza Ceasefire
10/2023
Russia Whitdrawal
02/2023
Rep. Korea Abstain Y
Philippines Abstain Y
Total 0 Y 0 N+Abstain
Source: Global South Insights

The peoples of these two nations (Figure 30) largely align with the Global South. Both countries have had pro-US leaders, as well as independent-leaning leaders. However, these countries are – militarily – entirely controlled by the US.

Historically, both nations have been subordinated to the US through military conquest. After WWII, when the US had militarily occupied the Korean peninsula, and, later, at the end of the Korean War, the Republic of Korea retained a large US military presence. Its economic reconstruction was almost entirely funded and directed by the US. Following the Spanish-American War, the Philippines was a US colony for nearly five decades (1898–1946).

This vassalage is evident today: after the elections of Yoon Suk-yeol in the Republic of Korea and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Philippines in 2022, both have served as frontline positions in containing China. In February 2023, the Philippines invited the US to expand its military presence in the country by adding four more bases to the existing five US-operated bases – 30 years after Philippine lawmakers ruled to end permanently the US military presence in the country. The Republic of Korea has also increased the military expansion of the US, participating alongside Japan ‘to inaugurate a new era of trilateral partnership’ with the US.108 In addition, the General Security of Military Information Agreement between Japan and the Republic of Korea, facilitated by their closer alignment with the US, expands intelligence sharing between the two countries to include ‘threats from China and Russia’.109 Their military expenditures should be attributed to the US-Led Military Bloc.

Figure 31

Global South countries with per capita military spending exceeding world average (excl. Russia)

2022

Country Name (GSI) Military SpendingUS Dollars (mil.) Percentage of
GDP (CER)
Per Capita>world avg. (times)
Saudi Arabia 75,013 6.8% 5.7
Rep. Korea 46,365 2.8% 2.5
Qatar 15,412 6.5% 15.9
Singapore 11,688 2.5% 5.4
Kuwait 8,244 4.7% 5.4
Oman 5,783 5.0% 3.5
Lebanon 4,739 21.8% 2.4
Bahrain 1,381 3.1% 2.6
Uruguay 1,376 1.9% 1.1
Brunei 436 2.6% 2.7
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on IMF, UN, SIPRI & Monthly Review

Figure 31 lists all Global South countries with military spending exceeding the world average (except Russia, which was shown earlier). Many of these countries have close military relations with the United States but are not listed in Grouping 6.

PART IV: The West in Decline

The Erosion of United States Economic and Political Hegemony

US slowing economic growth, measured by a decelerating GDP growth rate, fall of net investment as a share of GDP, higher levels of unutilised productive capacity, and unemployment/underemployment began in the mid-1960s and accelerated from the early-to-mid 1970s.110The transition to the US becoming a net importer of capital exacerbated the contradictions of monopoly capital.

The change in the US capital account to becoming dependent on continuous large-scale import of capital from the 1980s onwards is key to a financialised wealth generation process and a crucial economic mechanism of US imperialism. The world’s capital assets are preponderantly in US dollars and feed the overall position of US monopoly-finance capital.

By 2009, the US began to plan its pivot to Asia to curtail China’s economic growth. Under the Obama period, the US began to move against the World Trade Organisation. This period also marked the increased reliance on tariffs, sanctions, protectionism, and hybrid warfare.

Given that it is now dependent on large scale net capital imports, which by 2022 reached US$ 1 trillion a year, the US has little internal economic ability to provide economic advantages to its Global North or Global South allies.111 Indeed, it needs to continue to attempt to hollow out even more surplus from them.

Under neo-liberalism, the relative autonomy of the US state eroded, and private capital exerted more direct control of much of the state. Today, however, faced with rising international economic threats to the US position, and the failure of neo-liberalism to maintain US economic dominance, the collective political interests of the ruling class are being asserted by an increasingly autonomous state (as opposed to representing the interests of individual capitalist groups). To borrow from Lenin, for the capitalists also, ‘politics must take precedence over economics’.112

Financialisation or accumulation under the phase of monopoly-finance capital is truly a parasitic development aimed at drawing blood from a sponge and marking the structural crisis of capital. US capital has an internal contradiction. As US capital seeks to increase surplus extraction from its own working class, it risks losing support for its external military wars, which are aimed at removing international obstacles to US capitalist economic interests. The US ruling class is therefore forced into simultaneous attacks on the Global South and its own working class – this necessitated the rise of increasingly right-wing currents in US capitalism. In the 1930s, the US had sufficient reserves to confront a deep crisis of capitalism with a reformist domestic programme, unlike the open attack on the working class in Germany or Japan. However, it took WWII for the US to escape the economic depression not, as is popularly purported, the Keynesian New Deal. Today, in this new situation, the US has no alternative but to rely on combining external aggression with an increasingly repressive domestic agenda.

The US utilises inflation to attempt to increase profits – a trend exacerbated by military spending and the debt it incurs. Interest on US military debt accounts for around 70% of US federal government net interest payments. In the 1970s, the US was able to manage the consequences of its Viet Nam Bonanza in military spending by removing itself from the gold standard to push the cost of this debt onto other countries. This successful attack on imperialist rivals strengthened US economic and financial power compared to them.

An accurate historical perspective, as well as short-term shifts, is required when analysing a potential decline of an empire. In Europe, the transition from slavery to feudalism took several centuries as did the transition from feudalism to capitalism. France was still fighting remnants of feudalism in the 19th century, hundreds of years after European capitalism had begun on a small scale in Italian city-states.

The relative economic decline of an imperialist state can be traced by its increasing need to extract capital from abroad – with the UK and US both following a similar historical trend. The UK stopped being an exporter capital beginning in the early 1930s (Figure 32).

A country’s balance of payments is equal to the difference between its domestic capital creation (savings/surplus) and its domestic capital investment. If a country’s ‘domestic’ capital creation is larger than its domestic investment, it is, therefore, exporting capital and runs a balance of payments surplus. If a country’s domestic capital creation is less than its ‘domestic’ capital investment, it runs a balance of payments deficit and is importing capital, that is, it has a surplus in its capital account.

From 1913 to the early 1980s, with rare exceptions, the US generated more surplus than it invested ‘domestically’. It had a surplus of capital that it could invest in other countries and extend its international hegemony not only through violence. Post-WWII, the particular beneficiaries of this were imperialist countries whom the US wished to enmesh, integrate, and dominate, as seen by the Marshall Plan in Europe. Other beneficiaries, such as the Republic of Korea, became military frontier states to constrain Russia and China and thus received US economic investment.

By the late 1960s, the US understood that the most urgent economic, as opposed to political, threat did not come from communism. The attention began to focus on curtailing the growth of other capitalist rivals. A few capitalist economies – first Germany in the immediate post-war period and then Japan until the late 1970s – achieved investment rates far higher than the US, reaching 30% of the GDP or above. This enabled these countries to achieve higher GDP growth rates than the US. This was a historical result of the immense defeats of the German and Japanese working classes by fascism – the consequences of which continued into the post-war period. German and Japanese capitalists were able to increase the rates of exploitation, which financed high rates of capital investment. Simultaneously, their ‘late industrialisation’ also allowed them access to better quality technology, which further increased productivity. While the US was prepared to accept the economic consequences of this in the immediate post-war period, the continuation of this process began to impact US economic growth.

To prevent effective economic competition from these countries, the United States used political and military pressure to force down their rates of investment and, therefore, growth rates. The decoupling of the US dollar from gold in 1971, and therefore the removal of restraints on the weaponisation of the US control of the international monetary system, played a key role in this process.

The numbers in Figure 33, positive or negative, show the balance between domestic savings/capital creation and domestic investment over the span of 120 years. A positive number, for example, 0.8% for 1929, means the US is saving/creating more capital than it is investing domestically, i.e., it is lending/exporting capital abroad. A negative number, for example -3.9% of GNP for 2022, means US domestic investment is higher than US domestic capital creation/saving. Thus, there is an inflow of capital of 3.9% of GNP from abroad. A positive number represents an outflow of capital from the US, and a negative number indicates an inflow of capital into the US.113

But despite this ability to slow down imperialist rivals, the US proved incapable of raising its own economic growth rate (to achieve a new higher rate of investment and exploitation), partly because of the withdrawal of US-based capitalists from long-term productive investments within the United States. Indeed, US economic growth decelerated further – the average annual economic growth of the US today is only 2.0%, less than half its growth rate in the 1960s and far behind the rate of growth of China or indeed of a series of Asian states. Figure 34 shows that the US has had a long-term overall decline in average growth rate since 1953.

Confronted with this situation the US has subsequently turned to tariffs, economic sanctions, and technology bans, leading to an increasingly protectionist environment. However, despite this economic decline, as already analysed, the US still maintains a military lead over all other states. US Imperialism, therefore, now turns to a growing reliance on force.

Tracing the processes underlying this and showing the inability of the US to raise its rate of growth without a complete restructuring of the US economy (which is not on the agenda), Line 1 in Figure 35 shows that from 1965 onwards, US net saving/capital creation progressively fell until by 2009 it was -2.7% of GNI. Line 2 shows that from the 1980s on, US borrowing from abroad, the use of capital imported from other countries, began to rise sharply. By 2002, for the first time, US borrowing from abroad was higher than its domestic net capital creation – i.e., for the first time, even the immediate increase in US capital stock was being financed more by capital from other countries than from the US itself. This slightly reversed and then fluctuated until 2020, when, once again, more of the addition to the US capital stock was financed from other countries.

To summarise this overall process, the US has structured the world economy to its advantage. Its corporations obtain gargantuan amounts of surplus value through the global arbitrage in the Global South and the entire imperial system forces US dollars on foreign countries – including via not only economic processes but through US military bases and other means. The aim is to create a system whereby countries have no choice but to put their US dollars into US securities, financing the US deficit and US domestic investment. This is how global monopoly-finance capital, which is an advanced form of financial imperialism backed by military and political power, works.

What is upsetting this system is that monopoly capital is relatively stagnant in terms of production (the real economy), which has allowed China and other countries in the Global South to leap forward in production. Hudson’s Super Imperialism provides useful insight on what the consequences would be if the US lost its dollar hegemony.114

Figure 36 shows that China has outpaced the US in net fixed capital formation, whilst the US has seen a gradual decline. Whilst this section does not cover the rise of China, it should be noted here that every year since 1992, for 30 years, China has been a net exporter of capital. It is this surplus of capital that makes economically possible the financing of international initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

This becomes a critical factor in understanding that two nuclei of international processes are developing:

  • The US has increasingly become a fetter on the development of the productive forces domestically and globally.
  • China is now focused on the development of its national productive forces and on working with the developing nations as a whole. This presents a new path to modernisation through the development of the world’s productive forces taken as a whole (through the BRI, the Global Development Initiative, and various continental-scale industrialisation projects).

The Sunsetting of Bourgeois Liberal Democracy

Some outside of the US have long held an illusion that democracy in the US has existed for centuries and has only recently been defaced. In 1776, both wings of US capital, those led by Alexander Hamilton and those led by Thomas Jefferson (a slave owner), ensured that only property-owning white males like themselves had the right to vote. From 1776 onwards, property rights were sacrosanct and subordinated all other rights.

‘Freedom of speech’ was effectively restricted to those who owned the means of material production. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The German Ideology (1846), these were generally those who owned the means of mental production, that is, the media, beginning with the printing press. In some cases, this right extended to those known to have fringe or no support, or others who were no threat to the system. Those opposing capitalist class interests who had the chance of any significant support were subjected to suppression, imprisonment, and sanctioning, as well as judicial murder or assassination. Bourgeois democracy was always a vehicle for protecting property rights. Only the pressure of the US to defend itself against socialist projects internationally in the twentieth century temporarily extended voting rights to black people and increased the appearance of free speech and other civil liberties.

There is a great misunderstanding internationally about the US electoral parties. From their inception, neither the Democratic nor Republican parties were formed as mass membership parties. They have been primarily top-down associations of propertied elites and professional class allies, closely aligned with the status quo. Third parties have practically no influence in the US system, a political party duopoly. The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee that run their respective parties are formally organised as not-for-profit, tax-exempt corporations. They are primarily money-based, vote-gathering machines that periodically attract voters in the context of electoral contests and thus are quite distinct from membership political parties like many European parties. Although there are registered Democrats and Republicans, this mainly affects the right to vote in their respective primaries. Party affiliation for the vast majority of the population, thus, does not go beyond votes cast in particular elections. Therefore, around half of US voters see themselves as politically independent, not attached to either of the major parties. Indeed, neither political party, when in office, reflects the interests of the majority of the US population.

One of the most poignant written words on the hypocrisy of America’s self-proclaimed greatness is found in a poem by Langston Hughes:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’.)

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay —
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.115

Large sections of the capitalist class in the Global North and their hangers-on indulged in a period of euphoria caused by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. They deluded themselves into believing in the ‘end of history’ with aspirations for a perpetual unipolar world. The War on Terror campaign espoused by the US was a brilliantly constructed methodology to gain support for militarism.

Between 2006 and 2009, new realities began to set in:

  • The demise of the Soviet Union did not result in Yeltsin’s promise of a de-nuclearised Russia nor the permanent establishment of a Russian government entirely following US directions. The usual cries of ‘who failed in Russia?’ followed.
  • US strategic circles began to announce the idea (both amoral and unscientific) that the US could achieve first-strike nuclear war capability.
  • In the face of NATO’s continuing eastward expansion and claims of the United States to be on the verge of nuclear primacy, Vladimir Putin delivered his Munich speech in February 2007, marking the end of any illusions about Russia being adopted into the Anglo-American club. In that speech, Putin criticised the ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations’ and suggested that the world must not be governed by ‘one master, one sovereign’.116
  • The creation of the Centre for New American Security in 2007 marked a historic marriage of two groups of foreign policy elites, the mainly Republican neo-conservatives and the largely Democratic liberal hawks. Their joint strategy was to move to target Russia via Ukraine immediately.
  • Led by populist neo-fascists, the Tea Party arose in 2009. It appealed to the petty bourgeoisie and a section of the upper strata (mainly but not exclusively white) of the working class who had made little to no economic progress and feared a loss of privilege. This signalled the ending of the so-called bipartisan consensus that had dominated the US system for decades.
  • The bubble caused by financialisation turned into the Third Great Depression starting in 2008, the most significant economic crisis since the 1930s.
  • There was growing evidence that there would be no Gorbachev in China to lead the surrender of the Chinese Revolution.
  • The ‘Pivot to Asia’, which is more precisely the pivot to China, and a strategy for the US control of Eurasia, was devised.

China’s economy continued to expand rapidly after the beginning of the Third Great Depression, while the Western economies were anaemic.117 In 2016, China exceeded the US in terms of GDP (PPP), and there was palpable fear that by 2030, China would surpass the US in GDP at current exchange rates (CER). The US ruling class needed a response.

Neo-fascism and extreme right-wing forces grew globally. Obama, the Democratic president, adopted regressive domestic measures that would have been the envy of previous Republican administrations. Trump’s election weakened the shared identity of the bourgeoisie’s interests and widened awareness of the limitations of the US political system.

Internationally, this situation also it marked a resumption of global awareness of imperialism as the greatest danger facing humanity. Faced with the evident failure of neo-liberalism, which had culminated in the Third Great Depression, a new movement to reverse some aspects of the hollowing out of the state that neo-liberalism had produced began.

To accurately understand the events following the start of the Third Great Depression, we must evaluate the preceding 60 years. In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater, an extreme right-wing capitalist, lost the general election but succeeded in bringing the far-right into the mainstream of the Republican Party and the country. The Democrats lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a Republican centrist, who seized the white Southern vote and introduced a new institutional racism-based incarceration system, which both parties have followed since. The Democratic Party began a period of internal fracturing and began abandoning any leftward positioning in the name of ‘electability’ and ‘triangulation’. Instead, it attempted to capitalise on the rightward momentum of the Republicans.

The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan marked the actual far-right takeover of the Republican Party. The 1985 formation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a private corporation, marked the beginning of a new phase of the Democratic Party: the rise of the New Democrats. A list of some former chairmen of the DLC included Dick Gephardt, Chuck Robb, Sam Nunn, and Joe Lieberman – all military hawks, who favoured shifting social spending to the military. The DLC successfully defeated the left, and its crowning victory was winning the Presidency by their chosen candidate, Bill Clinton, in 1992.

Clinton’s virtue from the standpoint of the DLC was that he could bring the white South back into the Democratic Party by talking left and walking right. For example, he adopted both anti-welfare and pro-incarceration policies (both racial code positions) while making pretensions of a progressive agenda. Less anti-labour than Reagan, he nonetheless represented the Democratic strategy of trying to remain the ‘centre’ in a political dynamic that had shifted far to the right, with the Democrats standing for a lighter, kinder version of neo-liberalism.

It is instructive to think of the Democratic and Republican Parties as operating like private corporations with revenue derived mainly from various capitalists to serve the interests of the shareholders and the corporation’s top officers. For the Democratic Party, this includes groups like the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Centre for American Progress (CAP).118 The product sold is elected officeholders who implement the interests of their financiers. Well-known officials include John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, once elected, became parasites of the state, earned tens of millions, and joined the higher echelons of the capitalist class. At least 85 of the 154 people from private interest groups who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Hillary Clinton, while she led the State Department under President Obama, donated a combined US$ 156 million to the Clinton Foundation.119

The DNC business model requires the assembly of a disparate array of electoral blocks and the necessity of manipulating numerous social strata, groups, and movements. There is now more than ever a sharp rift between the interests of the people who vote for the Democratic Party versus the vastly different interests of the Democratic Party paymasters.

A more comprehensive assessment is beyond the scope of this document. However, the idea of entrepreneurial democracy, in which the concepts of competition between individual capitalists and groups and the battle to acquire votes like a market, trace back to Joseph Schumpeter.120

In the last twenty years, the Republican Party has been transformed ideologically. The emergence of the Tea Party in 2009 signalled both a growing neofascist ideology and the creation of a more engaged core and base. Although the Republican Party also has internal fractures, the weaponisation of large sections of the lower middle class has engendered a radical right that destabilises bourgeois liberal democracy.

All the previous contradictions of race, class, gender, and social identity became weaponised by both the far right and the DNC corporation for different purposes. The social rift between various strata of the US is acute. Hyperbolic claims that the US is heading towards a civil war are highly misleading, however. There is no economic basis for California seceding from the US. This is not the pre-civil war period in the US.

Starting in 1970, the US working class received very little of the vast increases in wealth created by the US’s world domination. Millions of children suffer food insecurity, and their parents have precarious employment and lives. The US is undergoing significant demographic changes, with some estimates showing that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority within the US by 2045, which suggests a trajectory of US racial capitalism toward enhanced segregation and even apartheid.

Narcissism, pessimism, nihilism, and fatalism are now fundamental features of an increasingly stagnant capitalism in the Global North. The traditional trappings of bourgeois liberal democracy are becoming fetters on the needs of capital, which is, ironically, caught up in a process of self-negation.

These fissures inside the US political system are significant to the US working class, which is in a very uneven development of its revolutionary capacity. It faces great danger and opportunities. There can be no illusion that ‘worse is better’.

Simultaneously with this erosion of liberal democracy, millions of young people from Jakarta to Istanbul to Johannesburg to Des Moines, Iowa, have now been brought into political life based on their moral, racial, religious, and political outrage. This has been met with severe repression by Washington in its global geopolitical, economic, and hegemonic military roles. The United States is a waning hegemonic power; it is a wounded one and, as a result, is more dangerous.

A Defeated and Submissive Europe and Japan

Since the end of WWII, the United States has been committed to the military, political, and economic integration of countries in Europe and Japan into a bloc that it controls. Through the NATO+ structure, the US ensured complete military dominance within the imperialist group, deploying many military bases in countries defeated in WWII, including in Japan (120), Germany (119), and Italy (45). The latter is home to over 12,000 US military personnel.121

Beginning in the 1950s, the US brought European political elites into their orbit. Through the Marshall Plan, European economic interests were subordinated to those of the US. Over the next fifty years, even imperialist leaders who dared to partially oppose US interests – such as Jacques Chirac (president of France between 1995 and 2007) or Gerhard Schroeder (Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005), both of whom opposed the US invasion of Iraq – were targeted by the US for replacement.

After WWII, Japan, as a frontline state against Soviet and Chinese communism, was allowed to rapidly develop its economy. However, in the 1980s, Japan’s economic rise began to pose a possible threat to the United States’ global economic hegemony, leading to increased bilateral trade frictions. The United States forced a rapid appreciation of the Japanese yen through the 1985 ‘Plaza Accord’, reducing exports and causing Japan to lose its economic momentum.122 Then, following the 1987 Wall Street crash, the US compelled Japan to adopt ultra-loose monetary and economic policies. This aimed to increase the flow of capital to the US to aid finance its international aggression against the USSR. In the process, it created the ‘bubble economy’ in Japan, the bursting of which plunged Japan into a decades-long economic stagnation.

In the fields of information technology and new energy, among other high-tech areas, Japan also faced suppression from the United States, hindering its industrial upgrading. Toshiba was the global leader in semiconductor manufacturing by 1987 until it was sanctioned by the US under the pretext of making deals with the USSR (very similar to what the United States has done with Huawei in China). Toshiba’s main competitors, IBM and Intel, benefited from this policy by the US state.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and Germany’s subsequent reunification, the German bourgeoisie coveted Russia’s markets and low-cost energy. They desired economic ties with Russia but only as long as they and their French compatriots could maintain their unfettered domination of the European project, which they had held since WWII. This meant building economic ties with Russia but excluding Russia’s political leadership from any equal participation in Europe’s political affairs, decisions, or structures. US strategy in turn had been to avoid any strategic relationship between Russia and Germany as their combined strength would create a formidable economic competitor in Europe.

Ownership of capital and the means of production are always fundamental. Over the last 30 years, the ability of capital to move quickly and seamlessly between the borders of imperialist countries has increased exponentially. Capital investments have a defined number of primary categories including stock, notes, bonds, private equity, real estate, and many forms of derivatives. The stock market is one of the fundamental vehicles for most capitalists to make long-term investments. A German firm that goes public may do so in either the US or German stock exchanges. Large funds like Vanguard purchase these funds, but they are not the beneficial owners. They are just effective trustees for the funds of major capital (some small percentage of this capital is owned by the petty bourgeoisie and privileged sectors of the working class through pension funds and other instruments).

The original shareholders of this firm eventually can and do sell their now public stock. They no longer remain dependent on managing their wealth via their investment inside one company. Rather they hire wealth managers, either through firms such as Goldman Sachs or their own advisors, who in turn, invest the cash proceeds from the sale of stock. For many capitalists, their advisors will have them invest well over 50% of their portfolio in the US stock markets. The German capitalist’s ‘family wealth’ therefore does not disappear when the German company they had originally owned declines in value.

The economic, political, and social consequences of this change in capital markets and ownership are vast. This newly minted global – formerly ‘German’ – capitalist behaves very much like their French, English, Swedish, or US peers. This level of integration and denationalisation of capital results in a much more robust economic and, eventually, reinforces political allegiance to the US.

Such a high level of stock market and capital integration rarely occurs in Global South countries for many historical reasons. A capitalist in Turkey has much greater difficulty having their company go public in the US. What the Turkish capitalist can do is to go public in Turkey, sell their stock, turn the proceeds into US dollars, and then invest those dollars in US stocks. This is the most common pathway for the Turkish capitalists to join the global elite. This process, however, is much more competitive, happens in smaller amounts, is less frequent, and is elongated.

Figure 37 shows research from the OECD that indicates the percentage of beneficial foreign ownership for each of the major stock markets in the world.123 These show that Europe overall has a high percentage of foreign ownership, whereas the US, China, and Saudi Arabia all have less than 20% foreign ownership. Different national imperialisms, and their ruling classes, are not separate or economically divided from each other. They do not pursue substantially divergent strategic national goals on any scale comparable to that before World War II. Progressive and socialist forces, however, always utilise partial, economic, or tactical differences between imperialist powers where valuable.

The situation in Germany today, for example, clearly illustrates the effectiveness of this integration process and economic consolidation by the US as shown in Figure 38. According to 2020 IHS Markit data, only 13.3% of the German stock market’s value is owned by Germans, while investors from North America and the UK own 58.3%.124 A 2023 study by Ernst & Young revealed that at least 52.1% of the market value of the 40 blue-chip stocks that make up Germany’s DAX index is owned by funds outside of Germany in 2022. Of the remaining shares, 16.5% ownership is unidentified (very likely also owned by foreign capital), with only 31.3% of the market value owned by Germans.125 The major companies of the German economy are primarily not owned by Germans.

Germany’s industrial value added has declined from 9% of the world to just above 6% in the last 18 years.126 The loss of cheap Russian energy and its adaption to risk-managed decoupling are likely to be disastrous for its international competitiveness. In addition, the advent of Electric Vehicles (EV) has led to a huge loss with the end of the importance of the combustion engine. This had been a core one-hundred-year technology superiority enjoyed by Germany.

In 2022, FDI in Germany decreased 50.4% year-on-year.127 Over the course of 15 quarters, starting in Q3 2019, Germany’s GDP increased by a paltry 0.6% in total, in constant prices, whereas China increased 20.2% during the same period, and the US by 8.1%.128

In media, the US dominates more than the Global South. The European television market is largely a US business: ‘Around one in five (18%) of all private TV channels (excluding local TV) are US-owned and over one third of all SVOD (39%) and TVOD (33%) services in Europe belong to a US company… Around half of all children’s TV channels in Europe are US-owned (48%) and so are 59% of entertainment subscription video-on-demand services’.129

The collapse of ‘national will’, the willingness to pursue a path corresponding to its national capitalist interests, demonstrated by Germany in the context of the war in Ukraine, shows that Germany has been defeated for a third time since the beginning of the twentieth century (the first two being the world wars, as noted by Hudson).130 Despite the cost to itself, Germany supported sanctions against Russia and military aid to Ukraine. When Israel’s war on Gaza entered its 100th day, having killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, Germany – with its historical violence in Namibia and domestic holocaust against Jewish people during WWII – supported Israel in the hearing at the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa.131

Over the last few months of 2023, political representatives of German capital in the Bundestag privately raised and then introduced measures to restrict trade with China under the guise of de-risking. This is clearly in contradiction to the short- and medium-term interests of German business. Marx described the relations between the capitalists as one between a band of warring brothers.132 In periods of crisis, the state, as an organ of the ruling class, exerts its political role despite the fissiparous nature of intra-capitalist relations. Today, the short-term interests of executives at nominally German companies are subordinated to the interests of Hyper-Imperialism.

With the formation of the German Empire (1871–1918), political and economic expansion into Eastern Europe, rather than solely territorial expansion, was a key strategy. After reunification in 1990, Germany pursued a dual strategy: first, it decisively supported the US strategy towards Russia of NATO expansion. Second, it led a simultaneous strategy of ‘capital penetration’ into Russia with the aim of securing political control in that state of groups most tied to Western and German interests and against those pursuing a more independent policy. German capital supported proxies like Russian billionaire (at the time) Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2001, Khodorkovsky established the Open Russia Foundation, with Henry Kissinger as one of its trustees.133 By 2004, he was imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement after attempting to carry out policies against Putin.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel pursued dual strategies of supporting military preparations against Russia and organising the internal opposition to Putin. She also orchestrated the building of Nord Stream 2 despite huge US resistance. The latter however was for German self-interest, not for the appeasement of Russia, nor to hinder NATO expansion. In 2014, she arranged the release of Khodorkovsky and enabled a calculated breach of the Minsk agreements. But the dual strategy ended in February 2022, when Germany as a willing partner alongside the US, and with the help of Ukraine, decided to wrestle and topple Russia.

Germany’s reality, however, is that unless it were prepared to undertake a full break with US policy, which no significant section of the German bourgeoisie is prepared to consider, any strategy it has fails without US support – giving the US the whip hand in this relationship. A paradox arose in which the US wanted to maintain German-Russian enmity, but not support a full German victory against Russia. This explains in part why the US appears to be threatening to cut off Ukraine’s funding. The US goal of destroying German-Russian relations has already been achieved as well as the vassalage of Europe and Germany under penalty of the deindustrialisation of Germany.

The US will continue to deprive the German bourgeoisie of all major options for asserting independent political positions. With the help of the capital ownership links that we have described, the German bourgeoisie will be faced with absolute subsumption of the options for the action of German capital under the US aegis. The hostility towards Russia acts as a driver of Europe’s subordination to the US and as a loss of any possibility of independent development.

The situation of antagonistic contradictions between US and European capital on fundamental issues has ceased. Small differences exist, but they are not strategic. The depth of US subordination of Europe is seen by the fact that only 11 of the 49 countries in the Global North are not part of a known US spy network nor attended the Vilnius NATO+ meeting. They are Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, San Marino, Serbia, and Switzerland. Collectively they have 28.3 million people (nearly equivalent to Delhi’s population) and a combined GDP of .8 trillion (1% of world GDP), a small portion of the Global North.

While a member of the secret Fourteen Eyes, Germany’s impotence was on full display when it was revealed that the US spied on its leaders, and it was incapable of even a whimper. Today, Europe’s bourgeoisie has become a toady for US intelligence operations.

NATO has long pressured Germany to spend a minimum of 2% of GDP on the military, following what was called the Goldilocks principle (established in the 1950s), aimed at:

… encouraging defence contributions from medium-sized allies – for example, [the Republic of] Korea during the Cold War, or Poland today – while treading lightly when it comes to larger allies like Germany or Japan. In doing so, it seeks to maximise contributions from allies that are powerful enough to supply meaningful military power to the alliance but not so powerful that they can afford to spurn the alliance.134

Japan’s governments have pursued policies of political provocation to China, at the behest of the US, despite the great advantages to Japan’s economy that would flow from closer ties with China. In the UK, US opposition to the ‘golden period’ of relations with China carried out under David Cameron’s premiership forced its reversal under his successors – with damaging consequences for British capital.

The creation of the Centre for New American Security in 2007 marked a historic marriage of two groups of foreign policy elites, the mainly Republican neo-conservatives and the largely Democratic liberal hawks. Their joint strategy was to move to target Russia via Ukraine immediately.

In 2022, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida set spending targets for the following five years of 43 trillion yen (US$316 billion).135 It already has the second greatest number of F35 advanced aircraft in the world (after the US) and signed an agreement in 2020 to purchase 105 additional aircraft. These aircraft can be retrofitted with nuclear weapons. It has penned a revised national security strategy to allow the country to develop a pre-emptive strike capability and deploy long-range missiles.136

The rearming of the two main fascist powers of WWII must be considered a crime. A dangerous revanchist movement is re-emerging in Germany. The difference is that this time they do so as part of the US-Led Military Bloc.

PART V: Changes in the World Order

A Southwards Shift of the Economic Base

As the countries of the Global North have faced prolonged declining economic growth, countries of the Global South, especially in Asia, have displayed a higher economic growth trajectory over the past thirty years. As can be seen in Figure 39, at the end of the Cold War in 1993, the Global North accounted for 57.2% of the global GDP (PPP), while the Global South accounted for just 42.8%. Thirty years later, these proportions have definitively inverted: the share of the Global South has reached 59.4%, with the Global North holding at 40.6%.

The G7 (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan) is the core economic countries of the Global North bloc, and in 1993, these seven countries accounted for 45.4% of the global economy. Meanwhile, the most significant economies of the Global South, later known as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), made up only 16.7% of the global economy in that year. Among them, Russia had just emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and China was deepening its economic reforms and establishing a socialist market economy. Neither Russia nor China were competitors to the G7 at the time. Thirty years later, the BRICS countries accounted for 31.5% of the global economy, having surpassed the G7 (30.3%) as shown in Figure 40.

In August 2023, BRICS expanded by inviting six countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina (although Argentina has now temporarily declined). BRICS10 (excluding Argentina) added 4% to BRICS’s share of the world GDP (PPP) as shown in Figure 41.

Over the past thirty years, the absolute leader of the Global North, the United States, has seen its share of the world economy slowly decline in PPP terms from 19.7% in 1993 to 15.5% in 2022. However, in the Global South, China’s rapid rise has been the most notable variable. In 1993, China only accounted for 5% of the world economy (Figure 42); by 2016, China’s economy had surpassed that of the United States in PPP terms; and by 2022, China’s share of the world economy had reached 18.4%. This marks the first time in over 600 years that a non-white dominated country has economically broken through the hegemony of the white imperialist countries. This economic reality led the US to urgently begin to try to suppress China’s rise.

However, it would be a mistake to view China as the sole source of growth for the Global South. Even without China, the economies of the Global South had surpassed the Global North by 2022 — with their respective shares of the global economy at 41% and 40.6% (Figure 43). The overall economic development of the Global South has enabled them to objectively have the capacity and to seek a more just international order, which is contrary to the wishes of the imperialist bloc of the Global North.

We have identified all 43 countries – whose share of the world GDP (PPP) amounts to 41.1% (Figure 44) – that are part of one or more of the three new non-imperialist controlled international organisations: BRICS10 (founded in 2009, expanded in 2010 and 2023), Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (founded as ‘Shanghai Five’ in 1996, expanded in 2001, 2017, and 2023), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations (founded in 2021). The full list is provided in a later section.

Figure 45 shows the past decade’s average annual growth rate of GDP (PPP) per capita of the 21 largest economies in the Global South and the G7 countries. China’s growth rate (5.8%) continues to lead among major countries. Asia’s growth rate is generally higher than other countries in the Global South. The next five countries with the highest growth rates are Bangladesh (5.3%), Viet Nam (4.9%), India (4.6%), the Philippines (3.3%), and Indonesia (3.1%). Aside from the United States, the rest of the G7 countries have an average per capita growth rate of less than 1%. Regrettably, the largest economies in Africa and Latin America have experienced negative per capita growth: Nigeria and South Africa at -0.4%, and Brazil and Argentina at 0% and -0.7%, respectively.

Of course, we acknowledge that growth rates themselves can mask the intense class struggles within these countries, where the share of the growth is not nearly equitably distributed between capital and labour. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the growth rates and what their trend lines describe.

One of the most significant changes in the world economy of the last 20 years has been a dramatic shift in the geography of world industrial production.

The World Bank publishes the industry percentage of GDP using the current prices and current exchange rates, which this study refers to as the Current Exchange Rate (CER) method. Currently, we are unaware of any published industry percentages for GDP (PPP) calculations.

Figures 46 and 47 show changes in the percentage of industry value added in GDP for both CER and PPP terms over the last 18 years. It is likely that the figures of the industry value added world share are somewhere in between the CER and PPP. Subsequent charts in this series are shown only for the PPP method and have the same qualifications as made for the first series.137

What we see is that there is indeed a change in the base of the economy, with the Global South home to the majority share. Despite many predictions of a new post-industrial society, no major country has achieved modernisation without industrialisation.

The world share of industry value added of BRICS10 is now double that of the G7 (Figure 48).

The results show the following for industry valued added as a percentage of the world using GDP (PPP):

  • China is the world’s leading industrial country with a 25.7% share value added, while the US holds only a 9.7% share.
  • The Global South has a 69.4% share, while the Global North has a 30.6% share.
  • BRICS10 has a 44% share and exceeds the G7.
  • The share of Japan, Germany, France, and the UK are also declining, whilst India is increasing (Figure 49).

We used the World Bank industry percentage multiplied by the annual GDP (PPP) for each country for each year to derive a country-based industrial value added. We then used these to calculate the percentage of total world industry value added by each country and country grouping category. There are some limitations and complex issues regarding this methodology.

Some economists have tried to minimise this change. Some argue that US dollar monopolies and ownership of large multinational corporations mean GDP figures overstate the change. China, at a minimum, cannot be said to have all its production under the lock and key of the US. Even in India, it is a mistake to understate the significance of a growing big national bourgeoise (albeit large sections of it politically reactionary). Moving industrial production to the Global South could only have occurred with massive improvements in their infrastructure.

In his parting words to Russian President Vladimir Putin during his state visit in March 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, ‘Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together’.138 Eurasia is now centre stage for determining the future of the next period of human existence.

US Strategy to Curtail China’s Economic Growth and Influence

In 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered his famous Munich speech criticising US monopolistic dominance, ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts’.139 In the same year, the Centre for New American Security (CNAS) was formed. By 2009, secret US cables to Washington revealed by Wikileaks stated:

Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialisation of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution… When Xi takes the helm of the party, he might aggressively attempt to address those evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.140

The alarm bells in Langley and Foggy Bottom were ringing. The West’s dream for the rise of a ‘Chinese Gorbachev’ was eviscerated in 2012. It became clear that an economically ascendant China would not be imminently defeated. Thus, the Pivot to Asia strategy began integrating its allies to contain China. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly declared that ‘the twenty-first century will be America’s Pacific Century’.141 In contrast, Xi Jinping said to US President Barack Obama, ‘The Pacific Ocean is broad enough to accommodate the development of both China and the United States’.142

By 2016, China’s GDP, calculated by purchasing power parity, had surpassed that of the United States. In 2020, the Centre for Economics and Business Research predicted that by 2028, China’s GDP, measured in US dollars, would overtake that of the US, a forecast that became a ‘demon barrier’.143 US officials repeatedly defined China as the most significant strategic threat facing the US and the Global North.

The relative decline of US power, the rise of socialist China, and the economic growth of the Global South are key reasons behind US active subordination and subsequent integration of the rest of the imperialist countries. This has led to a full military, political, and economic bloc under US control. In 1998, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, ‘The most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran… not out of a sudden love for one another but out of a shared opposition to the predominant power (the US)’.144

CNAS, formed by a combination of neo-cons and liberal hawks, spawned a core cadre of US policy elites – from both parties – who focused on developing a new geopolitical strategy for the US. By 2021, ignoring Brzezinski’s warning, they began publicly promoting the preparation for simultaneous wars. Significant figures from CNAS include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, and former Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Michele Flournoy. Former CNAS staff and consultants have permeated strategic organs of the state, including the National Security Council.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, whilst not a member of CNAS, now plays a dominant role in the Presidency and pursues the same international strategy. In April 2023, Sullivan gave a speech titled ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institute.145 This speech was significant for three distinct reasons. First, it is very unusual for such an important speech on the US economy to be given by a National Security Advisor. Historically, National Security Advisors, like Henry Kissinger, stayed in the realms of national security, geopolitics, and military affairs. Second, Sullivan’s speech sought to create a ‘new Washington Consensus’ to re-establish US economic hegemony. Third, Sullivan acknowledged the depth of the US structural crisis, including its economic stagnation.

This economic plan is required to support military expansion. In July 2023, the US proposed a bill to add US$ 345 million in military aid to Taiwan.146 From Tel Aviv to Kiev to Taipei, the US is escalating its military operations to the doorsteps of Eurasia.

Cold Wars, necessarily associated with conflicts between nuclear powers, are always dangerous. In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, in which they decried the ‘propaganda model’ utilised by the US corporate media, often in partnership with the state. They wrote it long before that system was able to avail itself of the new technological tools of surveillance and targeted communication characterising the digital age. Thanks to whistle-blower Edward Snowden the world was able to get a glimpse of the vast expansion of US control over all communications and how it has integrated all the US IT tech monopoly platforms into adjuncts of US national security infrastructure.

‘Collect it all’ was how a former senior intelligence officer described the National Security Agency’s former director Keith Alexander’s approach to data collection. All the emails, phone calls, and text messages of all types (including those of WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal), every key stroke, and every URL are captured for the vast majority of the world’s population (outside of China, Russia, and a few other countries). They are stored in vast networks of hard drives in locations like Bluffdale, Utah. The US created a global network able to capture and manage nearly every packet of data on all undersea optical cables, all cellular traffic, and satellite data traffic.

Despite military hegemony, capital still needs the approximation of consent. Over time, new techniques such as machine learning created a qualitative leap in the ability of the US to conduct psychological secret warfare against the people, the Global South, and their populations.147 The economic models of all media companies collapsed with the advent of the internet and the creation of economic tech monopolies, which disintermediated all media profits. A new era of fully weaponised media outlets began – a development that is part of the overall hybrid war strategy (including economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation) that has been utilised by the US establishment around the world.

The pivot to Asia, in reality a pivot to China, began formally in 2012 under Obama. The US combined propaganda, diplomatic, economic, and political strategies to try to curb, at first, China’s economic development and, later, its growing influence in institutions like BRICS. Starting in 2016, Trump attempted to avoid conflict with Russia and began to focus all US energies against China.

Over the last eight years, the US used a coterie of selected and curated topics to define the Western media narrative on China. Despite millions of dead Muslims at the hands of NATO forces in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the West managed to integrate their formidable array of soft-power resources to wage a fierce cold war against China. Even the chief propagandist of the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels, might have been amazed at the hubris of the West in claiming the mantle of human rights and attempting to use Xinjiang as the whipping point against China.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and former army colonel, noted that an important strategic goal of the US military’s invasion and long-term stationing in Afghanistan was to contain China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2013–present) and to create ethnic divisions and social unrest in Xinjiang.148 The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC became central props in a hallmark US psyops campaign.

As we have explained in the economic analysis of Western economies, it is not irrational for the West to seek to retard China’s growth. Central to the next stage of development of China’s economy is promoting a dual circulation economy, i.e., to increase the weight of the domestic market while continuing to keep growing its international trade, switching to high quality development, and advancing the economic development of the western provinces of China. Attacking Xinjiang simultaneously accomplishes many Western interests: weakens China’s domestic growth strategies, isolates China internationally, masks US violence against Muslim countries, and continues to support extremist groups to destabilise their adversaries.

Fabricated allegations of genocide among the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, entirely unsubstantiated by the US State Department, enabled the US government to impose sanctions on China, aiming to strike at China’s entire textile industry chain, which exports more than US$ 300 billion and accounts for over one-third of the world’s textile exports, ranking first globally.149 But despite US sanctions, Xinjiang’s foreign trade surged by 51.25% year-on-year, reaching US$ 30 billion in the first three-quarters of 2023, with trade with five Central Asian nations increasing by 59.1%.150 China has just announced a free trade zone in Xinjiang to promote connectivity with regional Belt and Road countries.

In addition to ‘soft-power’ warfare, the US spared no effort to contain China’s development in high-tech sectors, especially in weakening China’s capacity to produce or even purchase top-end semiconductor chips. By imposing long-arm jurisdiction on technology such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines manufactured by the Dutch company ASML, the US seeks to prevent China from entering the future of chip technology. The Biden administration believes that its impact will extend far beyond weakening China’s military advancements, but also threatening China’s economic growth and scientific leadership.

Gregory C. Allen, director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project and senior fellow in the Emerging Technology Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believes that the message conveyed by the export controls against China issued by the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in October 2022, is part of ‘a new US policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry – strangling with an intent to kill’.151 C.J. Muse, an industry analyst in the US, stated: ‘If you’d told me about these rules five years ago, I would’ve told you that’s an act of war — we’d have to be at war’.152

Despite severe restrictions by the US, China continues to outgrow the Global North (Figure 50).

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China strengthens its economic connections with the Global South. From 2013 to 2022, China’s total trade volume with countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative reached US$ 19.1 trillion, with an average annual increase of 6.4%. Cumulative bilateral investment exceeded US$ 380 billion, and China’s foreign direct investment exceeded US$ 240 billion. China’s new contracted projects reached US$ 2 trillion, with a cumulative turnover of US$ 1.3 trillion completed.153

Ironically, US containment in high-tech fields has only strengthened China’s resolve for self-reliance in innovation. In recent years, China has made significant breakthroughs in independent innovation in high-end chips, electric vehicles, and digital technology, making the US blockade and containment in high-tech fields increasingly unrealistic.

The Global North Pushing the World Towards War

The peaceful rise of the Global South countries, led by Asia and especially China, poses a comprehensive economic challenge to imperialist world dominance. For the first time in 600 years, the Atlantic imperialist powers are confronted with a non-white economic force capable of countering them.

To contain China’s rise, the US is intensifying internal integration within the imperialist camp, allowing and demanding that two fascist countries defeated in WWII – Japan and Germany – rearm themselves. US political leaders unanimously consider it essential to contain and defeat China as a core strategic enemy and started a New Cold War. US military leaders make alarming statements about China. The US geopolitical goal is to overthrow the regimes of China and Russia, de-nuclearise and if possible, dismember both countries, split them into several small countries, and ensure they can never again challenge US military or economic hegemony.

On Russia’s western border, NATO’s eastward expansion has brought the security issue of Ukraine to a critical boiling point. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States had promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward since its original mission – countering the Soviet Union and containing European communism ­– had concluded with the end of the Cold War. However, NATO reneged on that ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ and it inducted 14 new member states, including several former Soviet Republics. In 2018, Ukraine amended its constitution to prioritise joining NATO and the European Union as its national strategy, posing a significant threat to Russia’s national security. With Kiev only 760 km away from Moscow, allowing NATO to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine would constitute an uncontrollable military threat to Russia.

Simultaneously, neo-Nazi forces in western Ukraine were on the rise. In January 2022, torchlight processions were held in cities like Kiev and Lviv, commemorating the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Prior conflicts saw western Ukrainian nationalist extremists hoisting Nazi flags and threatening to annihilate eastern Ukrainians and pro-Russian elements. Ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine had to organise resistance and seek Russian aid. Under these circumstances, Russia launched a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, essentially facing a direct confrontation with NATO’s military force.

In the Western Pacific, the United States continuously attempts to stoke tensions over the South China Sea and Taiwan. In August 2022, despite strong opposition and solemn representations from China, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, seriously violating the One-China principle and the provisions of the three US-China joint communiqués, severely impacting the political foundation of Sino-American relations; it is important to recall that in 1972, in the Shanghai communiqué, the United States accepted the ‘One China’ policy, which acknowledges that there is only one China and that Taiwan is not a separate, sovereign state). In August 2023, the US Navy, along with forces from Canada and the Republic of Korea, conducted joint military exercises in the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea.154 However, the exercises ended abruptly after just five hours due to China’s targeted military mobilisations.155 Since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became president of the Philippines in June 2022, the Philippines has opened multiple military bases to the US, strengthened security ties with Australia and Japan, and sparked disputes with China over sovereignty issues in the South China Sea. Warships from the US, Canada, Australia, and other countries also frequently patrol and exercise in the South China Sea, causing several close encounters and frictions with the Chinese Navy.

To date, faced with continuous provocations from the United States and its allies, China has maintained a restrained stance, striving to avoid military conflicts with the US and its allies – a confrontation that could escalate into a global nuclear war. However, Taiwan holds a special significance for China. As part of China, historically and under international law, Taiwan’s continued separation signifies that China’s civil war, and even the ‘century of humiliation’ that began with the Opium Wars in 1840, has not ended. The division of Taiwan is unacceptable to China, ultimately even if it means the risk of direct war against the United States.

With the direct support of Biden and Blinken, Israel is advancing an ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The situation in Gaza starkly reveals the true face of the imperialist camp of the Global North as a collective of white settlers: when conflicts arise between white settlers and colonised people of colour, the imperialist camp uniformly stands with the settlers.

The fault lines of Ukraine and Palestine have exacerbated the polarisation of the social democrats, sections of whom have proven unable to overcome their desire for acceptability and join in a robust movement for peace.

Let us return to the quote from NATO and the EU that they would be ‘protecting our one billion citizens, preserving our freedom and democracy… against all threats’. This sentence, appearing in the first paragraph of the NATO-EU 2023 communiqué, clearly outlines the structure of today’s world: the imperialist camp, centred around the US and based on NATO infrastructure, is fully united and mobilised militarily, politically, and economically, ready to stifle any emerging forces that might pose a threat to their hegemonic status. This unprecedented immense imperialist pressure has forced many in the ‘rest of the world’ (those outside the imperialist camp) to identify alternative structures and identities for self-preservation.

EPILOGUE: A Credible Economic and Political Alternative World Order

Twenty-five years after the publication of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) – identifying this as the greatest geopolitical danger for the US – China, Russia, and Iran have indeed grown closer in various fields, including economics, politics, and security. Not coincidentally, they are the only three countries that are in the BRICS10, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter and United Nations (Figure 51). The driving force behind this convergence – precisely as Brzezinski predicted – is the escalating hegemonic pressure from the imperialist group led by the United States. Compared to NATO, which is highly unified in ideology, military command, and intelligence sharing, there is no anti-imperialist international organisation that is comparable. Nevertheless, three influential international organisations have emerged within the Global South:

  • The BRICS organisation, initiated by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is an economic cooperation mechanism that expanded to 17 official and unofficial cooperating partners after the BRICS summit in August 2023. BRICS10 represents 45.5% of the world population, 35.6% of the GDP (PPP), and 44% of the global industrial output. The BRICS New Development Bank began with US$ 100 billion in capital investment and its Contingent Reserve Structure also holds US$ 100 billion.156
  • The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) started with a focus on security issues. It brings together countries from the Eurasian continent – from the large economic performers like China, India, and Turkey to the leading OPEC countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as member countries of the League of Arab States – to address security challenges through multifaceted development approaches. The SCO represents 60% of the Eurasian territory, a quarter of the world’s GDP, and 40% of the global population.157 In July 2023, Xi Jinping proposed the creation of an SCO development bank.
  • The newly established Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations (FUNC) seeks to advocate for multilateralism and oppose hegemony and unilateralism within the framework of the UN Charter. Currently, this group has 20 member countries, with Venezuela as its initiator. On the issue of Palestine, the group supports the just demand for national independence of the Palestinian people, backs Palestine’s bid to become a formal member of the United Nations and supports the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Hitting its 10-year milestone, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has also had a significant impact on the Global South. To date, with an investment surpassing US$ 1 trillion, the BRI has been a pivotal force in infrastructure development in the Global South.158

Contrary to the imperialist camp, the primary aspirations of the Global South countries are sovereignty and development, and to achieve peace. Specifically, they face at least eight common challenges and opportunities (Figure 52), elaborated on below:

  • Multilateralism: Engaging in profound multilateral dialogues and cooperation among Global South countries without reliance on platforms provided by the Global North countries.
  • New Modernisation: Building regional economic integration through economic corridors and belts within the Global South to realise economies of scale at the continental level.
  • De-dollarisation: Reducing dependence on the US dollar (especially for those countries facing sanctions) in international trade through mechanisms like local currency transactions, currency swaps, and regional common currencies.
  • Innovation led by the Global South: Promoting democratic and open technological innovation among Global South countries. This includes reducing the economic premium caused by intellectual property monopolies in areas like medicine, new energy, and information technology.
  • Reparations and Debt Resolution: Addressing the century-old debt trap imposed by imperialist countries through collective negotiations for reductions and compensations.
  • Food Sovereignty: Ensuring the peoples’ and states’ right to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries, transnational corporations, and free trade agreements.
  • Digital Sovereignty: Enhancing the capability of Global South countries to control digital spaces in hardware, software, data, content, standards, and regulations, and constructing alternatives to the US monopolised digital platforms.
  • Environmental Justice: Formulating fair emission rights allocation plans and urging imperialist countries to compensate for their long-term cumulative pollution. Financialisation of nature is a dead end for the Global South.

Humanity faces a dangerous and ruthless military power. The US is on a march to rearm the two main fascist powers of WWII, as it itself turns more towards a politics of the extreme right and neo-fascism.

It is sadly very true that the left forces outside the socialist camp are indeed weak and that the subjective aspect of revolution in most countries is not ready for conducting revolution. But we are witnessing significant changes and breaks in consciousness, albeit not full class consciousness. Millions of people are in the streets reviled by the sickness of not only the US and Israel’s genocidal regimes but also of France and the UK. The four nuclear powers of imperialism have banded together, demonstrating their power. The likely cost of this will be the creation of a future generation of youth in the Arab and Muslim world who will never forget nor forgive this flaunting of brutality and humiliation. Mao Zedong described this historical dialectic:

Imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are – paper tigers. On this, we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers that can devour people. On this, we should build our tactical thinking.159

Under President Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has proposed visionary recommendations for humanity. The China model of modernisation, a result of socialism with Chinese characteristics, indicates a path for the Global South countries that does not rely on exploiting and oppressing other nations. It balances the material and spiritual civilisation, economic development, and the ecological environment, offering an essential reference for the development of the Global South.

As a result of over 600 years of humiliation, racial violence, and economic exploitation by the Global North, we have arrived at this stage of Hyper-Imperialism. However, an emerging Global South, even with its contradictions, reminds us that human beings are not constrained to remain victims of history. Despite the different context of subjective factors, the concluding call of The Communist Manifesto (1848) remains compelling today:

We have a world to win.

***

‘Black Woman’

by Cuban Poet Nancy Morejón

Still I smell the foam of the sea they forced me to cross.

Night, I cannot recall the night.

Nor could the ocean itself recall it.
But never have I forgotten the first seagull I glimpsed.
High up, the clouds, like innocent ever-present witnesses.
Perhaps I’ve not forgotten my lost coast nor even my ancestral tongue.
They dropped me here and here I’ve lived.
And because I work like a dog,
Here is where I was reborn.
And I sought to rely on epic story of the Mandinga after epic story.

I rebelled.

His Grace purchased me in a public square.
I embroidered His Grace’s cloak and I bore him a son.
My son was given no name.
And His Grace, he died at the hands of an impeccable English lord.

I trudged forward.

This is the land where I was lashed and beaten upside down.
I paddled along all its rivers.
Under its sun I sewed, harvested, and ate none of the crops.
I got a slave barracks for a house.
I myself carried the stones to build it,
but I sang in the natural beat of the nation’s birds.

I rose in rebellion.

In this very land I touched the warm blood
and rotten bones of many others like me,
brought here, or not, as I was.
Then I stopped thinking about the way to Guinea forever.
To Guinea or Benin? Was I thinking about Madagascar or Cape Verde?

I worked even more.

Then I laid the foundation for my best millenary chant and my hope.
Here I built my world.
I went to the mountains.
My true independence happened at the palenque
and I rode with Maceo’s cavalry.

Only one century later, alongside my descendants,
from atop a blue mountain,

I came down from the Sierra

to put an end to capitalists and usurers,
and generals and the petit bourgeois.
Now I am: only now do we hold and create.
Nothing is beyond our reach.
Our land.
Ours the sea and sky.
Ours the magic and the amazing dreams.
My equals, here I see you dance
around the tree we planted for communism.
Its generous wood is clearly resounding.

APPENDIX

Methodology

This report was compiled with data and charts from Global South Insights (GSI), based on diverse sources, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, OECD, the Conference Board, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Monthly Review, and World Beyond War, among others (see Figure 55). In this section, we present the methodological definitions and criteria that guided the elaboration of this report.

All 193 UN Member States and Palestine as an Observer State are included in the Global North Rings or the Global South Groupings.

In analysing the Global North, we found that among the factors included in our investigation – historical, military, and intelligence relationships – a critical factor was each country’s relationship to US intelligence. As a result, we have divided the Global North into four rings, comprising 49 countries in the US-Led Imperialist Camp. Our analysis of the Global South indicated factors such as the country’s economic and political independence from imperialism and the strategic relationships between Global South countries. However, a critical factor was the relative degree to which they were targets of regime change and their role in publicly advancing international anti-imperialist stances. Therefore, the 145 Global South countries are divided into six groupings.

In addition to UN member countries, we have included the number of military bases in non-UN member countries and in the territories – sometimes contentious – where foreign bases are located.

Other comparative calculations in this report include all countries and territories from their respective source database.

Although invaluable, international databases, such as those from the IMF and the World Bank, are burdened by limitations arising from disparities in national statistical production processes, particularly in the methodologies for variable measurement. This leads to the non-harmonisation of national data compiled by international databases at its sources. Similarly, international databases may have limitations regarding completeness. The data governance and rigorous audit procedures conducted by GSI sought to ensure maximum data consistency.

Regarding GDP-related data, this report primarily uses the IMF data. Notably, the IMF database does not include data for four countries: Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, due to their sovereign decision of not being subject to IMF dictates, as well as Monaco and Liechtenstein. The GDP (PPP) field in tables featuring these four countries is left blank.

Economic data from the World Bank is used only to calculate world industry value added. The World Bank publishes the value added of industry as a percentage of GDP using current prices and exchange rates, referred to in this study as the Current Exchange Rate (CER) method. Only in this case are both CER and GDP (PPP) values presented.

In this document, GDP (PPP) is adopted as the standard. This is not a choice free of controversy, and due to the scope of this report, we will not delve into our methodological reflections on such controversies. PPP conversion factors are statistical estimates based on baskets of goods and services for benchmark years, further applied to GDP for GDP (PPP) estimates. Although there are arguments that GDP (PPP) data could overestimate countries in the Global South, it is a more accurate measure in comparing economic performance and living standards across different countries, as it adjusts for differences in price levels and provides a more stable metric for international comparisons. At the same time, GDP (PPP) delivers a more meaningful basis for ranking countries regarding their economic size and contribution to the global economy, compared to the GDP rankings using CER. In such rankings, countries with strong currencies may rank higher, even if their actual economic output is not as significant.

Figures 53 and 54 show the comparisons for CER versus PPP calculations of percentage of world total GDP for 1) China versus the United States and 2) the Global South versus the Global North. Both CER and PPP show a dramatic rise in relative percentages for China and the Global South.

However, PPP conversion factors to measure military spending are necessarily less reliable than current exchange rates because no price data is collected for military expenditure. Therefore, the nature of military spending lacks this information for international comparisons. SIPRI recognises that using the PPP adjustment for military spending is inaccurate and, therefore, is less reliable than using currency exchange rates. Regarding military spending, we combined data from Monthly Review for actual US military spending, along with SIPRI data, to calculate the real worldwide military spending using CER.

As for other military data, various sources were used to comprehensively address this central phenomenon to analyse Hyper-Imperialism; however, limitations persist due to differing methodologies, measurement variables, data scarcity, and secrecy. We used data from the US Congressional Research Service combined with the Military Intervention Project (MIP) for the quantity of interventions. While the former is an official US publication that serves as a primary data source on US military interventions, it does not include some secret missions and does not aggregate its data to differentiate between the various types of US Armed Forces’ overseas interventions. The latter uses a more comprehensive definition of military intervention, although it only publishes a data summary. Finally, we used the lists published by World Beyond War, Declassified UK, and the US Department of Defence Base Structure Report for data on military bases.

In addition to the aforementioned data sources, GSI’s elaboration in this report draws from a broader set of data sources listed below. GSI carefully created new categories and built complex data integration platforms to provide the analysis from a Global South standpoint. Classification processes are inherently challenging and subject to modification since domestic and regional politics can change quickly. Extensive data collection and integration across diverse countries allowed for hypothesis testing. For example, in determining who were the closest allies of the US, we assessed closeness to US intelligence. The data for this analysis was exposed by Edward Snowden when he showed that, in addition to the ‘Five Eyes’ – the world’s oldest intelligence partnership between five anglophone Western states, which began with the 1946 British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement – there were two other hidden groups, the ‘Nine Eyes’ and the ‘Fourteen Eyes’ (SIGINT Seniors Europe, formed in 1982).

The foundation for this report is the integration of databases, data analysis, and GSI’s elaboration.

Figure 55

Sources and descriptions of data used for research

Source Database GSI explanation URLs
Conference Board (CB) Growth Accounting and Total Factor Productivity Contribution of Labor Quality to real GDP growth https://data-central.conference-board.org/
Conference Board (CB) Growth Accounting and Total Factor Productivity Contribution of Labor Quantity to real GDP growth https://data-central.conference-board.org/
Conference Board (CB) Growth Accounting and Total Factor Productivity Contribution of Total Capital Services to real GDP growth https://data-central.conference-board.org/
Conference Board (CB) Growth Accounting and Total Factor Productivity Contribution of Total Factor Productivity to real GDP growth https://data-central.conference-board.org/
Conference Board (CB) Growth Accounting and Total Factor Productivity Real GDP growth https://data-central.conference-board.org/
Congressional Research Service (CRS) US acknowledged use of armed forces abroad, 1798–April 2023 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738/41
Declassified UK Declassified UK bases, 2020 https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-the-uk-militarys-overseas-base-network-involves-145-sites-in-42-countries/
Encyclopedia Britannica British Commonwealth members
Enerdata Global Energy & CO2 Data Global Energy & CO2 Data https://www.enerdata.net/
Enerdata World Energy Efficiency & Demand World Energy Efficiency & Demand https://www.enerdata.net/
Energy Information Administration (EIA) Natural Gas Natural Gas Reserves https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/
Ernst & Young Who owns the DAX? Analysis of the shareholder structure of DAX companies in 2018 – abridged version Shareholder structure of DAX companies in 2018 https://assets.ey.com/content/dam/ey-sites/ey-com/de_de/news/2019/06/ey-wem-gehoert-der-dax-2019.pdf?download=.
Federation of American Scientists Nuclear weapons sharing, 2023 https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Nuclear-weapons-sharing-2023.pdf
Federation of American Scientists Status of World Nuclear Forces https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/
G-77 Group of 77 at the United Nations https://www.g77.org/doc/
Global South Insights (GSI) Colonial status
Global South Insights (GSI) Common history of Imperialist countries
Global South Insights (GSI) Global North or Global South
Global South Insights (GSI) Global North Ring or Global South Grouping
Global South Insights (GSI) US-Led Military Bloc
Green Finance & Development Center Countries signing BRI MOU https://greenfdc.org/countries-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-bri/
Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations Friends of the UN Charter https://www.gof-uncharter.org/
IHS Markit Shareholder structure by region in 2020 https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/pdf/0621/DAX-Study-2020—DIRK-Conference-June-2021_IHS-Markit.pdf
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Deployment of troop information https://www.iiss.org/publications/the-military-balance/
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) GDP in Current Exchange Rates (CER) terms using constant prices https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) GDP in Current Exchange Rates (CER) terms using current prices https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) GDP in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms using constant prices https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) GDP in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms using current prices https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) GDP per capita in Current Exchange Rates (CER) terms using current prices https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms using constant prices https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms using current prices https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (WEO) Population https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2023/October
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ISO country and territory https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Renewable energy statistics 2023 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Jul/Renewable-energy-statistics-2023
Maddison Historical Statistics of the World Economy https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-database-2010
Monthly Review Actual US military spending, 2022 https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/actual-u-s-military-spending-reached-1-53-trillion-in-2022-more-than-twice-acknowledged-level-new-estimates-based-on-u-s-national-accounts/
National Bureau of Statistics of China(NBS) China quarterly GDP from 2019 Q3 to 2023 Q3 https://data.stats.gov.cn/english/easyquery.htm?cn=B01
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 2023 NATO Vilnius Summit participants https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/events_216418.htm?selectedLocale=en
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) NATO member countries https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52044.htm
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Capital Market Series Capital in the hands of non-domestic investors, OECD 10,000 largest companies https://www.oecd.org/corporate/Owners-of-the-Worlds-Listed-Companies.pdf
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Capital Market Series Foreign and domestic ownership key stock exchanges https://www.oecd.org/corporate/Owners-of-the-Worlds-Listed-Companies.pdf
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Eurozone quarterly GDP from 2019 Q3 to 2023 Q3 https://data.oecd.org/gdp/quarterly-gdp.htm
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) The Annual Statistical Bulletin (ASB) World proven crude oil reserves by country https://asb.opec.org/
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) OPEC members https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/25.htm
SanctionsKill Campaign US sanctioned countries https://sanctionskill.org/
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) SCO members https://eng.sectsco.org/
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) SIPRI Military Expenditure World military expenditure (constant USD) https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) SIPRI Military Expenditure World military expenditure (current USD) https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex
Stuart Laycock (2012) UK invasions 927-2012
The Economist One Hundred Years of Economic Statistics UK current account balance
The Economist One Hundred Years of Economic Statistics UK GDP at market prices
The Economist One Hundred Years of Economic Statistics US current account balance 1885–1987
The Economist One Hundred Years of Economic Statistics US gross national product (GNP) 1889–1987
United Nations (UN) World Population Prospects (WPP) Life expectancy estimates by region, subregion and country, annually for 1950–2021 https://population.un.org/wpp/
United Nations (UN) World Population Prospects (WPP) Life expectancy estimates by region, subregion and country, annually for 2022–2100 https://population.un.org/wpp/
United Nations (UN) World Population Prospects (WPP) UN defined regions, sub-regions and intermediate https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Documentation/Documentation/
United Nations (UN) World Population Prospects (WPP) Population estimates by region, subregion and country, annually for 1950–2021 https://population.un.org/wpp/
United Nations (UN) World Population Prospects (WPP) Population estimates by region, subregion and country, annually for 2022–2100 https://population.un.org/wpp/
United Nations (UN) UN members https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states
United Nations (UN) UN voting data https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Voting+Data&ln=en&c=Voting+Data
US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) International Transactions, International Services, and International Investment Position Tables Balance on current account https://apps.bea.gov/itable/?reqid=62&step=1&_gl=1*xxlwzz*_ga*Mjk5NDQ2MTIxLjE2OTA0NjEwMzA.*_ga_J4698JNNFT*MTcwMjMxNjAyMC4xNS4xLjE3MDIzMTYwMjkuMC4wLjA.#eyJhcHBpZCI6NjIsInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDYsNl0sImRhdGEiOltbIlByb2R1Y3QiLCIxIl0sWyJUYWJsZUxpc3QiLCIxIl0sWyJGaWx0ZXJfIzEiLFsiMCJdXSxbIkZpbHRlcl8jMiIsWyIwIl1dLFsiRmlsdGVyXyMzIixbIjAiXV0sWyJGaWx0ZXJfIzQiLFsiMCJdXSxbIkZpbHRlcl8jNSIsWyIwIl1dXX0=
US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Accounts Gross domestic product (GDP), quantity indexes https://apps.bea.gov/itable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDMsM10sImRhdGEiOltbImNhdGVnb3JpZXMiLCJTdXJ2ZXkiXSxbIk5JUEFfVGFibGVfTGlzdCIsIjMiXSxbIkZpcnN0X1llYXIiLCIyMDIxIl0sWyJMYXN0X1llYXIiLCIyMDIzIl0sWyJTY2FsZSIsIjAiXSxbIlNlcmllcyIsIkEiXSxbIlNlbGVjdF9hbGxfeWVhcnMiLCIxIl1dfQ==
US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Accounts Gross national product https://apps.bea.gov/itable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey&_gl=1*es60tl*_ga*Mjk5NDQ2MTIxLjE2OTA0NjEwMzA.*_ga_J4698JNNFT*MTcwMjMxNjAyMC4xNS4xLjE3MDIzMTYyODEuMC4wLjA.#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDMsM10sImRhdGEiOltbImNhdGVnb3JpZXMiLCJTdXJ2ZXkiXSxbIk5JUEFfVGFibGVfTGlzdCIsIjMxNyJdLFsiRmlyc3RfWWVhciIsIjIwMjEiXSxbIkxhc3RfWWVhciIsIjIwMjMiXSxbIlNjYWxlIiwiLTkiXSxbIlNlcmllcyIsIkEiXSxbIlNlbGVjdF9hbGxfeWVhcnMiLCIxIl1dfQ==
US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Accounts Net saving as a percentage of gross national income https://apps.bea.gov/itable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCIxMzciXV19
US Department of Defense Base Structure Reports FY2023 Buildings under US military control in foreign countries https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/Downloads/BSI/Base%20Structure%20Report%20FY23.xlsx
World Bank (WB) World Development Indicators (WDI) Adjusted savings: consumption of fixed capital (current USD) https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/
World Bank (WB) World Development Indicators (WDI) GDP in Current Exchange Rates (CER) terms using current USD https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/
World Bank (WB) World Development Indicators (WDI) GDP in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms using current international dollars https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/
World Bank (WB) World Development Indicators (WDI) Gross fixed capital formation (current USD) https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/
World Bank (WB) World Development Indicators (WDI) Industry (including construction), value added (% of GDP) https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/
World BEYOND War USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database 902 current US military bases https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/
World Nuclear Report The World Nuclear Industry Status Report, 2022 https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-v3-hr.pdf
World Resources Institute (WRI) Country shapefiles and boundaries, India Perspective, last updated on May 4, 2017 https://github.com/wri/wri-bounds
XV BRICS Summit 2023 Johannesburg II Declaration BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development and Inclusive Multilateralism BRICS members https://brics2023.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Jhb-II-Declaration-24-August-2023-1.pdf
Source: Global South Insights

Global South Insights

Global South Insights (GSI) is a network of researchers committed to advancing quantitative, data-driven research in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is a partner of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

GSI has employed advanced data technologies focused on statistical databases from multiple authoritative institutions, embedding comprehensive data governance and audit mechanisms.

Common issues facing researchers include:

  • Complex data sources, difficultly in data integration. For commonly used data such as population and GDP statistics, organisations like the United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund each have different statistical approaches. The data released by these institutions lack standardisation, leading to various compatibility and interoperability issues during data integration.
  • Poor data quality, difficultly in data auditing. Missing and erroneous data exist in the datasets published by various organisations. Auditing original data and integrated/analysed data relies heavily on manual operations, which is labour-intensive, inefficient, error-prone, and lacks repeatability.
  • Basic processing tools, difficultly in advanced analysis. Data integration and analysis depend significantly on basic tools like Excel, which are inefficient and cumbersome for operations like 10-year rolling averages and linear regression. These challenges make it difficult to conduct higher-level abstract analyses.
  • Limited visualisation, difficultly for insight presentation. Relying on the limited chart formats provided by Excel makes it difficult to create more expressive data presentations like composite charts, maps, heatmaps, etc. Charts created with professional design tools cannot automatically update with data changes.
  • Lack of data asset management, difficultly in team collaboration. Quantitative research processes based on Excel files lack the accumulation and management of data assets such as source data, data audit results, data processing workflows, process data, and interim outcomes, making it difficult to support long-term collaborative research among multiple people and multiple topics.

Full list of ‘One Hundred and Eleven Diverse Global South Countries’

Figure 56

Grouping 5: Diverse Global South

Select information, all countries, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 1

Country General Colonial History
UNyr. joined Population
(mil.)
GDP (PPP)
(bn.)
Growth Rate
10 yr. annual
moving avg.
GDP (PPP)
per capita
Colonial
Status
Main
colonial
Powers
Year of
Independence
Egypt 1945 111 1,676 4.3% 16,174 Colony UK 1922
Pakistan 1947 236 1,520 4.0% 6,695 Colony UK 1947
Thailand 1946 72 1,482 1.8% 21,154 Semi Colony UK, France
Bangladesh 1974 171 1,343 6.5% 7,971 Colony UK 1971
Nigeria 1960 219 1,281 2.2% 5,909 Colony UK 1960
Argentina 1945 46 1,226 0.3% 26,484 Colony Spain, UK 1816
Malaysia 1957 34 1,137 4.1% 34,834 Colony UK 1957
United Arab Emirates 1971 9 835 3.1% 84,657 Colony UK 1971
Singapore 1965 6 719 3.3% 127,563 Colony UK 1965
Kazakhstan 1992 19 603 2.9% 30,523 Independent
Chile 1945 20 579 2.2% 29,221 Colony Spain 1818
Peru 1945 34 523 2.8% 15,310 Colony Spain 1821
Iraq 1945 44 505 2.7% 11,948 Colony UK 1932
Morocco 1956 37 363 2.4% 9,900 Colony France, Spain 1956
Ethiopia 1945 123 358 8.4% 3,435 Independent
Uzbekistan 1992 35 340 5.9% 9,634 Independent
Sri Lanka 1955 22 320 1.8% 14,267 Colony UK 1948
Kenya 1963 54 311 4.5% 6,151 Colony UK 1963
Qatar 1971 3 309 2.2% 109,160 Colony UK 1971
Myanmar 1948 54 261 3.3% 4,847 Colony UK 1948
Dominican Republic 1945 11 256 5.2% 24,117 Colony Spain 1844
Kuwait 1963 4 249 0.3% 51,238 Colony UK 1961
Angola 1976 36 248 0.4% 6,944 Colony Portugal 1975
Ecuador 1945 18 231 1.0% 12,818 Colony Spain 1822
Ghana 1957 33 217 4.5% 6,752 Colony UK 1957
Tanzania 1961 65 209 6.2% 3,394 Colony UK 1961
Sudan 1956 47 204 0.6% 4,366 Colony UK 1956
Oman 1971 5 191 2.1% 38,699 Colony Portugal 1650
Guatemala 1945 18 188 3.5% 10,076 Colony Spain 1821
Côte d’Ivoire 1960 28 184 6.8% 6,486 Colony France 1960
Azerbaijan 1992 10 181 1.6% 17,800
Panama 1945 4 173 4.1% 39,397 Colony Spain 1903
Tunisia 1956 12 154 1.2% 12,723 Colony France 1956
Libya 1955 7 143 -4.4% 21,104 Colony Italy 1951
DR Congo 1960 99 136 5.3% 1,409 Colony Belgium 1960
Uganda 1962 47 134 4.8% 3,062 Colony UK 1962
Costa Rica 1945 5 131 3.0% 25,000 Colony Spain 1821
Jordan 1955 11 124 2.0% 12,055 Colony UK 1946
Cameroon 1960 28 124 4.0% 4,431 Colony France, UK 1960
Turkmenistan 1992 6 119 1.1% 19,028 Independent
Paraguay 1945 7 108 3.1% 14,535 Colony Spain 1811
Uruguay 1945 3 99 1.6% 27,770 Colony Spain 1825
Bahrain 1971 1 90 2.7% 58,426 Colony UK 1971
Cambodia 1955 17 90 5.5% 5,613 Colony France 1953
Lebanon 1945 5 78 -4.0% 11,794 Colony France 1943
Zambia 1964 20 78 3.2% 3,894 Colony UK 1964
Senegal 1960 17 73 5.1% 4,117 Colony France 1960
El Salvador 1945 6 70 2.1% 11,097 Colony Spain 1821
Yemen 1947 34 68 -4.8% 2,035 Colony UK 1967
Benin 1960 13 54 5.5% 4,048 Colony France 1960
Armenia 1992 3 53 4.1% 17,795
Madagascar 1960 30 53 2.6% 1,817 Colony France 1960
Tajikistan 1992 10 49 7.1% 4,943 Independent
Mongolia 1961 3 48 4.4% 13,996 Colony 1911
Mozambique 1975 33 48 3.9% 1,469 Colony Portugal 1975
Botswana 1966 3 48 3.8% 18,323 Colony UK 1966
Kyrgyzstan 1992 7 42 4.0% 6,127 Independent
Trinidad & Tobago 1962 2 41 -1.4% 29,050 Colony UK 1962
Gabon 1960 2 39 2.4% 18,207 Colony France 1960
Papua New Guinea 1975 10 39 3.8% 3,252 Colony Australia 1975
Rwanda 1962 14 38 6.3% 2,904 Colony Belgium 1962
Haiti 1945 12 38 0.6% 3,161 Colony France 1804
Malawi 1964 20 36 3.6% 1,628 Colony UK 1964
Mauritius 1968 1 34 2.1% 26,934 Colony UK 1968
Guyana 1966 1 34 13.4% 42,699 Colony UK 1966
Jamaica 1962 3 34 0.6% 12,302 Colony UK 1962
Brunei 1984 < 1 31 -0.5% 70,576 Colony UK 1984
Mauritania 1961 5 31 3.9% 7,113 Colony France 1960
Somalia 1960 18 30 3.1% 1,928 Colony UK, Italy 1960
Chad 1960 18 30 1.2% 1,724 Colony France 1960
Equatorial Guinea 1968 2 29 -4.2% 19,465 Colony Spain 1968
Rep Congo 1960 6 26 -1.4% 5,277 Colony France 1960
Togo 1960 9 23 5.0% 2,594 Colony France 1960
Bahamas 1973 < 1 17 0.6% 42,023 Colony UK 1973
Sierra Leone 1961 9 17 2.5% 2,009 Colony UK 1961
Fiji 1970 1 14 2.0% 14,950 Colony UK 1970
Maldives 1965 1 13 5.3% 33,663 Colony UK 1965
Eswatini 1968 1 13 2.5% 11,217 Colony UK 1968
Suriname 1975 1 11 -1.7% 17,498 Colony Netherlands 1975
Burundi 1962 13 11 1.4% 856 Colony Belgium 1962
Bhutan 1971 1 10 3.4% 13,219 Colony UK 1947
East Timor 2002 1 9 8.5% 7,064 Colony Portugal 2002
Liberia 1945 5 9 1.5% 1,690 Colony US 1847
Gambia 1965 3 7 3.6% 2,670 Colony UK 1965
South Sudan 2011 11 7 0.3% 456 Colony UK 2011
Djibouti 1977 1 7 5.1% 6,502 Colony France 1977
Lesotho 1966 2 7 0.3% 3,092 Colony UK 1966
Guinea-Bissau 1974 2 6 4.1% 2,911 Colony Portugal 1973
Central African Republic 1960 6 5 -2.3% 1,081 Colony France 1960
Cabo Verde 1975 1 5 2.2% 9,263 Colony Portugal 1975
Barbados 1966 < 1 5 -0.3% 17,339 Colony UK 1966
Belize 1981 < 1 5 2.8% 10,564 Colony UK 1981
Seychelles 1976 < 1 4 5.3% 39,079 Colony UK 1976
Saint Lucia 1979 < 1 3 0.7% 17,840 Colony UK 1979
Comoros 1975 1 3 2.5% 3,363 Colony France 1975
Antigua & Barbuda 1981 < 1 2 2.2% 23,575 Colony UK 1981
Grenada 1974 < 1 2 2.6% 18,843 Colony UK 1974
St. Vincent & the Grenadines 1980 < 1 2 1.8% 16,216 Colony UK 1979
Solomon Islands 1978 1 2 1.3% 2,325 Colony UK 1978
Saint Kitts & Nevis 1983 < 1 2 1.4% 27,767 Colony UK 1983
Samoa 1976 < 1 1 0.1% 5,883 Colony New Zealand 1962
Dominica 1978 < 1 1 0.0% 13,293 Colony UK 1978
Vanuatu 1981 < 1 1 1.8% 2,890 Colony UK, France 1980
São Tomé & Príncipe 1975 < 1 1 3.2% 4,067 Colony Portugal 1975
Tonga 1999 < 1 1 1.0% 6,686 Colony UK 1970
Micronesia 1991 < 1 0 -0.2% 3,693 Colony German Emp., Japan
Kiribati 1999 < 1 0 2.3% 2,271 Colony UK 1979
Palau 1994 < 1 0 -1.2% 14,515 Colony German Emp., Japan, US 1994
Marshall Islands 1991 < 1 0 1.9% 5,497 Colony Spain, German Emp., Japan, US 1986
Nauru 1999 < 1 0 4.4% 10,930 Colony UK, Australia, New Zealand 1968
Tuvalu 2000 < 1 0 3.5% 5,376 Colony UK 1978
Total 2,242 21,171 9,687 103 Col+SemiCol
Percentage of World 28.1% 12.9%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on UN, IMF
Figure 56

Grouping 5: Diverse Global South

Select information, all countries, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 2

Country Military US Military Target
Military spend
adj. (mil.)
Military spend
adj. per capita
> world avg. (times)
US Sanctions
List
US Military
Intervention
hist.
US Bases
Egypt 4,646 0.1 Y 7
Pakistan 10,337 0.1 8
Thailand 5,724 0.2 Y 3
Bangladesh 4,806 0.1
Nigeria 3,109 < 0.1
Argentina 2,578 0.2 Y 3
Malaysia 3,671 0.3
United Arab Emirates 3
Singapore 11,688 5.4 2
Kazakhstan 1,133 0.2
Chile 5,566 0.8 Y 1
Peru 2,845 0.2 Y 5
Iraq 4,683 0.3 Y Y 10
Morocco 4,995 0.4 Y
Ethiopia 1,031 < 0.1 Y Y
Uzbekistan
Sri Lanka 1,053 0.1 Y
Kenya 1,138 0.1 Y 3
Qatar 15,412 15.9 5
Myanmar 1,857 0.1 Y
Dominican Republic 761 0.2 Y 2
Kuwait 8,244 5.4 Y 8
Angola 1,623 0.1 Y
Ecuador 2,489 0.4 Y
Ghana 229 < 0.1 2
Tanzania 832 < 0.1 Y
Sudan Y Y
Oman 5,783 3.5 8
Guatemala 431 0.1 Y 8
Côte d’Ivoire 607 0.1 Y
Azerbaijan 2,991 0.8
Panama < 0.1 Y 15
Tunisia 1,156 0.3 Y Y 2
Libya Y Y
DR Congo 371 < 0.1 Y Y 1
Uganda 923 0.1 Y Y 2
Costa Rica < 0.1 Y 4
Jordan 2,323 0.6 Y 8
Cameroon 417 < 0.1 Y 4
Turkmenistan
Paraguay 366 0.1 Y Y
Uruguay 1,376 1.1 Y 1
Bahrain 1,381 2.6 10
Cambodia 611 0.1 Y 1
Lebanon 4,739 2.4 Y Y
Zambia 326 < 0.1
Senegal 433 0.1 Y 1
El Salvador 422 0.2 Y 6
Yemen Y Y 2
Benin 97 < 0.1
Armenia 795 0.8
Madagascar 98 < 0.1
Tajikistan 103 < 0.1
Mongolia 118 0.1
Mozambique 282 < 0.1
Botswana 489 0.5 1
Kyrgyzstan 150 0.1
Trinidad & Tobago 201 0.4 Y
Gabon 278 0.3 Y 2
Papua New Guinea 97 < 0.1 Y
Rwanda 177 < 0.1 Y
Haiti 13 < 0.1 Y Y
Malawi 76 < 0.1
Mauritius 20 < 0.1
Guyana 84 0.3 Y
Jamaica 215 0.2 Y
Brunei 436 2.7
Mauritania 225 0.1 3
Somalia 115 < 0.1 Y Y 6
Chad 357 0.1 Y 3
Equatorial Guinea 157 0.3
Rep Congo 266 0.1
Togo 337 0.1
Bahamas Y 9
Sierra Leone 24 < 0.1 Y
Fiji 67 0.2 Y
Maldives
Eswatini 74 0.2
Suriname Y 2
Burundi 101 < 0.1 Y 1
Bhutan
East Timor 44 0.1 Y
Liberia 19 < 0.1 Y Y
Gambia 15 < 0.1
South Sudan 379 0.1 Y Y 1
Djibouti Y 2
Lesotho 35 < 0.1
Guinea-Bissau 25 < 0.1 Y Y
Central African Republic 42 < 0.1 Y Y 3
Cabo Verde 10 < 0.1
Barbados
Belize 24 0.2 9
Seychelles 26 0.7 1
Saint Lucia Y
Comoros Y
Antigua & Barbuda Y
Grenada Y
St. Vincent & the Grenadines
Solomon Islands Y
Saint Kitts & Nevis
Samoa Y 1
Dominica Y
Vanuatu
São Tomé & Príncipe
Tonga Y
Micronesia
Kiribati Y
Palau 3
Marshall Islands Y 10
Nauru
Tuvalu
Total 131,182 17 63 192
Percentage of World 4.6%
Source: Global South Insights elaboration based on SIPRI & Monthly Review, UN, CRS, World Beyond War
Figure 56

Grouping 5: Diverse Global South

Select information, all countries, sorted by GDP (PPP), 2022

Part 3

Country International Affiliations UN Votes
Friends of
UN Charter
Shangai
Coop. Org.
BRICS10 Gaza Ceasefire
10/2023
Russia Whitdrawal
02/2023
Egypt Dialogue New Y Y
Pakistan Full Y Abstain
Thailand Y Y
Bangladesh Y Abstain
Nigeria Y Y
Argentina Y Y
Malaysia Y Y
United Arab Emirates Dialogue New Y Y
Singapore Y Y
Kazakhstan Full Y Abstain
Chile Y Y
Peru Y Y
Iraq Abstain Y
Morocco Y Y
Ethiopia New Abstain Abstain
Uzbekistan Full Y Abstain
Sri Lanka Dialogue Y Abstain
Kenya Y Y
Qatar Dialogue Y Y
Myanmar Dialogue Y Y
Dominican Republic Y Y
Kuwait Dialogue Y Y
Angola Y Abstain
Ecuador Y Y
Ghana Y Y
Tanzania Y Did not vote
Sudan Y Abstain
Oman Y Y
Guatemala N Y
Côte d’Ivoire Y Y
Azerbaijan Dialogue Y Did not vote
Panama Abstain Y
Tunisia Abstain Y
Libya Y Y
DR Congo Y Y
Uganda Y Abstain
Costa Rica Y Y
Jordan Y Y
Cameroon Abstain Did not vote
Turkmenistan Did not vote Did not vote
Paraguay N Y
Uruguay Abstain Y
Bahrain Dialogue Y Y
Cambodia Y Dialogue Did not vote Y
Lebanon Y Did not vote
Zambia Abstain Y
Senegal Y Did not vote
El Salvador Y Abstain
Yemen Y Y
Benin Did not vote Y
Armenia Dialogue Y Abstain
Madagascar Y Y
Tajikistan Full Y Abstain
Mongolia Observer Y Abstain
Mozambique Y Abstain
Botswana Y Y
Kyrgyzstan Full Y Abstain
Trinidad & Tobago Y Y
Gabon Y Abstain
Papua New Guinea N Y
Rwanda Did not vote Y
Haiti Abstain Y
Malawi Y Y
Mauritius Y Y
Guyana Y Y
Jamaica Did not vote Y
Brunei Y Y
Mauritania Y Y
Somalia Y Y
Chad Y Y
Equatorial Guinea Y Y Did not vote
Rep Congo Y Abstain
Togo Did not vote Abstain
Bahamas Y Y
Sierra Leone Y Y
Fiji N Y
Maldives Dialogue Y Y
Eswatini Did not vote Did not vote
Suriname Y Y
Burundi Did not vote Abstain
Bhutan Y Y
East Timor Y Y
Liberia Did not vote Y
Gambia Y Y
South Sudan Abstain Y
Djibouti Y Y
Lesotho Y Y
Guinea-Bissau Y Did not vote
Central African Republic Y Abstain
Cabo Verde Abstain Y
Barbados Y Y
Belize Y Y
Seychelles Did not vote Y
Saint Lucia Y Y
Comoros Y Y
Antigua & Barbuda Y Y
Grenada Y Did not vote
St. Vincent & the Grenadines Y Y Y
Solomon Islands Y Y
Saint Kitts & Nevis Y Y
Samoa Did not vote Y
Dominica Y Did not vote
Vanuatu Abstain Y
São Tomé & Príncipe Did not vote Y
Tonga N Y
Micronesia N Y
Kiribati Abstain Y
Palau Abstain Y
Marshall Islands N Y
Nauru N Y
Tuvalu Abstain Y
Total 3 17 3 77 Y 20 Abstain
Source: Global South Insights

End Notes

1 Vijay Prashad, Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism (New York: Haymarket Books, 2022); Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, dossier no. 56, 20 September 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-ten-theses-on-marxism-and-decolonisation/.

2 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Popular Agrarian Reform and the Struggle for Land in Brazil, dossier no. 27, 6 April 2020, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-27-land/.

3 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Strategic Revolutionary Thought and Legacy of Hugo Chávez Ten Years After His Death, dossier no. 61, 28 February 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-61-chavez/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar, dossier no. 49, 7 February 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-hector-bejar-latin-america/; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The US Ministry of Colonies and Its Summit, red alert no. 14, 25 May 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert-14-summit-of-the-americas/.

4 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy’, ed. Lenski, Current Issues and Research in Macrosociology, 1 January 1984, 100–108, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004477995_008.

5 Jens Stoltenberg, Ursula von der Leyen, and Charles Michel, ‘Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation’, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 10 January 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_210549.htm.

6 Leila Khaled, ‘Where There is Repression, There is Resistance’, Capire, 27 October 2023, https://capiremov.org/en/interview/leila-khaled-where-there-is-repression-there-is-resistance/.

7 Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (New York: International Publishers, 1939); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972); Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Reprinted (London: Panaf, 2004).

8 Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014).

9 Donald Trump, ‘President Donald J. Trump Is Ending United States Participation in an Unacceptable Iran Deal’, The White House, 8 May 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-ending-united-states-participation-unacceptable-iran-deal/.

10 ‘US Completes Open Skies Treaty Withdrawal’, Arms Control Association, December 2020, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2020-12/news/us-completes-open-skies-treaty-withdrawal; C. Todd Lopez, ‘US Withdraws From Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty’, US Department of Defence, 2 August 2019, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/article/article/1924779/us-withdraws-from-intermediate-range-nuclear-forces-treaty/; George W. Bush, ‘Statement by the President’, The White House, 13 June 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020613-9.html.

11 Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster, ‘Actual US Military Spending Reached US$ 1.53 trillion in 2022 – More than Twice Acknowledged Level: New Estimates Based on US National Accounts’, Monthly Review, 1 November 2023, https://monthlyreview.org/2023/11/01/actual-u-s-military-spending-reached-1-53-trillion-in-2022-more-than-twice-acknowledged-level-new-estimates-based-on-u-s-national-accounts/.

12 The Quincy Institute and other authors have also published significantly higher US military spending estimates. Andrew Cockburn, ‘Getting the Defense Budget Right: A (Real) Grand Total, over $1.4 Trillion’, Responsible Statecraft, 7 May 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/05/07/getting-the-defense-budget-right-a-real-grand-total-over-1-4-trillion/.

13 ‘SIPRI Military Expenditure Database’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex.

14 Chen Zhuo, ‘Explainer: Prudent Chinese Defense Budget Growth Ensures Broad Public Security’, Ministry of National Defence, People’s Republic of China, 6 March 2022, http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/TopStories/4906180.html; National Bureau of Statistics of China, accessed 20 December 2023,
https://data.stats.gov.cn/english/adv.htm?m=advquery&cnC01.

15 The 2022 SIPRI adjustment are expenses related to (a) spending on the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP); (b) soldiers’ de-mobilisation and retirement payments from the Ministry of Civil Affairs; (c) additional military research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) funding outside the national defence budget; (d) additional military construction expenses; (e) commercial earnings of the People’s Liberation Army (zero as of 2015); (f) subsidies to the arms industry (zero as of 2010); (e) Chinese arms imports (zero as of 2020); and (g) the Chinese Coast Guard (since 2013). The new series remains internally consistent over the period 1989–2019. See Nan Tian and Fei Su, ‘A New Estimate Of China’s Military Expenditure’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, January 2021, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/2101_sipri_report_a_new_estimate_of_chinas_military_expenditure.pdf; ‘Sources and Methods’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex/sources-and-methods#sipri-estimates-for-china.

16 SIPRI figures for China 2021 were on average about 1.36 times larger than China’s official national defence budget, though reducing the estimates made in the past. For instance, for the year 2019, the new SIPRI estimate is 1,660 billion yuan or US$ 240 billion, slightly lower than the old estimate of 1,803 billion yuan or US$ 261 billion. Under the previous estimates, SIPRI increased China’s official 2021 defence budget by 48.6%. Under the new estimates, China’s 2021 budget was increased 36.8% by SIPRI. With the new adjustments China’s military spending corresponds to 1.6% of GDP, compared to 1.3% that the official budget represents. Calculations for GDP are based on IMF WEO GDP CER data.

17 Office of Management and Budget, ‘Historical Tables. Table 3.2. Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962–2028’, The White House, accessed 20 December 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/.

18 Calculations based on the estimates of actual US military spending for the year 2022 by Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster. See note 11.

19 ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.

20 For decades, it has been recognised by independent researchers that actual US military spending is approximately twice the officially acknowledged level. The independent research is not restricted to left-wing circles, but it includes the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, funded by the right-wing billionaire George Soros, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and the ‘liberal’ Centre for American Progress. See Lawrence J. Krob and Kaveh Toofan, ‘A Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget? – Centre for American Progress’, Centre for American Progress, 12 July 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/a-trillion-dollar-defense-budget/; Cockburn, ‘Getting the Defense Budget Right: A (Real) Grand Total, over $1.4 Trillion’; William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, ‘Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget’, Project on Government Oversight, 7 May 2019, https://www.pogo.org/analysis/making-sense-of-the-1-25-trillion-national-security-state-budget.

21 Our worldwide military spending figures use current exchange rates (CER). PPP conversion factors to measure military spending are necessarily less reliable than currency exchange rates. PPP rates are statistical estimates, calculated on the basis of collected price data for baskets of goods and services for benchmark years. No such price data is collected for military expenditure. Therefore, the nature of military spending lacks this information for international comparisons. Thus, the calculation of the military spending applying PPP rates through GDP conversion factors is methodologically invalid since it’s based on the implicit assumption that the ratio of military prices equals the ratio of relative prices of GDP for which no evidence is presented. SIPRI recognises that using the PPP adjustment for military spending is inaccurate and therefore it is less reliable than using currency exchange rates. See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, accessed 25 November 2023, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex/frequently-asked-questions#PPP.

22 Since China’s military spending is focused on only Chinese territory, there are clear limits to China’s military expansion, The country does not have significant military bases abroad, unlike the US with 902 in 2022. This idea is supported by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft: ‘China has thus far established only one actual, operating overseas military base, on the horn of Africa, in Djibouti, and is probably establishing a naval facility in Cambodia. But there are real limits to how far China can go in duplicating such places. As Isaac Kardon of the Carnegie Endowment has pointed out, China has no formal military alliances (beyond the dubious case of DPR Korea) and is unlikely to acquire any in the foreseeable future, a fact that imposes major constraints on its ability to establish serious military bases. Few if any countries wish to commit to housing full-fledged, sizeable military facilities that could project Chinese military power across their region and, in the process, invite an American response.’ See Michael D. Swaine, ‘Actually, China’s Military Isn’t Going Global’, Responsible Statecraft, 8 September 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-military/.

23 The Editors, ‘US Military Bases and Empire’, Monthly Review, 1 March 2002, https://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/u-s-military-bases-and-empire/.

24 ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.

25 The Military Balance 2023, International Institute for Security Studies, 15 February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/the-military-balance/.

26 Sally Williamson ‘Logistics Contractors and Strategic Logistics Advantage in US Military Operations’, Logistics In War, 4 June 2023, https://logisticsinwar.com/2023/06/04/logistics-contractors-and-strategic-logistics-advantage-in-us-military-operations/.

27 ‘Agreement Between the United States of America and Ghana’, Treaties and Other International Acts, series 18–531, US Department of State, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/18-531-Ghana-Defense-Status-of-Forces.pdf.

28 Vijay Prashad, ‘Why Does the United States Have a Military Base in Ghana?’, Peoples Dispatch, 15 June 2022, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/06/15/why-does-the-united-states-have-a-military-base-in-ghana/.

29 Matthew P. Goodman and Matthew Wayland, ‘Securing Asia’s Subsea Network: US Interests and Strategic Options’, Centre for Strategic International Studies, 4 April 2022, https://www.csis.org/analysis/securing-asias-subsea-network-us-interests-and-strategic-options.

30 ‘Utah Data Centre’, Domestic Surveillance Directorate, accessed 27 November 2023, https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/.

31 Nick Turse, ‘Pentagon Misled Congress About US Bases in Africa’, The Intercept, 8 September 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/09/08/africa-air-base-us-military/.

32 ‘USA’s Military Empire: A Visual Database’, World Beyond War, accessed 27 November 2023, https://worldbeyondwar.org/no-bases/.

33 The Military Balance 2023.

34 The Military Balance 2023.

35 Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023, Congressional Research Service, 7 June 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738.

36 Kushi and Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’, 4.

37 Salazar Torreon and Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2023.

38 Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 4 (2023): 752–779. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027221117546?icid=int.sj-full-text.citing-articles.1.

39 The Military Intervention Project (MIP) has a slightly lower estimate than the larger lists from sources such as the Congressional Research Services (CRS), whose figures are more frequently cited by researchers. MIP uses a range of all known published databases. However, due to its more comprehensive definition, their aggregation process results in a slightly lower total figure due to reclassification. MIP and CRS, therefore, have incomparable data sets and incomparable raw numbers based on the different way they treat dating, scale, duration, legality, and intent. MIP and CRS have incomparable methodological approaches. We use CRS as it is the largest published data available. See Kushi and Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project’.

40 Claudia Jones, ‘International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace’, speech delivered at a rally on 8 March 1950, Liberation School, 29 March 2023, https://www.liberationschool.org/claudia-jones-1950-iwd-speech/.

41 Anthony Lake, ‘Confronting Backlash States’, Foreign Affairs, 1 March 1994, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/1994-03-01/confronting-backlash-states.

42 Francisco R. Rodríguez, ‘The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions’, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 4 May 2023, https://cepr.net/press-release/new-report-finds-that-economic-sanctions-are-often-deadly-and-harm-peoples-living-standards-in-target-countries/.

43 Agence France-Presse, ‘US Commerce Chief Warns against China “Threat”’, South China Morning Post, 3 December 2023, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3243657/us-commerce-chief-warns-against-china-threat.

44 Deutscher Bundestag, China-Strategie der Bundesregierung [China Strategy of the Federal Government], 20/7770, 13 July 2023, https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/20/077/2007770.pdf.

45 Own elaboration based on data from Christoph Nedopil Wang, ‘Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – Green Finance & Development Centre’, accessed 2 December 2023, https://greenfdc.org/countries-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-bri/.

46 Global South Insights own elaboration based on World Bank WDI and IMF WEO.

47 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist “Rules-Based Order”, Studies on Contemporary Dilemmas, 13 March 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/eight-contradiction-of-the-imperialist-rules-based-order/.

48 All images in the ‘Common History of Imperialist Countries’ are in the public domain or under Creative Commons. See attribution, listed chronologically: Joseph Swain, On Board a Slave Ship, c.1835, https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:On_Board_a_Slave-Ship,_engraving_by_Swain_c._1835_Colorized.jpg; Unknown, The Destruction of the Pequots, c. 19th century, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mystic_Massacre_1637_Destruction_Of_The_Pequots_in_Connecticut.png; Unknown, The Berlin Conference on Partition of Africa, c. 1884, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afrikakonferenz.jpg; William Heysham Overend, Chinese Officers Tear Down the British Flag on the Arrow, 8 October 1856, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_officers_tear_down_the_British_flag_on_the_arrow.JPG; Edward N. Jackson, Council of Four at the WWI Paris peace conference, 27 May 1919,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Big-Four-Paris_1919.jpg; Charles Levy, Atomic Cloud Rises Over Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasakibomb.jpg

49 Utsa Patnaik, ‘Revisiting the “Drain”, or Transfer from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism’, in Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, edited by Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (New Delhi: Tulika, 2017).

50 Michael Johnson, ‘Teaching about Slavery’, Foreign Policy Research Institute, August 2008, https://www.fpri.org/article/2008/08/teaching-about-slavery/.

51 Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, ‘Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023’, Prison Policy Initiative, 14 March 2023, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html.

52 ‘Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database’, SlaveVoyage, 2019, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database.

53 Rachel Nuwer, ‘Mississippi Officially Ratifies Amendment to Ban Slavery, 148 Years Late’, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 February 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mississippi-officially-ratifies-amendment-to-ban-slavery-148-years-late-21328041/.

54 Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2001).

55 Jean Enriquez, ‘From “Comfort Women” to Prostitution in Military Bases’, Capire, 18 July 2023, https://capiremov.org/en/interview/from-comfort-women-to-prostitution-in-military-bases/.

56 Cori Bush and et. al., ‘Calling for an Immediate De-escalation and Cease-Fire in Israel and Occupied Palestine’, Pub. L. No. H.Res.786, 118th Congress (2023–2024) (2023), https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-resolution/786/cosponsors.

57 Rosalind C. Morris, ‘Ursprüngliche Akkumulation: The Secret of an Originary Mistranslation’, boundary 2 43, no. 3 (1 August 2016): 29–77, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3572418.

58 Daniel Larsen, Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108761833.

59 Lenin, Imperialism; Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

60 Vladimir Lenin, ‘Imperialism and the Split in Socialism’, in V. I. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 114, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.

61 ‘2023 Bilderberg Meeting Participant List’, Public Intelligence, 19 May 2023, https://publicintelligence.net/2023-bilderberg-participant-list/.

62 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973, dossier no. 68, 5 September 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-68-the-coup-against-the-third-world-chile-1973/.

63 Nalu Faria, ‘O Feminismo Latino-Americano e Caribenho: Perspectivas Diante Do Neo-liberalismo [Latin American and Caribbean Feminism: Perspectives on Neoliberalism]’, in Desafios Do Livre Mercado Para o Feminismo [Challenges of the Free Market for Feminism], Cadernos Sempreviva 9 (São Paulo: SOF, 2005).

64 Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks.

65 Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance (London: Pluto Press, 2003).

66 ‘The Transistor Revolution: How Transistors Changed the World’, Arrow, 22 December 2022, https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/the-transistor-revolution-how-transistors-changed-the-world; Omar Sohail, ’ Apple’s M3 Max Has the Highest Generational Leap in Transistor Count with a 37 Percent Difference Compared to the M2 Max’, WCCF Tech, 3 Novemeber 2023, https://wccftech.com/apple-m3-max-highest-transistor-count-for-any-m-series-chip/.

67 2023 Year in Review – India Review, Comscore, December 2023, https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Events-and-Webinars/Webinar/2023/2023-Year-in-Review-India-Edition.

68 Kevin Townsend, ‘Bad Bots Account for 73% of Internet Traffic: Analysis’, Security Week, 16 November 2023, https://www.securityweek.com/bad-bots-account-for-73-of-internet-traffic-analysis/; Unheard Voices: Evaluating Five Years of pro-Western Covert Influence Operations, Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory, 24 August 2022, https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_stanford_internet_observatory_report_unheard_voice.pdf.

69 Janan Ganesh, ‘America’s Cultural Supremacy and Geopolitical Weakness’, Financial Times, 19 December 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/dce07860-f39e-432b-a0f6-1a2124e4e1a3.

70 See Karl Marx, ‘Component Parts of Bank Capital’, in Capital, vol. III (New York: International Publishers, 1995), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm, 336–337.

71 ‘OTC Derivatives Statistics at End-June 2023’, Bank of International Settlements, 16 November 2023, https://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy2311.pdf.

72 ‘OTC Derivatives Statistics at End-June 2023’.

73 Samir Amin, ‘How to Defeat the Collective Imperialism of the Triad’, Monthly Reviw, 5 December 2022, https://mronline.org/2022/12/05/samir-amin-how-to-defeat-the-collective-imperialism-of-the-triad/; Samir Amin, Globalisation and Its Alternative, interviewed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 30 October 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/globalisation-and-its-alternative/.

74 ‘Religion and the Founding of the American Republic’, Exhibitions, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html.

75 Mohammad Shahid Alam, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilising Logic of Zionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 109.

76 Stuart Laycock, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To (London: The History Press, 2012).

77 ‘Israel Hits Gaza Strip with the Equivalent of Two Nuclear Bombs’, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, 2 November 2023, https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5908/Israel-hit-Gaza-Strip-with-the-equivalent-of-two-nuclear-bombs.

78 Jeremy M. Sharp, US Foreign Aid to Israel, Congressional Research Service, 1 March 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33222/, i.

79 ‘How Much Aid Does the US Give to Israel?’, USA FACTS, 12 October 2023, https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/.

80 Vladimir Lenin, ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions: The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin’, in V. I. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 70­–107.

81 Justin Cremer, ‘Denmark Is One of the NSA’s “9-Eyes”’, The Copenhagen Post, 4 November 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20131219010450/http:/cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.7611.html

82 Ryan Gallagher, ‘The Powerful Global Spy Alliance You Never Knew Existed’, The Intercept, 1 March 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-sigint-seniors/.

83 Office of Press Secretary, ‘Remarks By President Obama to the Australian Parliament’, The White House, 17 November 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/17/remarks-president-obama-australian-parliament.

84 ‘Japan Defence: China Threat Prompts Plan to Double Military Spending’, BBC, 16 December 2022 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64001554.

85 According to the World Bank, ‘high-income economies are those with a GNI per capita of $13,846 or more’, see ‘World Bank Country and Lending Groups’, The World Bank, accessed 20 December 2023, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519#High_income; ‘GNI per Capita, Atlas Method (Current US$) – China’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD?end=2022&locations=CN&start=2005.

86 Xi Jinping, speech at the Closing Ceremony of the BRICS Business Forum 2023. Full text: https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2023-08-23/Full-text-Xi-Jinping-s-speech-at-the-Closing-Ceremony-of-the-BRICS-Business-Forum-2023-1mulkZSzuso/index.html

87 For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, dossier no. 66, 4 July 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-66-development-theory/.

88 Larissa Mies Bombardi, Agrotóxicos e Colonialismo Químico [Agrotoxins and Pesticide Colonialism] (São Paulo, SP: Elefante, 2023).

89 Larissa Packer and Camila Moreno, eds., O Brasil Na Retomada Verde: Integrar Para Entregar [Brazil in the Green Recovery: Integrate to Deliver] (Brasília: Grupo Carta de Belém, 2021).

90 Own elaboration based on IMF data.

91 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, Studies in Socialist Construction no. 1, 23 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.

92 Xi Jinping, Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive in Unity to Build a Modern Socialist Country in All Respects, report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, 16 October 2022, http://my.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zgxw/202210/t20221026_10792358.htm.

93 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 22nd printing of 100th anniversary ed (New York: International Publishers, 1979).

94 Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, ‘US Security Cooperation with Ukraine’, US Department of State, 12 December 2023, https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-ukraine/.

95 Joe Biden, ‘Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan’, The White House, 31 August 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/31/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-end-of-the-war-in-afghanistan/.

96 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Syria’s Bloody and Unforgiving War, dossier no. 3, 5 April 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-3-syrias-bloody-war/.

97 ‘Manufacturing, Value Added (% Of GDP) – South Africa’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?locations=ZA.

98 Rodríguez, ‘The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions’.

99Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘The Emergence of a New Non-Alignment’, newsletter no. 24, 15 June 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/new-non-alignment/.

100 Patrick Wintour, ‘Gulf States Fend off Call From Iran to Arm Palestinians at Riyadh Summit’, The Guardian, 12 November 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/12/gulf-states-fend-off-call-from-iran-to-arm-palestinians-at-riyadh-summit.

101 Own elaboration based on World Bank data.

102 Kyunghoon Kim and Andy Sumner, ‘Bringing State-Owned Entities Back into the Industrial Policy Debate: The Case of Indonesia’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 59 (December 2021): 496–509, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2021.10.002.

103 ‘Exports of Goods and Services (current US$) – Indonesia’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.CD?locations=ID.

104 Daniel Kritenbrink et al., ‘Joint Statement on the United States-Indonesia Senior Officials’ 2+2 Foreign Policy and Defense Dialogue’, US Department of Defence, 23 October 2023, https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3566363/joint-statement-on-the-united-states-indonesia-senior-officials-22-foreign-poli/; ‘US Embassy Tracked Indonesia Mass Murder 1965’, National Security Archive, 17 October 2017, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/indonesia/2017-10-17/indonesia-mass-murder-1965-us-embassy-files.

105 Ana Esther Ceceña and David Rodriguez, ‘La Guerra Contra El Narco En México Como Política de Reordenamiento Social’, OLAG, no. 157 (2022), https://geopolitica.iiec.unam.mx/index.php/node/1294.

106 Timothy A. Wise, ‘The US Assault on Mexico’s Food Sovereignty’, Global Issues, 6 June 2023, https://www.globalissues.org/news/2023/06/06/33954.

107 Chaba Brahim, ‘“Until Our Territories Are Free”: Women From Western Sahara in Ceaseless Struggle’, Capire, 18 February 2021, https://capiremov.org/en/interview/until-our-territories-are-free/.

108 ‘The Spirit of Camp David: Joint Statement of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States’, press statement, White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/18/the-spirit-of-camp-david-joint-statement-of-japan-the-republic-of-korea-and-the-united-states/.

109 Shanna Khayat, ‘GSOMIA vs. TISA: What Is the Big Deal?’, Pacific Forum, 10 February 2020, https://pacforum.org/publication/yl-blog-19-gsomia-vs-tisa-what-is-the-big-deal.

110 The data and charts for this section of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.

111 The data and charts for this section of the document rely heavily on published research by economist John Ross.

111 Calculated by John Ross from One Hundred Years of Economic Statistics: United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden, compiled by T. Liesner (The Economist, 1989) and ‘International Transactions’, Table 1, Bureau of Economic Analysis Data, accessed 13 November 2022, https://www.bea.gov/data/intl-trade-investment/international-transactions.

112 Lenin, ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions’.

113 Atish Rex Ghosh and Uma Ramakrishnan, ‘Current Account Deficits’, International Monetary Fund, accessed 7 December 2023, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back-to-Basics/Current-Account-Deficits.

114 Hudson, Super Imperialism, 77.

115 Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1st ed (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1994).

116 Vladimir Putin, speech delivered at the Munich Security Council, Munich, Germany, 10 February 2007, https://is.muni.cz/th/xlghl/DP_Fillinger_Speeches.pdf.

117 To understand why we refrain from using the terms ‘great recession’ or the ‘great financial crisis’, see our study: The World in Economic Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, notebook no. 4, 10 October 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-notebook-4-economic-crisis/.

118 Independent Voter Project, ‘DNC to Court: We Are a Private Corporation With No Obligation to Follow Our Rules’, Independent Voter News, 14 August 2022, https://ivn.us/posts/dnc-to-court-we-are-a-private-corporation-with-no-obligation-to-follow-our-rules.

119Associated Press, ‘Many Who Met with Clinton as Secretary of State Donated to Foundation’, CNBC, 23 August 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/23/most-of-those-who-met-with-clinton-as-secretary-of-state-donated-to-foundation.html.

120 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008).

121 The Military Balance 2022, International Institute for Security Studies, 15 February 2023, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/the-military-balance/.

122 Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London & New York: Verso, 2014).

123 A. De La Cruz, A. Medina, and Y. Tang, ‘Owners of the World’s Listed Companies’, OECD Capital Market Series, 17 October 2019, https://www.oecd.org/corporate/Owners-of-the-Worlds-Listed-Companies.htm.

124 Who Owns the German DAX? The Ownership Structure of the German DAX 30 in 2020 – A Joint Study of IHS Markit and DIRK, IHS Markit, June 2021, https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/pdf/0621/DAX-Study-2020—DIRK-Conference-June-2021_IHS-Markit.pdf.

125  Henrik Ahlers, Wem gehört der DAX? Analyse der Aktionärsstruktur der im Deutschen Aktienindex vertretenen Unternehmen [Who Owns the Dax? Analysis of the Shareholder Structure of the Companies Represented in the German Stock Index] (Ernst & Young, July 2023), https://www.ey.com/de_de/forms/download-forms/2023/07/wem-gehoert-der-dax-2023.

126Who Owns the German DAX?.

127 ‘Foreign Direct Investment, Net Inflows (BoP, Current US$) – Germany’, The World Bank Data, accessed 20 December 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD?end=2022&locations=DE&start=1971.

128 John Ross, ‘事实表明,中国经济表现继续远优于G7国家 [Facts show China’s economy continues to far outperform the G7 economies]’, Weibo (blog), 12 April 2023, https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404975244548113063.

129 ‘US Companies Dominating European TV Market’, Moonshot News (blog), 20 January 2022, https://moonshot.news/news/media-news/us-companies-dominating-european-tv-market/; Agnes Schneeberger, ‘Audiovisual Media Services in Europe – 2023 edition’, June 2023, European Audiovisual Observatory and the Council of Europe, https://rm.coe.int/audiovisual-media-services-in-europe-2023-edition-a-schneeberger/1680abc9bc#:~:text=Around%20one%20in%20five%20(18,in%20documentary%20and%20children’s%20programming, 7.

130 Hudson, Super Imperialism.

131 ‘Namibia Condemns Germany for Defending Israel in ICJ Genocide Case’, Al Jazeera, 14 January 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/14/namibia-condemns-germany-for-defending-israel-in-icj-genocide-case.

132 Marx, ‘Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law’.

133 David Hoffman, ‘Russia’s Billionaire Matchmaker To the West’, Washington Post, 24 September 2002, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/09/24/russias-billionaire-matchmaker-to-the-west/e6c98740-ac21-4933-a445-674ea6149102/.

134 Brian D. Blankenship, ‘NATO and the Persistent Problem of German Defense Spending’, Cornell University Press (blog), 1 November 2023, https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/burden-sharing-dilemma-coercive-diplomacy-brian-blankenship-11-01-2023/.

135 Mari Yamguchi, ‘Japan to Jointly Develop New Fighter Jet with UK, Italy’, Associated Press, 9 December 2022, https://apnews.com/article/business-japan-united-kingdom-government-states-219e0adadd5f14b115766141cd0c5f6f.

136 Valerie Insinna, ‘US Gives the Green Light to Japan’s $23B F-35 Buy’, 10 July 2020, https://www.defensenews.com/smr/2020/07/09/us-gives-the-green-light-to-japans-massive-23b-f-35-buy/.

137 If there is evidence that industry has a significantly lower conversion than other elements of GDP, the PPP figures we have presented would overstate for the percentages for the Global South. We feel that despite this possible error the direction of this approach provides useful insights. The percentage composition of the GDP by sector depends on the price data used to measure the value added of each of them. The PPP conversion factors are statistical estimates based on baskets of goods and services for benchmark years that are further applied to the GDP for GDP (PPP) estimates.

138 Barbara Kollmeyer, ‘“Right Now There Are Changes, the Likes of Which We Haven’t Seen in 100 Years.” Here’s What China’s Xi Said to Putin before Leaving Russia’, Market Watch, 22 March 2023, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/right-now-there-are-changes-the-likes-of-which-we-havent-seen-in-100-years-what-china-president-xi-said-to-putin-before-leaving-russia-d15150ce.

139 Agnieszka Bryc, ‘The Russian Federation and Reshaping a Post-Cold War Order’, Politeja 5, no. 62 (31 October 2019): 161–74, https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.16.2019.62.09; Vladimir Putin, speech delivered at the Munich Security Council, Munich, Germany, 10 February 2007, https://is.muni.cz/th/xlghl/DP_Fillinger_Speeches.pdf.

139 ‘Special Report: Cables Show US Sizing up China’s Next Leader’, Reuters, 17 February 2011, https://www.reuters.comarticle/idUSTRE71G5WH/.

141 Luke Hunt, ‘The World’s Gaze Turns to the South Pacific’, The Diplomat, 4 September 2012, https://thediplomat.com/2012/09/the-worlds-gaze-turns-to-the-south-pacific/.

142 Xi Jinping, ‘Remarks by President Obama and President Xi Jinping in Joint Press Conference’, 12 November 2014, The White House, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/12/remarks-president-obama-and-president-xi-jinping-joint-press-conference#:~:text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20I,instead%20of%20mutually%20exclusive%20ones.

143 ‘China to Leapfrog US as World’s Biggest Economy by 2028 – Think Tank’, Reuters, 26 December 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN290003/.

144 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 55; 30–31.

145 The Editors, ‘Notes from the Editors’, Monthly Review 75, no. 4 (1 September 2023), https://monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/mr-075-04-2023-08_0/; Jake Sullivan, ‘Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution’, The White House, 27 April 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/04/27/remarks-by-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-on-renewing-american-economic-leadership-at-the-brookings-institution/.

146 Nomaan Merchant et al., ‘US Announces $345 Million Military Aid Package for Taiwan’, TIME, 29 July 2023, https://time.com/6299419/us-military-aid-taiwan/.

147 Despite the recent exposures of fraudulent practices, behavioural economics was successfully weaponised by US intelligence in online media campaigns.

148 Daniel McAdams, ‘“What Is The Empire’s Strategy?” – Col Lawrence Wilkerson Speech At RPI Media & War Conference’, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity, 22 August 2018, https://ronpaulinstitute.org/what-is-the-empires-strategy-col-lawrence-wilkerson-speech-at-rpi-media-war-conference/.

149 Colum Lynch, ‘State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China’, Foreign Policy, 19 February 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/; ‘Textile Exports by Country 2023’, World Population Review, accessed 26 December 2023, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/textile-exports-by-country; ‘China’s Major Exports by Quantity and Value, December 2022 (in USD)’, General Administration of Customs, People’s Republic of China, 8 January 2023, http://english.customs.gov.cn/Statics/aeb5aefa-b537-4ef3-8e13-59244228cb0e.html.

150 Li Xuanmin, ‘A Decade of BRI Development Transforms China’s Xinjiang Region into a Core Area of the Silk Road Economic Belt – Global Times’, Global Times, 1 October 2023, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202310/1299158.shtml.

151 Gregory C. Allen, ‘Choking off China’s Access to the Future of AI’, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 11 October 2023, https://www.csis.org/analysis/choking-chinas-access-future-ai.

152 Alex W. Palmer, ‘“An Act of War”: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China’, The New York Times, 12 July 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/magazine/semiconductor-chips-us-china.html.

153 Xinhua, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative: A Key Pillar of the Global Community of Shared Future’, State Council Information Office, People’s Republic of China, 10 October 2023, http://english.scio.gov.cn/whitepapers/2023-10/10/content_116735061_5.htm.

154 David Choi, ‘US, South Korean, Canadian Warships Train in Yellow Sea Ahead of Incheon Anniversary’, Stars and Stripes, 15 September 2023, https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2023-09-15/trilateral-naval-drill-yellow-sea-incheon-11383145.html.

155 An Dong, ‘黄海军演仅5小时,美准航母跑路,舰载机坠毁,美军被迫发帖寻找 [Just Five Hours into the Yellow Sea Naval Exercise, a US Quasi-Aircraft Carrier Ran Away, Its Carrier Crashed, and the US Military Was Forced to Post a Search for It]’, IFENG, 18 September 2023, https://i.ifeng.com/c/8TBMF5tH2bY.

156 ‘Investor FAQs’, New Development Bank, accessed 26 November 2023, https://www.ndb.int/investor-relations/inverstor-faqs/; BRICS Information Centre, ‘Treaty for the Establishment of a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement’, University of Toronto, accessed 26 November 2023, http://www.brics.utoronto.ca/docs/140715-treaty.html.

157 ‘Answers to the Questions of the Video Conference “SCO – Shaping Eurasia”’, The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, 27 October 2020, https://eng.sectsco.org/20201027/686658.html.

158 Christoph Nedopil Wang, ‘China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2023 H1’, Green Finance & Development Centre, 1 August 2023, https://greenfdc.org/china-belt-and-road-initiative-bri-investment-report-2023-h1/.

159 Mao Zedong, ‘Speech at the Wuchang Meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. IV (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958), 98–99, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch06.htm.

The fourth issue of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横) traces the historical evolution of socialism and identifies new forms that are emerging today. The issue features two articles that examine China’s socialist market economy, assessing its impact on the global socialist movement and how it could surpass capitalism.

The New Forms of Twenty-First Century Socialism’ (新时代,新自觉——如何在当下重新思考社会主义) was originally published in Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), issue no. 3 (June 2023).

After three decades of expansion following the end of the Cold War, liberal capitalism is now facing a crisis. The world is enveloped in a fog of uncertainty amid significant challenges posed by economic recession, geopolitical conflicts, social rifts, and disruptive new technologies. At this historical juncture, it is necessary to revitalise socialism and further develop socialist theories suited to the new conditions of the twenty-first century, paving the way for a new future for humanity.

The world has come a long way since the mid-nineteenth century, when Marx and Engels completed the fundamental transformation of socialism from utopia to science, most famously synthesised in The Communist Manifesto. Over the past 175 years, generation after generation of socialists have followed in the footsteps of Marx and Engels, working tirelessly to elevate socialism from a mere ideological concept to class struggles, political organisations, social revolutions, governments, and civilisation forms. The historical development of socialism can be divided into three main forms.

Classical Socialism in the Centres of European Capitalism

The socialist movement originated in Europe and its transformation from utopia to science also took place there, which was not accidental. This region benefited from the development of capitalism, becoming the most developed area in the world. The major European countries, with the first-mover advantage of the Industrial Revolution, created a new and powerful productive force.

Internally, a new ruling class rose to prominence, the bourgeoisie. Through various forms of bourgeois revolution, this class seized power successively in a series of European countries, creating corresponding social, political, market, and cultural structures, including the modern nation-state. The advancements and transformations of early capitalist modernisation ultimately turned the page on Europe’s somewhat gloomy medieval era.

Externally, these European countries that led in modernisation, through continuous colonial expansion and comprehensive means such as military wars, religious propagation, and cultural aggression, opened the prelude to the subsequent centuries-long globalisation centred on Europe. It is worth noting that, during this period, the internal and external development of European capitalism was intertwined and mutually conditioned: the internal development of politics, economy, culture, and society propelled and led the external expansion; in turn, external expansion greatly supported and strengthened internal development.

Behind the dazzling achievements of European capitalism, however, a new socialist ideology was quietly gestating and breaking ground. The economic and political development of European capitalism created the social conditions for the emergence of Marxism; the growth of the working class and the rise of the labour movement to advocate for their own interests, provided the class foundation; and the flourishing of social sciences, philosophy, and economics provided the intellectual environment. Together these various elements culminated in the publication of The Communist Manifesto and the birth of scientific socialism.

The founders of scientific socialism – Marx, Engels, and their contemporaries – generously acknowledged and congratulated the achievements of capitalist development. However, what set them apart from the majority of their peers was their ruthless criticism of European capitalism and firm belief that the seemingly thriving capitalist system would usher in its own swan song. These socialist pioneers fearlessly pointed out that – despite capitalism’s development of the productive forces and material wealth, and the associated advancements in politics, society, and culture – the system had profound inherent contradictions and shortcomings that capitalism could only alleviate but not eradicate. As such, capitalism could never be considered the ultimate form of human social development. It emerged in history and will be negated by history.

The socialists of this period believed that the power to make change and transcend capitalism was held by the working class and other social forces that faced oppression. In their view, it was in the interests of the working class to pursue a revolution and shatter the old world and the declining capitalist system, rather than submit to continued exploitation and oppression at the hands of the bourgeoisie. Through political struggles and social revolutions, the oppressed classes would overthrow the bourgeoisie, become the ruling class, and build a more rational and humane system in place of capitalism. The ideal system was socialism, which would eventually move towards a more advanced form of development, communism. Although the precise details of this future ideal society could not be depicted, these thinkers contended that the working class and its political parties would inevitably progress toward it.

Most importantly, in the process of criticising capitalism and arguing for socialism, this generation of socialists distilled the general laws of human social development and formulated a worldview and methodology with historical materialism at its core. This has enabled successive generations to develop more accurate understandings of the world and the movement of human history.

The classical form of socialist thought that developed in Europe during this period consisted of three key elements:

1. Socialism can only emerge in those societies where capitalism is most developed. The productive forces, political forms, and ideological resources needed to build socialism are generated within advanced forms of capitalism.

2. Capitalism can and will inevitably be negated and transcended. No matter how long capitalism sustains itself, it will ultimately amount to a fragment of human history. Even if capitalism can make internal improvements as circumstances evolve, it will not be an eternal system due to its inherent contradictions. After fulfilling its historical mission, capitalism cannot avoid being relegated to history.

3. The end of capitalism is the starting point of socialism. Socialism will be built upon the productive forces, material wealth, intellectual development, and modernisation that humanity has already created. It is precisely on the basis of these resources accumulated under capitalism that socialism seeks to resolve the tensions and conflicts between the productive forces and relations of production, overcome the constraints of private ownership of the means of production, and address all of the contradictions that arise from this order. While socialism is indeed a critique and negation of capitalism, beyond this it aims to achieve a new transcendence and sublimation. The more capitalism develops, the more it prepares the material and other conditions for socialism. Similarly, as the productive forces of capitalism become more advanced, the relations of production become more complex, and state governance grows more sophisticated, in turn, it becomes increasingly challenging to attain higher productivity, develop greater productive forces, ensure genuine fairness, and build a harmonious society. In other words, the need to construct a new socialist society grows alongside capitalism. Humanity is capable of building this better society.

The socialist classics offer a sweeping narrative of immense vitality, illuminating the path for humanity to traverse through the jungle of capitalism and inspiring people to engage in the long historical struggle towards socialism.

Transformative Forms of Socialism in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies

During the twentieth century, socialism developed in a manner that differed significantly from the expectations of classical socialism. Rather than progress in a linear manner, socialist development took place in alternating peaks and valleys, including the reversal of successful revolutions and socialist developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Socialism failed to emerge in the areas it had been expected to, namely the developed capitalist countries of Europe. However, new areas of growth emerged beyond the vision of classical Marxist writers. Socialism emerged, not within global capitalism, but outside of it; not in the countries with the most advanced productive forces, but in the economically underdeveloped regions; not in the West, but in non-Western countries; not out of traditional, urban class struggles, but from national liberation movements in the colonies and semi-colonies under the grip of imperialism. The essential meaning and logic of socialism were redefined. The extraordinary breakthroughs of socialism in Russia, China, and elsewhere transcended classical Marxism and constituted a distinct form of transformative socialism.

From the perspective of socialist thought, one essential feature of capitalism is its conquest of the world. The invasion and plunder of vast non-Western regions is necessary to sustain the prosperity and comfort of the capitalist centres of Europe. The development of wealthy countries is built upon the underdevelopment of poor countries. In this way, capitalism not only creates internal inequality but also external inequality. Classical Marxist writers recognised the destructive impact of capitalist colonial expansion on the vast non-Western world, but due to various objective historical conditions, they did not develop a systematic and detailed understanding of this matter. It was not until Lenin and subsequent Marxist theorists that the national liberation struggles of colonies and semi-colonies against capitalist and imperialist aggression received more acute attention. Reflecting this greater emphasis, the classic proposition, ‘workers of the world, unite!’ was expanded to ‘workers of the world and oppressed peoples, unite!’. Although the focus of socialist theory and practice at that time still centred on the core capitalist countries, the influence of the European socialist movement in the vast colonies and semi-colonies continued to grow. Socialist criticisms of capitalism, the ideal and pursuit of a better future society, and the courage and determination of the working class and its parties to overthrow the old world, were important sources of inspiration in the colonised world. Socialism demonstrated that it was possible for the oppressed to make new choices and build new societies, and so it became an extremely important intellectual resource for these countries in their resistance against capitalist aggression and conquest.

In the colonies and semi-colonies, a new, transformative form of socialism developed. The development of socialism in China illustrates many of the significant changes between the classical and transformative forms. This new form emerged from the intersection and integration of the socialist development logic and China’s own development logic.

In the case of China, after being isolated in the East for thousands of years, the country’s doors were forcefully opened through warfare by Western powers that were superior economically, militarily, technologically, and in terms of governance. This upheaval was not merely the result of a Western expedition against an ancient Eastern country, but also a destructive blow from a rising capitalist system against a declining feudalist order. The humiliation of China, the suffering of its people, and the tarnishing of Chinese civilisation sparked national resistance. Those who pursued national liberation and rejuvenation were in dire need of new sources of intellectual enlightenment. Faced with the predicament of internal intellectual stagnation, many Chinese intellectuals turned their gaze outward, particularly towards the highly developed Western countries. A number of Western ideas were introduced into China, with socialism and Marxism being just one of them. However, socialism resonated most with the Chinese people.

China’s encounter with and integration of socialism was the outcome of specific political, temporal, and spatial conditions. In particular, three factors led the Chinese people to embrace socialism.

1. The world’s peripheral regions, including China, were inherently opposed to the aggression of the Western capitalist countries. As an ancient civilisation with a long history of its own, China rejected the notion that it needed to be discovered, enlightened, or civilised by the Western powers. Having been invaded and plundered by Western capitalist countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China became more inclined towards socialism.

2. Socialism identified with and foregrounded the interests of the oppressed, namely, the working class within capitalist countries that resisted bourgeois rule as well as the colonies and semi-colonies that resisted conquest by capitalist countries. As an oppressed nation, the Chinese people were naturally inclined to identify with other oppressed peoples and, therefore, the Chinese people were attracted to socialism.

3. Socialism revealed the inherent sins and decay of capitalism. As the Chinese people’s understanding of Western capitalism deepened, the dark side behind its glamorous façade became increasingly apparent, including the evils of the slave trade, the global scramble for colonies, the plight of impoverished groups within capitalist countries, and, especially, the bloody slaughter between the imperialist countries during World War I. These injustices reflected the internal flaws and contradictions of the capitalist countries, thereby igniting the Chinese people’s yearning for a better society. Socialism represented the possibility of building an ideal society.

However, many colonies and semi-colonies around the world, beyond China, encountered socialist ideas but did not similarly integrate them. Why then did socialism take root in China? The entrance of socialism into China and the Chinese people’s choice of socialism merely demonstrated the potentiality of the historical movement. To transform this potential into reality and yield fruitful results, several other crucial conditions were undoubtedly necessary. These conditions included the presence of an exemplary vanguard organisation, a generation of youth willing to sacrifice everything, intellectuals who empathised with the toiling masses, and leaders who possessed a deep understanding both of China’s national conditions and the essence of Marxism. In the twentieth century, all of these conditions were met within China. Therefore, socialism was able to take root and blossom on Chinese soil.

The entrance of socialism into China changed the nature of social transformation in China. In the blueprint of world capitalism, China was situated on the periphery, subordinated to the capitalist core, and consigned to foreign domination. Whether China developed and overcame its semi-feudal and semi-colonial status was irrelevant to the core capitalist countries. These countries sought to define any social transformation within China and ensure that it was carried out by political agents that would direct it towards capitalist homogenisation and the interests of the core. This blueprint was terminated after socialism arrived in China as a different vision of social transformation emerged. The Communist Party of China (CPC) took the place of the country’s bourgeois political parties and became the leader of China’s social transformation. In this process, the working class, together with the peasantry and other classes, overthrew the bourgeoisie and became the driving force in China’s social transformation. The blueprint of China’s social transformation was fundamentally redrawn, and now pursued the following aims: opposition to the aggression, oppression, and exploitation of foreign capitalism in China; opposition to foreign capitalism’s support for reactionary forces in China; an end to the rule of feudalism, bureaucratic capitalism, and imperialism in China; and the achievement of national liberation and independence. Socialism outlined a revolutionary vision for China that completely overturned the content and methods that had been put forward by the bourgeoisie.

The socialist vision for social transformation also changed how China approached the building of a modern state. After the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949, the new state did not choose a capitalist development path, but rather, pursued a direct transition to socialism. Accordingly, the entire process of state construction followed this principle, shaping the construction of China’s basic political, economic, and social systems. Furthermore, the state and its institutions were built based on China’s specific conditions and aimed to ensure that the Chinese people were masters of the country. Key features included the leadership of the CPC, the system of a people’s congresses that extended from the local, village-level to the national-level, the system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation, the system of ethnic regional autonomy, and the system of community-level participatory governance. In this manner, China was able to construct a modern state and attain long-term political stability.

Finally, socialism reset China’s approach to modernisation. As humanity transitioned from agricultural to industrial societies, European countries led the initial process of modernisation thanks to the first-mover advantage that they gained from the industrial revolution. During their expansion, these countries imposed incomplete and subordinate forms of capitalist modernisation onto many developing countries, including China. This process was not smooth, but was characterised by setbacks, stagnation, and failures. After the Chinese Revolution, the PRC pursued a sovereign, non-capitalist path to modernisation. The CPC effectively mobilised and organised hundreds of millions of Chinese people to vigorously promote China’s industrialisation, striving to create the material foundation for socialism. This process took place in a hostile international environment and experienced a series of twists and turns during the initial decades after the revolution. By the late 1970s, a new path for China’s modernisation had opened up: the socialist market economy, active participation in the world economy, and the pursuit of common prosperity. Following the initiation of reform and opening up, China achieved a miracle of long-term rapid economic development, making great strides in industrialisation, urbanisation, technological advancement, developing the market economy, and pursuing international exchanges. These efforts have placed China at the forefront of the world’s modernisation tide.

The preceding paragraphs offer a general outline of how new forms of socialism and socialist development have emerged, with particular reference to the case of China. The emergence of a transformative form of socialism in China does not represent a general process of socialist development, although it may have implications that are relevant for other countries. Rather, the birth and growth of this new form vividly illustrates the diverse nature of socialist development.

Building a New Form of Socialism That Can Surpass Capitalism through Self-Improvement

In the mid-nineteenth century, socialism emerged in Europe and took its initial form, based on a starting point of advanced capitalist development. This original form has not disappeared and continues to slowly grow. It has mainly manifested in criticisms of capitalism at the ideological and cultural level, as well as social and political movements that strive to advocate for the interests of the oppressed classes. However, this form of socialism still has a long way to go before it can ascend to a dominant position and replace capitalism. Reasons for this include the divisions and variations within the socialist movement itself, as well as capitalism’s extraordinary resilience and capacity for adaptation. Fundamentally, however, socialism has not grown in the developed capitalist countries as it has in developing countries due to the absence of vanguard parties in the former. As a result, capitalism has been able to operate in a normal manner.

In the twentieth century, the socialist movement opened up new development opportunities in non-capitalist regions of the world. Developing countries, such as China, chose not to embrace the path offered by core capitalist countries and severed their ties with capitalism, becoming new areas of growth for socialism. Faced with pre-capitalist or semi-capitalist societies, and situated in historical positions of relative backwardness in terms of economic, political, cultural, and social development, these countries faced challenges that could not be answered by classical theories on the direct transition from capitalism to socialism. Fortunately, they demonstrated unprecedented historical initiative and creativity by pursuing socialist-oriented revolutions, socialist-oriented nation-building, and socialist-oriented modernisation. As a result, completely different theories and practices of socialist construction took shape in developing countries, along with new forms of socialist development.

How will socialism continue to develop and progress in the twenty-first century? This is a question of concern for all socialist thinkers and practitioners. Of course, the aforementioned forms of socialist development and late-starter modernisation remain important in developing countries and non-capitalist regions. At the same time, as socialism continues to develop in China, a further new form is emerging. Having attained socialist modernisation, China’s social productive forces, technological strength, overall national strength, and achievements in other aspects of development are demonstrating the possibility of socialism surpassing capitalism as well as the superiority and potential of socialism. For this new form of socialism to strengthen, China must advance beyond its current level of development to a higher level.

This new form cannot simply be an extension of the existing transformational form of socialism, but rather a meaningfully advanced form. In a certain sense, this new form entails a return to classical Marxism, as it must take up the question of how to transcend the capitalism of the core countries (although from the outside). The new form aims to surpass capitalism through the self-improvement of socialism.

Objectively speaking, this new form has just begun to emerge. We are not yet able to fully grasp its overall direction and inherent laws, but can only provide a rough outline of its basic contours. To strengthen this new form of socialism in China, the following areas of development are key.

1. Develop a deep and unified theoretical understanding of socialism and cultivate corresponding abilities to realise a higher level of development. The CPC, which leads the development of socialism in China, needs to engage in deep thinking, comprehensive planning, and long-term strategising, while adapting to the unfolding situation. It is important for the party to establish this foundation and build upon it for further learning, to unify its thinking, and to gradually establish an ongoing process of self-growth. In particular, it is crucial for the party to develop a comprehensive understanding of the country’s level of development, bottlenecks, favourable and unfavourable conditions, and operational mechanisms, along with an understanding of the practical experiences of capitalism in the United States and Europe.

2. Strengthen overall development. China’s level of development is not consistent across different fields. Economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological development varies in terms of progress, prioritisation, and imbalances. It is necessary to promote balanced and integrated development in these five fields.

3. Promote high-quality development of productivity and enhance the material foundation. Despite China’s large strides in catching up with and, in certain respects, surpassing the economic development of the core capitalist countries, the country still has a long way to go in terms of further developing productivity, productive efficiency, advanced technology, and material wealth. Without this, the inherent advantages of socialism cannot be fully realised.

4. Strengthen institutional maturity and unique governance advantages. Building on the consolidation of existing, unique institutional and governance advantages, concrete efforts should be undertaken to accelerate this process. Only by doing so can China develop institutional strength on par with the institutions of Western capitalism, which have been in place for hundreds of years.

5. Strengthen the inherent advantages of socialism. Compared to capitalism, socialism has many unique advantages, such as making the people the masters of the country; the people-centred approach of the ruling party, which is not guided by personal privileges and self-interest; the steadfast pursuit of common prosperity to prevent extreme wealth inequality; concerted efforts to maintain the party’s progressive nature, integrity, and strong leadership; and the emphasis on social harmony and avoiding fundamental conflicts or confrontations among the people. These advantages need to be valued and carefully nurtured. On top of this, a new system should be built to pool and mobilise resources nationwide for major issues.

6. Strengthen cultural and intellectual power. Being a civilisational nation and state is of utmost importance to China. Chinese civilisation has distinct characteristics in language, culture, and thought. The integration of Marxism and the emergence of a new form of socialism in China owes much to their compatibility with Chinese culture, which has always been deeply rooted in society and people’s daily lives. Efforts should be made to creatively transform China’s valuable cultural resources into more proactive cultural and intellectual strength. China should also work together with other cultures to highlight the value of human diversity.

7. Highlight the global comparative advantages of socialist development. China’s development has created global comparative advantages in some fields, even relative to developed capitalist countries. China has advanced the modernisation of a country of 1.4 billion people, surpassing the combined modernisation of the developed capitalist countries in scale and scope. Moreover, China’s modernisation has been achieved at a faster pace, with lower social costs and broader inclusivity, and using a more peaceful approach. This is the greatest experiment in modernisation in human history. China has also taken the lead in areas such as renewable energy, ecological protection, poverty alleviation, and technological development, with impressive achievements comparable to those of developed capitalist countries. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has embarked on an ambitious, cooperative developmental project with the countries of the Global South, encouraging their own pursuits of modernisation. To address the world’s common challenges, China has put forward the concept of building a ‘community with a shared future for humanity’ (人类命运共同体, rénlèi mìngyùn gòngtóngtǐ) and a range of proposals to promote global peace and development. China welcomes and embraces cooperation, competition, and different forms of modernisation and development around the world. As China’s own modernisation continues to advance, its international comparative advantages will become more prominent. As for hostile attempts by certain countries to contain China, China will respond with sufficient intelligence and capability.

The wheels of progress are racing forward, as we advance through the third decade of the twenty-first century. What excites all socialists is the emergence of new forms of socialism. Building off more than a century of socialist development, in a way, we seem to have returned to the era of Marx and Engels, who continuously pondered over how socialism would surpass capitalism and become its gravedigger. Today, we can see that socialism is better than capitalism at doing what the latter purportedly does best, while also successfully accomplishing many things that capitalism cannot. Socialism in China continues to grow stronger and strives to comprehensively surpass even the most advanced forms of contemporary capitalism, as Marx and Engels envisioned, and create a better society for humanity. Faced with this emerging new form of socialism, we need a new sense of consciousness.

‘The Third Wave of Socialism’ (社会主义的第三次浪潮) was originally published in Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), issue no. 3 (June 2021).

Capitalism Is Facing a Major Crisis

The 2008 financial crisis and the global COVID-19 pandemic have made clear that capitalism is facing a major crisis. The global economy has experienced prolonged stagnation and decline, widespread unemployment, profound wealth disparities, excessive debt, and asset bubbles. Most tragically, this has been accompanied by a significant loss of human life. The current crisis of global capitalism is the largest and most severe since the Great Depression (1929–1933).

Within this crisis, the limits of capitalism – market, technological, and ecological – have become increasingly apparent. First, new markets and sources of profit have grown scarce, leading to a diminishing driving force for capital accumulation. Second, although crisis-driven technological innovation has remained active, the benefits of such innovation are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the large majority of people marginalised within the current capitalist system. Third, the Earth’s ecosystem can no longer sustain the pressures imposed upon it by capitalist modes of production and lifestyles, as the world’s environmental capacity has been pushed to its limit.

The means traditionally used to resolve capitalist crises have failed, one by one, under the current crisis. After nearly four decades of neoliberalism, capitalist governments are facing a public spending crisis – their push for even more structural economic reforms to stimulate private capital is at odds with the need to maintain the minimum levels of social welfare. Quantitative easing policies have repeatedly created enormous asset bubbles and debt spirals, exacerbating the already severe wealth disparities.

Under this crisis, there has been a resurgence of many of the features that characterised the global capitalist landscape prior to World War I and World War II: the growth of populism, militarism, and fascism; the intensification of internal social divisions; an increase in hostility and zero-sum competition between nations; and trends toward deglobalisation and bloc politics. As international tensions rise, so too does the possibility of another global war.

Crises ignite wars and wars lead to revolutions. This has been a recurring theme in the history of the capitalist system. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, amid this major crisis, will capitalism undergo profound reforms and overcome the crisis? Or is this capitalism’s ‘Chernobyl moment’, as it heads towards its ultimate demise?

History has once again arrived at a critical juncture.

The Three Waves of Socialism

As a critique of and movement against capitalism, socialism has always coexisted alongside capitalism, serving as a powerful counterweight and constantly seeking alternative paths to overcome and replace capitalism. Since the birth of the First International (1864–1876), the global socialist movement has experienced three major waves.

The first wave occurred in nineteenth-century Europe as the European labour movement gradually transitioned from a state of being to a state of self-awareness. The main features of this period included the birth of Marxism, the establishment of international labour organisations, and the initial attempts to carry out a socialist revolution, such as the Paris Commune of 1871. The first wave of socialism propelled the political awakening and consciousness of the working class and gave rise to working-class political parties in a range of countries. However, during this wave, a socialist state form would not yet emerge.

The second wave began as World War I came to an end, with the October Revolution in 1917, and lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the communist states in Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991. Across the world, a large number of socialist states emerged, first in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and, after the end of World War II, in China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Together, these countries formed a global socialist system or camp. In addition to this state system, during the Cold War, a large section of the international socialist movement was concentrated in the national liberation movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which identified as socialist or were significantly influenced by socialism. Thus, the two main characteristics of the second wave of socialism were the emergence of the socialist state form, with widespread public ownership and economic planning, and the national liberation movements.

After the end of the Cold War, socialism suffered significant global setbacks. However, despite this, a new wave would emerge. The third wave, which began to form after China launched its reform and opening up in the late 1970s, was able to withstand the severe shocks and tests following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the communist states in Eastern Europe. While socialism was at a low point worldwide, China remained committed to socialism while also pursuing reform and opening up, gradually exploring a path known as socialism with Chinese characteristics. The main feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics has been the incorporation of a market economy into the socialist system, gradually forming a socialist market economy. Today, just three decades after the end of the Cold War, socialism with Chinese characteristics has undergone a rapid rise, becoming a crucial force that is reshaping the world order and humanity’s future. Although this wave of socialism is still in its early stages, it has already made a significant impact and attracted global attention, providing new options for countries that seek to pursue a path of independent development and posing a strong challenge to those who contended that capitalism marked the ‘end of history’.

Limitations of the Second Wave of Socialism

Before proceeding further in assessing the current reality and future prospects of the third wave of socialism, we must first revisit the second wave of socialism and understand the reasons for its setback.

With the October Revolution in 1917 and Chinese Revolution in 1949, socialism swept the globe, not only forming a camp of states that posed a significant threat to capitalism but also igniting a wave of national liberation movements in the vast Third World of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the decades after World War II, the capitalist world system was in a precarious situation. As socialism spread globally, socialist countries widely implemented Soviet-style planned economies and public ownership systems, achieving the initial stage of industrialisation and building socialist national economic systems.

However, the Soviet-style planned economy and pure public ownership model had several profound drawbacks. First, the planned economic system was unable to allocate social and economic resources in an effective and flexible manner, resulting in a rigid and distorted national economic system that could not adequately respond to indicators from the real economy. Second, the pure public ownership and egalitarian distribution system lacked sufficient incentive mechanisms for labour at the intermediate and micro levels, leading to a lack of constructive competition and pressure between enterprises and workers, and resulting in a generally low level of economic efficiency. Third, the restrictions on and elimination of private and commodity economies violated the law of value and surpassed the stage of development of social productive forces. This led to a long-term, systemic failure to meet the complex needs of economic and social life and to realise significant improvements in people’s quality of life. Finally, over time, Soviet-style planning and economic management led to the development of an increasingly inward and closed system, characterised by bureaucratism and dogmatism, and a lack of sensitivity and responsiveness to technological progress and organisational innovation.

While the significant setbacks that the second wave of socialism experienced in the 1980s and 1990s can be attributed, in part, to external factors such as the strength of the capitalist world system and the fragmentation of the socialist camp, ultimately, the inadequate economic and social operating systems and institutional mechanisms within socialist countries were the fundamental determining factors. The unsustainability of these internal systems drove the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union as well as China’s shift towards reform and opening up.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the Third Wave of Socialism

With the continuous advancement of reform and opening up, socialism with Chinese characteristics has taken shape as a development path that is distinct from both traditional Soviet-style socialism and classical free-market capitalism. China’s developmental path and theories are confidently stepping onto the world stage. Although socialism with Chinese characteristics is not a static model and China’s practices undergo continuous experimentation, after more than four decades of exploration, six major features can be identified.

First, priority has been given to the development of productive forces. Socialism with Chinese characteristics dares to learn from reasonable economic forms of capitalism and allows the development of the private economy to promote the rapid development of advanced productive forces. At the same time, the development of the state-owned economy has been strategically planned in key sectors, forming a complementary relationship with the private economy and creating a mixed ownership structure.

Second, China has promoted the close integration of its socialist economic foundation and relations of production with the market economy, to gradually establish a socialist market economic system.

Third, while opening up and integrating with the global capitalist system, China has always focused on maintaining national sovereignty and ensuring the continued socialist nature of the Communist Party of China (CPC). China remains vigilant against the risk of deviating towards capitalism due to the demands of developing a market economy.

Fourth, China has sought to address issues related to social justice and inequality through development. Development can bring about a growth in wealth but, for various reasons, this wealth may also lead to increased social divisions. Only further development can produce the social wealth and material basis to resolve these social divisions and inequalities. Under socialism with Chinese characteristics, development has been the primary avenue to address social justice issues, while other methods have been secondary. This has required dynamic, proactive measures, rather than rigid and one-size-fits-all approaches.

Fifth, the state has also employed a number of other measures to balance wealth inequality within the socialist market economy. Large-scale poverty alleviation campaigns have been carried out to include marginalised groups in the market economy and help them escape poverty through targeted efforts. In addition, the practice of paired-up assistance connects developed areas, public institutions, enterprises, and other actors with poor areas to transfer resources and assistance to underdeveloped regions. Meanwhile, to address regional inequalities, transfer payments from more developed eastern regions to underdeveloped central and western areas have helped to supplement gaps in fiscal revenue and expenditure capacity. Such measures are difficult to imagine, let alone implement, in capitalist countries where private property is considered sacrosanct and where electoral processes only uphold the vested interests of the dominant class.

Sixth, the CPC is not beholden to the narrow interests of certain sectors of society. To maintain this position, the CPC must remain free from the infiltration and control of capital, as well as overcome the influences of populism and rigid egalitarianism, maintaining a dynamic balance between economic vitality and social equity.

The Relationship between Socialism and the Market Economy

History has demonstrated that it is impossible to artificially eliminate the market economy under socialism. The limitations and ultimate failure of traditional Soviet-style socialism serves as evidence.

The market economy is an ancient economic form, and its law of supply and demand spontaneously regulates human economic behaviour. It can be combined with feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. The degree of combination depends on the surplus of social products. Generally speaking, the greater the surplus, the more developed the market economy becomes. As Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) said, ‘There is no fundamental contradiction between socialism and a market economy. The question is how to develop the productive forces more effectively’.1 Similarly, he stated, ‘A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too. Planning and market forces are both means of controlling economic activity’.2

In the movement of a modern market economy, capital is the main actor. Capital has a dual nature: it is the most efficient force for resource allocation in the market economy, but it can also manipulate and monopolise the market. Fernand Braudel, French historian and leading scholar of the Annales school of historiography, argued that the market economy could not be equated with capitalism. For Braudel, the market economy ‘is really only a fragment of a vast whole. For by its very nature, the market economy is reduced to playing the role of a link between production and consumption, and until the nineteenth century it was merely a layer – more or less thick and resilient, but at times very thin – between the ocean of daily life that lay stretched out beneath it and the capitalistic mechanism that more than once manipulated it from above’.3 Distinct from the market economy, Braudel wrote that ‘capitalism is the perfect term for designating economic activities that are carried on at the summit, or that are striving for the summit. As a result, large-scale capitalism rests upon the underlying double layer composed of material life and the coherent market economy; it represents the high-profit zone’.4 In today’s global market economy that is dominated by modern capitalism, internal forces that resist capitalism continue to emerge, giving rise to demands and movements for economic and social equality. These movements will gravitate towards and advocate for socialism to address and overcome capitalism’s inequalities. As such, socialism is also an internal force of the market economy, an organic component that naturally opposes capitalism.

In addition to capital, the government is another key actor in a modern market economy. The government is a product of the market society’s demand for order and rules. Its existence is not an external force imposed on the market but an intrinsic requirement of the market economy. Even in a market society without a government, quasi-governmental entities such as guilds and chambers of commerce will emerge. Besides regulating and managing the market economy, the government often promotes and develops the market, especially during the early stages of market economies in developing countries. In fact, the government frequently becomes the driving force behind the market economy. Therefore, it is fundamentally incorrect to place the government and the market in complete opposition to one another as dichotomised entities. Liberalism regards the government as an absolute evil, while Soviet-style socialism directly equates the market economy with capitalism – both make formalistic errors.

A socialist market economy is one in which the movement of the market economy is guided by socialist values. On the one hand, this economic system employs national strategic regulation, fully leverages the fundamental role of the market economy in organising production, exchange, guiding consumption, and distribution, and fully harnesses the leading role of capital in developing advanced productive forces. On the other hand, it utilises the powerful state-owned capital and the socialist superstructure to restrain and balance private capital, overcome the inherent tendency of the market economy towards social division, and avoid capital’s control over economic and social life.

The socialist market economy is a system that utilises the decisive role of the market economy while optimising the government’s function. It represents the combination of the modern market economy and the socialist mode of production.

Maintaining the Socialist Character of a Socialist Market Economy

Capitalism constructs a superstructure and ideology that are compatible with its mode of production according to the logic of capital’s operation. Under the conditions of a socialist market economy, this logic does not change. The spontaneous movement of the market economy and the pursuit of profit by capital entities within it will continuously erode the superstructure and ideology of socialism, and may lead to the imbalance or even disintegration of the socialist market economy, leading society towards capitalism. In the era of global capitalism, the challenges faced by socialist market economies within sovereign nations become even more apparent as capital penetrates national borders. How then has China been able to maintain the socialist character and direction of its socialist market economy?

First, the key lies in upholding the leadership of the CPC and ensuring that the socialist nature of the party remains unchanged. In the socialist market economy, the CPC has fully leveraged the role of capital in developing advanced productive forces and promoting the continuous growth of social wealth, while ensuring that the party is not infiltrated nor manipulated by capital. The party has actively controlled capital and made it serve the majority of the people. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasised the essential relationship between the party’s leadership and socialism, stating that, ‘The leadership of the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the greatest strength of the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics’.5

Second, the stable operation of the socialist market economy also results from the fact that China has accumulated a large amount of state-owned assets during the past seventy years of development, including state-owned enterprises, state-owned financial institutions, and state-owned land. State control of these massive strategic assets forms the foundation of the CPC’s governance and ensures the party’s independence from capital forces, allowing it to govern based on the fundamental interests of the country and the people.

Under the conditions of a socialist market economy, state-owned enterprises and state-owned capital must also operate and compete according to the laws of the market economy. The logic of the market and capital deeply penetrate the daily behaviour of not only private enterprises, but also state-owned enterprises. Therefore, it is particularly important to ensure that the managers of these massive state-owned assets do not become agents of the bourgeoisie, so as to prevent managers from transforming state-owned assets into private assets or establishing internal control that is beholden to bourgeois interests. To maintain the socialist character of the socialist market economy, the CPC must ensure both the operational efficiency and the continued state ownership of these assets.

Third, the superstructure and ideology of socialism must be firmly controlled by the party. In industries or sectors such as education, publishing, and media, the pursuit of economic benefits must be subordinate to social benefits. The logic of the market economy should not dominate these sectors, and the party’s leadership must be integrated into their daily operations. If socialism does not provide ideological and cultural leadership, capitalism inevitably will.

Fourth, under the conditions of a market economy, the CPC has led the development of civil society and non-governmental organisations. The growth of these social forces is an inevitable phenomenon in a market economy. Due to the differentiation effect of the market economy, demands from different interest groups arise to address issues such as wealth inequality, environmental degradation, the demoralisation of society, and other problems generated by private capital. Due to China’s strong historical tradition of ‘bureaucratic feudalism’, the development and construction of these social forces can help overcome excessive bureaucracy and formalism within government departments. Therefore, the party has led the development of these social forces and encouraged them to organise, to promote the stable and long-term development of the socialist market economy.

Promoting the Third Wave of Socialism

At a time when the contemporary capitalist world system is facing tremendous crises, the opportunity for a new global wave of socialism has once again emerged. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is likely to be a key factor in initiating this wave. As China continues to rise and becomes a leading global power, the Chinese path of development will attract more attention as a viable alternative mode of production and way of life, promoting the formation of a new global socialist system and value system that is increasingly accepted by people around the world.

At the same time, during this historic transition period, socialism with Chinese characteristics will also face particularly acute challenges and dangers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially since the COVID-19 outbreak, the strengths of Chinese socialism have become increasingly evident on the international stage. China has turned many of these crises into opportunities, propelling the country to a higher level of development and enhancing its governance system and capacity. The stark contrast between China and Western countries in these respects has fundamentally shaken the narrative of Western capitalism; something that has a greater impact than mere military power and economic growth rates.

In response, various forces of international capitalism are mobilising against China. Attacks and smears from liberal, nationalist, and populist political forces are endless. Even some international left-wing forces harshly criticise China on issues of democracy, human rights, and environmental protection, and even question whether China is truly socialist. Since the Biden administration came to power in the United States, alliance politics have ramped up on a global scale. A US-led bourgeois ‘holy alliance’ is rapidly coalescing under the pretext of containing China.

The emerging third wave of socialism will undoubtedly face a dark night and experience even more intense turmoil and chaos within the capitalist world system. In response, Chinese socialists must be prepared.

Notes

1Deng Xiaoping, ‘There Is No Fundamental Contradiction between Socialism and a Market Economy’, 23 October 1985, in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 150, https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

2Deng Xiaoping, ‘Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai’, 18 January–21 February 1992, in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 361, https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

3Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism, trans. Patricia N. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 41.

4Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, 112–113.

5See ‘Full Text: Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century’, Xinhua News Agency, 16 November 2021, http://www.news.cn/english/2021-11/16/c_1310314611.htm.

Bibliography

 Braudel, Fernand. Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism. Translated by Patricia N. Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Deng Xiaoping. ‘Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai’, 18 January–21 February 1992. In Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992, 358–370. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994. https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

Deng Xiaoping. ‘There Is No Fundamental Contradiction between Socialism and a Market Economy’, 23 October 1985. In Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992, 151–153. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994. https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

‘Full Text: Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century’. Xinhua News Agency, 16 November 2021. http://www.news.cn/english/2021-11/16/c_1310314611.htm.

A contemporary Chinese saying goes, ‘In 1949, socialism saved China. In the twenty-first century, China will save socialism’. In a 2018 speech to incoming members of the Central Committee, Chinese President Xi Jinping (习近平) recalled that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘had socialism failed in China […] then global socialism would [have] lapsed into a long dark age. And communism, like Karl Marx once said, would be a haunting spectre lingering in limbo’.

But what are the main characteristics of socialism with Chinese characteristics? How are the market and planning jointly integrated into a socialist strategy, without antagonising each other? What sets Chinese socialism apart from the Soviet model? What are the greatest challenges that China faces as it confronts the contradictions imposed by the market on socialism? Can the Chinese experience inspire other countries on the path to socialism? The fourth issue of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横) examines these central questions in two essays by Yang Ping (杨平), editor-in-chief of the Chinese edition of Wenhua Zongheng, and Pan Shiwei (潘世伟), honorary president of the Institute of Chinese Marxism, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

In ‘The Third Wave of Socialism’, Yang Ping argues that during the past one and a half centuries, there have been three waves of scientific socialism: the emergence of Marxism and revolutionary movements in Europe in the nineteenth century (first wave), the emergence of a large number of socialist states and national liberation movements during the twentieth century (second wave), and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the exhaustion of socialism during the Mao Zedong era, the emergence of a socialist market economy, beginning with China’s reform and opening up in the 1970s (third wave). Similarly, in ‘The New Forms of Socialism in the Twenty-First Century’, Pan Shiwei contends that three main forms of socialism have emerged: classical socialism in the centres of European capitalism, transformative forms of socialism in the colonies and semi-colonies, and a new form of socialism that is developing in China and aims to surpass capitalism. Both authors believe that the new wave or form of socialism is in its early stages and discuss how it can further strengthen socialism in China and serve as an inspiration to other nations around the world.

Today, the imperialist powers are in the midst of an economic decline and embroiled in a frenzy of warfare in Ukraine and Palestine – which risks spreading to East and Southeast Asia and plunging humanity into a third world war. In this context, what opportunities does the rise of socialist China offer to the Global South? This editorial engages with the perspectives of the authors to examine this question.

Achievements and Challenges for Chinese Socialism

After 45 years of reform and opening up, socialist China has become a major industrial, technological, financial, commercial, and military power. Based on gross domestic product (GDP) in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), a more realistic measure to compare economies, China has comfortably surpassed the United States. In 2022, China’s GDP (PPP) was $30.32 trillion compared to $25.46 trillion for the US. In other words, China’s GDP (PPP) is 119 percent, or roughly 1.2 times greater, that of the US. To contextualise this achievement within the history of socialist development, at the peak of the Soviet Union’s economic strength in 1975, its GDP (PPP) only reached 58 percent, or just over half, that of the US.

Since the late 2000s, China has been the world’s largest industrial power. Last year, China produced 26.7 percent of global manufacturing output, followed by the United States (15.4 percent), Japan (5.3 percent), and Germany (4 percent). This means that China’s industrial production exceeds the combined output of the three largest industrial nations in the Global North. China has also made remarkable technological advancements in recent decades, becoming the global leader in sectors such as telecommunications (5G), high-speed rail, renewable energy, mineral refining, and electric vehicles, and reaching highly advanced stages in many other areas, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, and construction.

In addition, China is the world’s largest trading power, serving as the primary trade partner for over 120 countries. In 2022, China’s exports totalled $6.28 trillion, with a surplus of $860 billion, ending the year with international reserves of $3.13 trillion. Meanwhile, in the realm of finance, the Chinese state controls the world’s four largest banks based on total assets – Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank (CCB), Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), and Bank of China (BOC) – which together hold roughly $20 trillion in assets. Globally, the country has become the largest source of development financing, surpassing all other countries and multilateral institutions, including the World Bank.

Finally, China has achieved one of the greatest feats in history by lifting 850 million people out of extreme poverty between 1978 and 2021. According to the World Bank, China accounted for 76 percent of all poverty reduction during that period.

At the same time, despite its achievements, China remains a developing country and faces significant economic, social, and political challenges as it seeks to advance beyond its ‘primary stage’ of socialism. These challenges include the need to reduce inequality, both between urban and rural areas and between regions of the country (the east being much more developed than the west); raise the income and social wellbeing of over 300 million (internal) migrant workers; reduce high levels of youth unemployment; reduce the high degree of economic dependency on a financialised real estate sector; address the environmental consequences resulting from hyper-accelerated industrialisation; adapt to an aging population and declining birth rate; revive Marxist political education within the Communist Party of China (CPC) and among the masses (a priority for Xi Jinping); and navigate the hybrid warfare tactics employed by Western powers to try to contain China’s progress.

A Socialist or Developmental Wave in the Global South?

China has managed to break free from the vicious ‘development of underdevelopment’ cycle that has ensnared the Third World. Decades after gaining their independence from Western colonialism, this cycle continues to define the experience of peripheral countries within the capitalist system. Owing to its tremendous economic success, an increasing number of countries in the Global South view China as both a successful example to follow (taking into account their local specificities) and a potential partner in their pursuit of development-oriented strategies. In turn, China is increasingly developing such partnerships.

In October 2022, the report of the twentieth National Congress of the CPC included a resounding Marxist critique of the Western model of modernisation, as being based on colonisation, plunder, slavery, and predatory exploitation of the natural resources and peoples in the Global South. This model not only served as the foundation for the industrialisation processes in Europe and the United States, but also their economic, political, and military domination over the rest of the world, producing a system of imperialism. In response, China formulated its own distinct path of modernisation, characterised by principles of shared prosperity among a massive population, material and ethical-cultural progress, harmony between humans and nature, and peaceful development.

This historical awareness shapes China’s state policy, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013 with the aim of boosting the development of western China through its connection with Central Asia. In Deng Xiaoping’s (邓小平) style of ‘crossing the river by touching the stones’, the Chinese government realised that this could be the cornerstone of its relationship with the Global South, which had been plagued by neoliberalism for over three decades. Ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, this direction was reaffirmed at the twentieth National Congress of the CPC, which declared that China is committed to helping narrow the gap between the Global North and the Global South and supporting the acceleration of development in nations of the Global South.

Recent developments indicate a higher level of cooperation between China and developing countries. For instance, at the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue in August (held shortly after the fifteenth BRICS summit), African leaders expressed their appreciation for China’s efforts over the past two decades to promote infrastructure on the continent but also called on China to shift its investment focus from infrastructure to industrialisation.1 Xi Jinping agreed with the proposal. A similar debate took place at the Russia-Africa summit in July, confirming the current African strategy.

Across the Global South, the need for industrialisation is once again at the forefront of public debate, from countries like Brazil and South Africa, which once had robust and diversified industrial sectors but have experienced deindustrialisation in recent decades, to countries like Bolivia and Zimbabwe, which, despite their abundant natural resources, have never been able to accumulate sufficient capital to initiate a consistent industrialisation process due to Western exploitation.

Numerous partnerships between Chinese state-owned and private companies with Global South countries have been established in the recent period, many of them related to the local processing of high-demand minerals or the production of electric vehicles. For example, China is investing billions of dollars in lithium processing plants in Bolivia, another lithium plant and mega steel plant in Zimbabwe, nickel processing plants in Indonesia, and a hub of electric vehicle factories in Morocco. There are high expectations that regional initiatives like the BRI, the expanded BRICS-11, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, can serve as levers to strengthen this process, even though they face opposition from Western powers.

Without industrial development, the peoples in the Global South will not be able to overcome their profound problems, such as hunger, unemployment, and insufficient access to quality education, housing, and healthcare. However, this will not be attainable merely through relations with China (or Russia). It is necessary to strengthen national popular projects with broad participation from progressive social sectors, especially the working classes, otherwise, the fruits of any development are unlikely to be reaped by those who need them the most. Given that few countries in the Global South are currently experiencing an upsurge in mass movements, the prospects for a global ‘third socialist wave’ remain very challenging; rather, a new wave of development with the potential to take on a progressive character, seems more feasible. The principal contradiction of our time is imperialism and all efforts to confront it are strategically advantageous.

There is no doubt that China and Russia have been targeted by the imperialist powers precisely because they have built strong sovereign nations in recent decades. Beyond this, however, China and, to a lesser degree, Russia offer a greater range of industrial, technological, financial, communication, and military capabilities to countries of the Global South, expanding their choices and potentially weakening the hegemony of Western powers more broadly. Was this not precisely what was missing for the success of the ‘Third World Project’, the great wave for national liberation and development between the 1950s and 1970s, whose dreams were ultimately thwarted by neoliberalism and the Empire’s war machine?

Notes

1 See ‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’, Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), int’l ed. 1, no. 3 (October 2023), https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2023-3-china-africa-relations-belt-and-road-era/.

The images in this dossier are from Freedom Park’s Medu Art Ensemble Collection, which contains 150 digitised materials that are currently hosted on the University of California, Los Angeles Library website.

Dancers perform during the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, 1982.
Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

Medu Art Ensemble, Shades of Change, 1982. This two-man play, set in a prison cell, was written by Mongane Wally Serote. 
Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

From All Lands

A protest dance. ‘Hai! Hai!’ the crowd chants, knees pumping high, feet stomping, and fingers pointing at an invisible, but known, enemy. With roots in the military drills of the Algerian liberation movement, toyi-toyi, a form of resistance culture that mixes call-and-response chanting with energetic steps, journeyed through the training camps in Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in the 1960s. This protest dance arrived at the exiled outposts of uMkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’, also known as MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), before eventually being smuggled back to be popularised in South Africa’s townships and factories.1 Nearly thirty years after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, toyi-toyi has evolved according to the conditions, cultures, and political objectives of those who take it up. It is seen at nearly every protest in the country, from those of the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo to the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and from those of the mineworkers in Marikana to the students of the Fees Must Fall movement.

A song. The crowd roars as the legendary South African musician Jonas Gwangwa introduces his next song, Batsumi, to thousands of fans attending the largest annual jazz festival in Johannesburg. It was 2006. The song, however, had been written thirty years before at the height of apartheid rule in South Africa. After years of pursuing his musical career in the United States, Gwangwa made Botswana his home base in the 1970s, soaking in the local Setswana musical traditions and later becoming one of the founding members of the Medu Art Ensemble in 1979, a cultural collective created and based in Botswana whose members were mostly exiled South African artists. Gwangwa’s Batsumi, meaning ‘the hunters’, pays homage to the hunting tradition of the First People of Botswana and universalises their historic struggle against oppression as a struggle of people ‘from all lands’ (ba lefatshe lotlhe).2

A poster. The latest issue of the Cuban Tricontinental magazine had just arrived in a remote training camp in Angola. A poster tucked between its pages is unfolded, the four letters C-L-I-K written in yellow font against a night-blue background. Mandla Langa, a South African writer in exile, a Medu member, and an MK soldier deployed there recalls this moment: ‘I remember there was one poster which I can’t forget, from when the Cubans were having power failures, and they wanted to send messages through posters to the villages all over the country of how to conserve energy: Clik. Just switch off’.3 This poster, designed by the renowned Cuban graphic artist Félix Beltrán in 1968, travelled across oceans and continents to arrive at this remote Angolan camp a few years later. Posters and magazines like these were essential in carrying news about the struggles waged elsewhere. People took great risks not just with magazines, but with posters, songs, dances, and poems so that these cultural weapons could reach their intended audiences.

Put together, these vignettes are a drop in an ocean of rich cultural experiences in the South African struggle against white-minority apartheid rule and part of the tradition of liberation struggles across the colonised world. What were the conditions that necessitated and enabled culture to become such a strong mobilising force, both domestically and internationally? What was the Medu Art Ensemble, and what role did cultural groups like it play in pushing that moment of history forward? Over the last few years, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research spoke with several members of Medu and studied some of the largely unpublished materials that the group produced in its short but deeply impactful years of existence.

The story of Medu is not just a South or southern African story, but an international one. No single liberation struggle can exist without the circulation and exchange of ideas, strategies, material resources, political solidarity, and culture across the globe. Reflecting on the role of national culture in the struggle against colonialism, the Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote, ‘It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives. And this dual emergence, in fact, is the unique focus of all culture’.4 In other words, there is no culture of national liberation that is not at once bound up with internationalism. During its six years of existence from 1979 to 1985, the Medu Art Ensemble built and innovated drawing from the cultural practices and artistic theories of African, Asian, and Latin American struggles for national liberation. Thami Mnyele – one of Medu’s founders who was born in the impoverished Johannesburg township of Alexandra and murdered by the South African state for his artistic and political work – described this experience:

It was in [the] Medu Art Ensemble where the role of the artists concretised itself: the role of an artist is to learn; the role of an artist is to teach others; the role of an artist is to ceaselessly search for the ways and means of achieving freedom. Art cannot overthrow a government, but it can inspire change… the whole little ensemble is a workshop, a classroom, a jungle through which the people must carve out a home… The struggle of the artist must be rooted in that of the majority of our people. Any actual engagement in the making of change must of necessity seek inspiration and alliance with the movement of the people.5


Musicians play the drums at the opening of the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana, 1982. Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

Musicians play the drums at the opening of the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts at the University of Botswana in Gaborone,  1982.
Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

Medu Art Ensemble, The Spear Fights on Isandlwana, 1979. Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

Medu Art Ensemble, The Spear Fights on Isandlwana, 1979.
Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

Culture as a Weapon of Struggle

the struggle is food
age-old rule of bloodhounds
gives birth to revolt
the sharp teeth of class struggle
chew off whole epochs
we have travelled a long way
in soweto
we were matadors
trickling bullnosed war tanks
and learned
how much a brick
can bleed a bullet to death

— Bheki Langa, ‘Isandlwana Incarnate’, written in 1979 on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Isandlwana.6

The Medu Art Ensemble emerged as a necessity of a historic moment and out of a centuries-long tradition of cultural resistance on the continent. According to Judy Seidman, a member of Medu’s graphics and research units, the traditions that inspired South African cultural resistance can be categorised in four waves: the early anti-colonial era, the Pan-Africanist movement, and then the first and second waves of South Africans who went into exile.7 Seidman, who is from the United States, spent her youth in Ghana during Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency, dedicated her adult life to the South African liberation movement, and has helped to preserve much of Medu’s history.

The first tradition that inspired South African cultural resistance consisted of different cultural practices that responded to colonial invasions from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. An important landmark in this period of resistance was the 1879 Battle of Isandlwana, when warriors of the Zulu Kingdom defeated the British colonial troops who had their sights set on expanding into the diamond and gold-rich interior. This phase of cultural resistance developed alongside the emergence of the South African working classes as a social force, from the nineteenth century mineworkers, railway workers, and dockworkers to the twentieth century factory, domestic, and farm workers, bringing together pre-colonial cultural elements and ideas from the burgeoning international socialist and communist movements.

The second tradition is rooted in the Pan-Africanist movement, which began as early as the first two decades of the 1900s. This period was shaped by leaders like the Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams, women scholars like Anna Julia Haywood Cooper from the United States, and South African writers like Sol Plaatje. In Europe and the United States, Plaatje connected with W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and other key thinkers. By the 1940s and 1950s, the Pan-Africanist movement had incorporated strong Marxist tendencies under the influence of important figures like Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Sekou Touré (Guinea), and Amílcar Cabral (Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde) who understood culture to be a fundamental pillar of the struggle against colonialism and for Pan-African unity. A year after assuming the presidency of an independent Guinea, Touré made an important plea to writers, emphasising the symbiotic relationship between cultural production and the revolutionary processes that were underway: ‘To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves, and of themselves’.8

The third tradition emerged in the 1950s with South Africans who were exiled following the consolidation of the racially segregated political system that was formally inaugurated with the 1948 election of the Afrikaner National Party. Despite the implementation of increasingly repressive laws and restrictions, such as the 1950 Group Areas Act, which further racially segregated residential and commercial areas, and the banning of the Communist Party of South Africa under the Suppression of Communism Act that same year, the liberation struggle only grew more militant.9 It no longer demanded inclusion in the existing racialised society, seeking instead to restructure all aspects of South African society. At the height of this moment, the historic Freedom Charter was adopted by the 1955 Congress of the People in Kliptown, just outside of Johannesburg. Beginning with its opening proclamation ‘the people shall govern!’, the Charter addressed the material necessities of land, housing, and work, as well as cultural liberation, declaring that ‘the doors of learning and of culture shall be opened!’.10 This political militancy was met with increased state repression, marked by the Sharpeville Massacre on 21 March 1960 in which the South African Police killed sixty-nine people and injured hundreds more.11 Almost immediately after the massacre, the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a group whose members had primarily broken away from the ANC Youth League, were banned and forced underground. This generation of exiles, including the renowned musicians Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and Jonas Gwangwa, interacted with international circuits of political artists and intellectuals, from the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences (born out of the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia) to the Pan-African cultural festivals, connecting black artists from the diaspora with those on the continent.

The fourth tradition of cultural resistance came with the exiled South African students and activists who were involved in the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko. This movement emerged in the midst of the political vacuum of the late 1960s, which reached its height during the Soweto Uprising in 1976, when thousands of students revolted against the imposition of Afrikaans, the language of apartheid domination, as the medium of instruction in black schools. In response, hundreds were killed, affiliated organisations were banned, and many key leaders were exiled or jailed, including Biko, who died a year later in police custody. He was thirty years old. Many of the students and activists politicised in this moment ended up leaving South Africa, including some who went on to form Medu. At the same time, the increasing militancy in the trade union movement, as highlighted by the dockworkers who led the 1973 Durban Strikes and the increasing prominence of trade unionists (among them leaders such as Emma Mashinini), strengthened class consciousness in the artistic community and introduced the concept of a ‘cultural worker’, underscoring the notion that artists and intellectuals are part of the working class.12 By the late 1970s, these political and cultural currents had arrived in Botswana, whose capital, Gaborone, sits a mere fifteen kilometres from the South African border and became a vibrant breeding ground for a new cultural project.

‘Medu started out as a coalescing of the different energies of different people from sometimes almost antagonistic strains’, Mandla Langa recalls regarding his arrival in Botswana. ‘I came from the Black Consciousness Movement, and I was still trying to check [out] the terrain and what was going on. There were people like Wally [Serote] who were already working for the ANC, and there were other young people who were still trying to find their own feet in Botswana’.13 Mongane Wally Serote, who was born in the poor but culturally vibrant black township of Sophiatown and today is South Africa’s National Poet Laureate, spent nine months in solitary confinement in 1969 under the Terrorism Act, which was used to repress many of the first-wave exiles. Within months of the arrival of Serote, Langa, and others in Botswana in the late 1970s, the idea of building a cultural collective such as Medu began to take root. In fact, the word medu means ‘roots’ in the southern African language of Sesotho.

In addition to bringing together various tendencies and traditions, South African activists and artists exiled in Botswana were exposed to a much broader world of liberation struggles from across the continent and the world. ‘The whole of southern Africa was gripped in liberation struggles – Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, and so on’, founding Medu member Wally Serote explains. ‘And so, we extended our reach to those other countries which were also in struggle, and after we had discussed maybe for a year, we felt we should formalise the matter [of creating Medu] and anchor it’.14 It was in this context that the Medu Art Ensemble was born. Medu was divided into six creative units: theatre, graphic arts and design, publications and research, film, music, and photography. Led by an annually elected executive body, Medu’s stated aims, in its own words, included:

  1. training Botswana nationals and exiles in the above-mentioned skills,
  2. fostering an environment suitable for cultural work,
  3. creating closer relations between cultural workers and the community,
  4. establishing closer relations and practical cooperation amongst Southern African cultural workers.15

Medu established a number of programmes, especially practical workshops in various artistic areas for local and South African artists and students. In Botswana, it was also important to create a legitimate front for exiles to work, gain access to resources, and build bridges with local communities without deepening the tensions with the hosting government. For Serote, having different creative units was important in allowing Medu to create a reciprocal relationship that put the organisation ‘at the disposal of our people, so there was feedback for us, and we also fed back to the communities’.16

Breaking from the isolation imposed by the apartheid regime, exiled South Africans expanded their horizons both artistically and ideologically. ‘There were a lot of ideological teachings behind all this’, Langa recalls. ‘We were just learning about Amílcar Cabral’s Return to the Source and the primacy of culture in the struggle. We were meeting writers like Pepetela [and] understood how Angolans, under the leadership of [President] Agostinho Neto, were bringing [a] cultural impetus into their own struggle. There were also writers like Mário de Andrade from Brazil and Abdias do Nascimento, who was a Pan-Africanist’.17 In addition to building good relationships, securing resources, and expanding their ideological and creative exposure, Medu needed to be ‘anchored’, as Serote calls it, in a concrete political project.

Medu members Lulu Emmig and Thami Mnyele (seated at the table in the front, from left to right), and others attend a Woman’s Day function at the Swedish Embassy in Gaborone, Botswana, 1981. Credit: Sergio-Albio Gonzalez via Freedom Park

Medu members Lulu Emmig and Thami Mnyele (seated at the table in the front, from left to right) attend a Woman’s Day function at the Swedish Embassy in Gaborone, Botswana, 1981.
Credit: Sergio-Albio Gonzalez via Freedom Park

Medu Art Ensemble, Now You Have Touched the Women, You Have Struck a Rock, 1981.
Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

To Anchor Yourself

Sobashiy’abazali’ekhaya
Sophuma sangena kwamany’amazwe
Lapho kungazi khon’ubaba no mama
silandel’inkululeko

We will leave our parents at home
We go in and out of foreign countries
To places our fathers and mothers don’t know
Following freedom

Sobashiy’abazali (‘We Will Leave Our Parents’), a popular freedom song in the training camps.18

Although many of Medu’s core leaders were already members of the ANC and affiliated with its underground work, the organisation itself was not conceived as an official cultural front of the ANC. For founding members of Medu like Serote, to be anchored in a political project did not mean to be bound by the colonial borders of nation, race, or language, but to be at the service of the various national liberation struggles being waged. ‘Once you conceptualise a structure like we did in the context of southern Africa, it means that you are going to anchor yourself in FRELIMO [Mozambique Liberation Front], you’re going to educate yourself in [Namibia’s] SWAPO [South West Africa People’s Organisation], you’re going to act and call yourself a part of the Angolan liberation movement’.19 In order to be able to work across political divisions and attract a broad range of artists and activists, Medu established itself as a ‘non-aligned’ organisation, as Serote describes it, that was open to people from different backgrounds and political trajectories. For him, a guiding factor was that their ‘work was anchored in liberation struggles’.20

To produce cultural work while being anchored in a liberation struggle is not an easy task. Songs were composed, paintings painted, and poems written in extremely difficult conditions. Barry Gilder, a member of Medu’s music unit who is currently South Africa’s ambassador to Syria and Lebanon and worked closely with Serote, recalls their day-to-day life as cultural workers and political militants: ‘In between the clandestine meetings of the RPMC [Regional Politico-Military Council of the MK in Botswana], the highly secretive meetings with contacts at home, the extensive reading of reports from those contacts, the writing of voluminous reports to Lusaka, the dodging of the Botswana Special Branch, and the constant threat of apartheid death raids, Serote continued with his writing career’.21

With many of Medu’s more than sixty known members often working clandestinely, it is impossible to capture the breadth and depth of the organisation’s cultural production during its six years of existence.22 As is the case with any national liberation struggle, there is no single historical archive that makes Medu’s artefacts and cultural productions accessible to the public. One of its largest retrospectives, The Peoples Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster, was organised by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, featuring 130 of Medu’s artworks and artefacts, including 60 of its 90 known posters. Still, this history remains largely out of reach to South Africans engaged in social and political movements today and younger generations of cultural workers around the world. Nonetheless, what has been documented demonstrates an impressive range of creative experimentation and a high-quality body of work. Medu’s publications and research unit worked in conjunction with the other units to produce a newsletter filled with poetry, short stories, reviews of exhibitions, literary criticism, interviews, and political analyses by the organisation’s members and artists alongside thinkers from other countries. Revolutionary poems by Tố Hữu in Vietnam and essays by the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for instance, were interspersed with Medu’s writings, whose authors found themselves in the process of articulating their own practices and theories on the art of national liberation.

Among Medu’s most impressive achievements was the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, held from 5 to 9 July 1982. According to different accounts, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people attended the festival, with cultural workers arriving in the small city of Gaborone in cars and on buses while others hitchhiked or flew. Over these five days, both South Africans who were living in exile and ‘inziles’, those living their own ‘exiled’ existence within South Africa, along with people from Europe, the United States, and across southern Africa gathered at the University of Botswana to discuss the essential role of culture in accelerating the struggle for South African liberation, which was becoming more imminent each day. Wally Serote, Thami Mnyele, and Sergio-Albio González (a Medu member originally from Cuba) led the initial preparations for the conference, inviting a range of Batswana and South African organisations to join the planning process over the next two years.23

The Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, following a long lineage of conferences and festivals held in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, represented ‘the first significant opportunity in decades for South Africa-based and exiled South African artists to engage each other – directly, intensely – through papers, discussions, performances, and social interaction’, Barry Gilder recalls, having attended several conferences in exile held in the 1970s and 1980s.24 Though no formal declarations were made, the conference brought people together from across political, racial, social, and geographic divides to build towards a liberated South Africa. They not only talked about but created culture together during the festival, which gave birth to new formations of resistance. Amongst the most significant was the United Democratic Front, which was formed a year after the festival by many of its key participants and would mobilise the masses to deal a lethal blow to the apartheid system.

Eighty-seven cultural workers from diverse backgrounds contributed over 300 paintings, sculptures, and photographs to the Art Toward Social Development exhibition that accompanied the festival. These works embodied fear and despair, but also optimism and hopefulness.25 ‘It is this element of optimism and hopefulness’, Thami Mnyele said in his speech on the opening night, ‘which has brought us all together tonight; it is this indestructible and enduring spirit of struggle that nourishes our quest for social development and justice’.26

The festival included performances across artistic genres, such as the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s production of Marabi, a musical theatre piece that recovered the vibrant cultural life of the African working class and featured jazz music, dance parties, and beer-brewing in the shebeens (taverns that existed before forced removals began in the 1930s as part of urban segregation policies). There were also several musical performances featuring Hugh Masekela on the trumpet, Barry Gilder on the guitar, and Abdullah Ibrahim (known then as Dollar Brand) on the piano, who closed off his set with a melancholic melody of Tula Dubula, sung with a glimmer of hope:

There’s a new world a-coming,
falsehood will all be gone.
They’ll come a-marching
into town at dawn;
singing songs of freedom,
and laughing in the rain.
Gone will be this old world,
things won’t be the same.27

Though it is difficult to capture the spirit of the times, the cultural debates and experiments highlighted at the symposium and festival, and throughout Medu’s existence, remain relevant for cultural workers engaged in political struggles today. What follows is an attempt to distil some of the theories that emerged from Medu’s practices about the ideology, strategy, form, and content of revolutionary culture as well as the age-old tension between art and politics. Together, they point us towards a theory of art for national liberation.

The necessity of art. ‘The Necessity of Art for National Liberation’ was the title of the opening speech given by Medu member Dikobe wa Mogale Ben Martins at the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts. Its title references the classic book by the Austrian art historian Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (1959). For Fischer, the major task of art – specifically socialist art – is two-fold: ‘to lead the public towards a proper enjoyment of art, that is to say, to arouse and stimulate their understanding, and to emphasise the social responsibility of the artist’.28 In other words, the artist must help conscientise the people and has a social duty to do so. Similarly, for Dikobe wa Mogale, in a society of class and racial oppression, artists cannot hide behind ‘artistic neutrality’. If culture is indeed a weapon of struggle, then, he said, ‘art must teach people, in the most vivid and imaginative ways possible, to take control over their own experience and observations [and] how to link these with the struggle for liberation and a just society free of race, class, and exploitation’.29

This artistic responsibility was also emphasised in the writings of Thami Mnyele, a key Medu member who helped theorise the organisation’s work. Having grown up in the Alexandra township in northeast Johannesburg, Mnyele was angered by the oppression and underdevelopment inflicted upon black communities and by the sanitising selectiveness of ‘township art’ that galleries deemed palatable for white audiences and buyers. In a written exchange with Dikobe wa Mogale on ‘artistic neutrality’, Mnyele asked: ‘In the face of so much grief, suppression, and repression (homeless squatters, death sentences, war in Angola, starvation), how do we explain our works and daily activities or inactivities? What credibility do we deserve from the people?’.30 For Mnyele, credibility is earned by creating art that serves the people and that ‘clearly popularise[s] and give[s] dignity to the just thoughts and the deeds of the people. With our brushes and paints, we shall need to visualise the beauty of the country we would like our people to live in’.31 Art is necessary for building a future, socialist, society while providing the spiritual shelter for a people that are still in the process of liberating themselves.

No revolutionary soloist. Even with the social responsibility of the revolutionary artist established, the relationship between the individual artist and the collective is often tenuous in practice. Socialist artistic traditions reject the ideas of ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘artistic freedom’ inherited from nineteenth century Romanticism and liberalism, which centre the creativity, aspirations, and even protest of the individual over the collective. But during revolutionary times, which were brewing across southern Africa, the conflict between the individual and the collective heightens. Keorapetse William Kgositsile (or ‘Bra Willie’), a leading Medu member who later became South Africa’s first National Poet Laureate, reflected on this tension in his keynote speech at the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts. He began with an anecdote about a fellow South African writer who asked him how he ‘still manage[d] to write novels and poems’, suggesting that his active political engagement was at odds with his creative production. Kgositsile replied: ‘with a bit of acid on my tongue, I had always wondered how a South African writer could be outside the movement but hope to write anything of value or significance’.32 Affirming the fact that artistic production arises from concrete social relations, Kgositsile continued: ‘There is no such creature as a revolutionary soloist. We are all involved. The artist is both a participant and imaginative explorer in life. Outside of social life there is no culture, there is no art; and that is one of the major differences between [hu]man and beast’.33 As an antidote to the plague of individualism, Mnyele emphasised the importance of organisation and organising skills as one of the ‘most effective weapons against our problems’.34 An artist who is socially responsible is therefore an artist who is organised alongside the people, a part of – and not apart from – their movements.

To be understood. For art to fill its social function, it must be understood by the people. One of Mnyele’s diagnoses of contemporary South African artists was that their work was ‘acutely abstracted’, ‘lost to the mystical’, and plagued with ‘distortion’.35 In other words, their artwork confuses and distracts rather than clarifying and enabling its viewers to better understand the world around them. As a result, Mnyele explained, ‘the work has lost that essential quality of community, the immediacy of communication with the masses [to whom] the artist claims to address himself’.36

In the early 1980s, the trends that dominated the Western art world – to which liberation movements were not immune – were filled with abstraction, from the minimalist stainless steel sculptures of Jeff Koons to the pop art of Andy Warhol. This was no accident. Abstraction as an aesthetic style was even deployed by the Central Intelligence Agency to counter the Soviet tradition of socialist realism during the Cold War, a form of cultural warfare that continues today. In the 1950s, artists like Jackson Pollock, through his abstract ‘drip paintings’, were actively promoted internationally to represent the rugged individualism and anti-communism of United States culture.

‘The West was viciously anti-Soviet socialist realism and so how you made art in the context of a liberation movement was actually an issue’, Judy Seidman recalls, speaking of the ‘endless arguments’ about socialist realism that defined this period.37 It was common for artists of the time to criticise ‘posters of people with clenched fists [for being] socialist realist in the worst possible sense of the word’. She recalls what Mnyele used to say to the naysayers of the ‘fists and spears’ style of art: ‘When I go to meetings and I draw people with fists in the air, it’s because that’s what I’m seeing and that’s what I’m drawing’. To Seidman and Mnyele, it is neither possible nor responsible to exclude representations of the realities of the people in their art. Rather than adhering to a rigid style, Medu members aimed to make art that reflected the concrete realities of the people, with all their horrors, pain, and injustice, while at the same time instilling the confidence that these realities can be changed. In order to achieve both tasks, a work of art must be able to be understood by the people for whom it is made.

Towards socialist art. As a non-aligned, non-racial,38 and ideologically diverse organisation, Medu did not have a singular practice or theory around art. Through analysing some of their writings and debates, however, one could say that the group was moving towards a theory and practice of socialist art and towards restoring art to its social function, which capitalism and colonialism had destroyed. Medu members borrowed from different aesthetic and liberation traditions in order to break from the grip of the art galleries of the ruling class, which, according to Mnyele, were ‘not only the monopoly outposts and shrines of African art, but they even determine[d] what form and content the art should take’.39 So instead, they looked to socialist muralists like David Alfaro Siqueiros and Frida Kahlo in Mexico and to Marxist cultural theorists like Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Fischer. For instance, Fischer’s formulation of socialist art as that which ‘anticipates the future’ with the past ‘woven into its fabric’ is echoed in Mnyele’s own historical and materialist understanding of the development of art and aesthetics.40

Medu’s members were inspired by communist artists around the world, from the songs of the Chilean musician Victor Jara to the poetry of Vietnamese writer Tố Hữu. They learned from the cultural thinking of national liberation struggles of the Marxist tradition, like that of Amílcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Mao Zedong, whose theories and practices they adapted to their own realities. Serote recalls, for instance, that ‘There was a lot of influence, especially from Mao. We read a lot about that and we also discussed it and always asked ourselves, “how do we ensure that the two interact and influence each other, and what [do] we get from China and what we want to do in southern Africa and South Africa?”’.41

The path towards socialist art can be understood more as an outlook, a method, and an attitude, rather than a monolithic style, and in many ways, this is the orientation that Medu upheld and attempted to articulate as revolutionary processes unfolded. Given Medu’s tragic and premature end, it is impossible, of course, to predict where those practical and theoretical innovations might have taken them.

Actors rehearse Marumo by playwright Mandla Langa at the Gaborone Town Hall in Gaborone, Botswana, 1979. Credit: Sergio-Albio Gonzalez via Freedom Park

Actors rehearse Marumo by playwright Mandla Langa at the Gaborone Town Hall in Gaborone, Botswana, 1979.
Credit: Sergio-Albio Gonzalez via Freedom Park

December 16 – Heroes Day, 1983. Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

Medu Art Ensemble, December 16 – Heroes Day, 1983.
Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

My Blood Will Nourish the Tree Which Will Bear the Fruits of Freedom

Didn’t you hear him today
Even right now
Sing his poem of love
Write an epitaph of love
With LIFE
‘My blood will nourish the tree
Which will bear the fruits of freedom’…

Yes for him too with LIFE
We must reach freedom’s rich estates…
Marching
To the unbroken rhythm
Of surging dancing spears

– Lindiwe Mabuza, ‘Epitaph of Love’ (in memory of Solomon Mahlangu, executed in 1979).42

On the evening of 13 June 1985, a truck carrying sixty-three men from the South African Defence Force and an arsenal of rifles, 9mm pistols, stun grenades, gas masks, and more crossed the border into Botswana. Some sixty other tanks and armoured vehicles were on standby.

It was 1:15am when a team of eight men arrived at Thami Mnyele’s house. He was still awake. Within minutes, his entire house, his artwork, and Mnyele himself had been sprayed with bullets. He died trying to climb the fence next to a thorn tree while his pens laid uncapped, ink freshly spilt. Perhaps his last act in life was painting those very thorns, which he often did to show not only the beauty but also the pain and violence of this world.43

Michael Frank Hamlyn. Cecil George Phahle. Lindiwe Phahle. Joseph Malaza. Themba Duke Machobane. Dick Mtsweni. Basil Zondi. Ahmed Geer. Gladys Kesupile. Eugenia Kolobewere. Six-year-old Peter Masoke.44 These are the twelve people – two of them Medu members – who were identified as victims of the raids conducted that night by the South African Defence Force Special Forces in the sovereign territory of Botswana, while others who had gotten wind of a possible attack narrowly escaped. Some surviving Medu members and activists stayed in Botswana after the murders while others were deployed elsewhere to continue their political and artistic work. Nonetheless, this operation marked the end of the Medu Art Ensemble. In 2002, seventeen years after the raid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission argued that the cross-border action was not within their area of competence, and the only men who were tried were those who collated information on the targets. They were granted amnesty. Today, even further removed from the times and conditions that produced Medu, what can and should be recovered from this history for those engaged in struggles and cultural work?

Mandla Langa reflects on Medu’s ideological clarity during the South African liberation struggle and how the concept of nation and the Marxist analysis of class helped frame their understanding of who the oppressed in South Africa were. ‘Unfortunately, today, everything has been muddled up’. He compares South Africa’s young democracy to ‘an older adolescent’ with ‘hormonal impurities’ that require ‘a lot of unlearning’ to get on the right path.45 Along the same lines, Barry Gilder points to the importance of preserving history in the process of transitioning to state power: ‘We had a fear, a sensitivity about our history, our cultural history, our songs, and so on. Fear of offending those that we reconciled with’.46 To him, the process of reconciliation was also a process of forgetting critical and hard-earned lessons that came from revolutionary struggle, including in the realm of culture. Similarly, Serote laments the loss of internationalist cultural exchanges since the liberation period: ‘I can’t remember when last I read a novel from China… We have a lot of literature like that in our bookshops from [the United States of] America, Europe, and so on, but not from Vietnam, not from China, not from Cuba. There’s something wrong’.47

There is no doubt that South Africa’s transition to democracy did not deliver the liberation to the majority of its people that so many fought and died for, that its process of national liberation is incomplete. The Freedom Charter is far from being realised, and South Africa remains an extremely divided and unequal society in which the top, mostly white, 10 per cent of the population own 85 per cent of the country’s aggregate wealth.48 The process of national liberation does not end with the formal transfer of power from colonial hands, nor with the fall of an apartheid regime. Class society does not disappear overnight in a socialist project, and imperialism does not sit idly by as nations and peoples attempt to chart a sovereign path. Rather, liberation continues to be a process, and a struggle, that must be fashioned by and with the people continuously.

Medu members Tim Williams, Wally Serote, and Sergio-Albio Gonzalez print the poster ‘Unity Is Power’ in Gaborone, Botswana, 1979.
Credit: Teresa Devant via Freedom Park

Organisers prepare for the first session of the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, Gaborone, Botswana, 1982. Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

Medu Art Ensemble, Unity Is Power, 1979.
Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

Opening the Future

A poster. Dozens gather in a conference hall in the Diakonia Council of Churches in Durban, South Africa. It is October 2020, at the height of the global pandemic, and Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) is organising this and other events to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary. Since its founding in 2005, AbM has built a democratic self-organised movement of the poor and dispossessed in South Africa, occupying land, securing housing, producing food, and politically educating its 100,000 members. A large, centrally placed banner reads: ‘Fifteen years of our revolutionary struggle for land, housing, and dignity’. Below it are posters by artists and activists from around the world, from Cuba to India, Venezuela to Lebanon, Brazil to Indonesia. This artwork is part of the four-part series of Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions, jointly organised by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle.49 For the celebration, AbM members selected from the more than 200 posters that bear witness to peoples’ struggles internationally, which resonate with their own realities on the ground. Amongst them is a hand-drawn portrait honouring Thuli Ndlovu, AbM’s chairperson in KwaNdengezi and one of the twenty-five leaders who have been assassinated since the movement’s founding.50 Above it is a poster that Medu’s own Judy Seidman produced for the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions, which travelled around the world and the internet before landing on these walls in Durban. The poster reads, ‘Capitalism kills, but we shall rise’.

In Kgositsile’s speech at the 1982 Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, he said: ‘Our artists have over the years struggled along with the people, sensitised to and expressing the feelings, sufferings, hopes, failures and achievements in our struggle for national liberation’.51 Writing about the story of Medu and the southern African liberation struggles today is not a nostalgic endeavour. This attempt aspires, as Fanon wrote, ‘to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’.52 Art, therefore, has the capacity to capture both our collective victories and defeats, including the story of the Medu Art Ensemble, and turn them into a mobilising force for the struggles of today and those yet to come. In fact, the artist has a responsibility to do so.


Organisers prepare for the first session of the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, Gaborone, Botswana, 1982. Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

Organisers prepare for the first session of the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, Gaborone, Botswana, 1982.
Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

Posters displayed on the walls at Abahlali baseMjondolo’s fifteenth anniversary celebration at the Diakonia Conference Centre in Durban, South Africa, 2020. Top: Judy Seidman, Capitalism Kills, but We Shall Rise, 2020. Bottom: Pan Africanism Today, Thuli Ndlovu, 29 September – Day of Remembrance, 2020. Credit: Abahlali baseMjondolo

Posters displayed on the walls at Abahlali baseMjondolo’s fifteenth anniversary celebration
at the Diakonia Conference Centre in Durban, South Africa, 2020.
Top: Judy Seidman, Capitalism Kills, but We Shall Rise, 2020.
Bottom: Pan Africanism Today, Thuli Ndlovu, 29 September – Day of Remembrance, 2020.
Credit: Abahlali baseMjondolo

Notes

1 Shirli Gilbert, ‘Singing against Apartheid: ANC Cultural Groups and the International Anti-Apartheid Struggle’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 2 (June 2007): 434.

2 Gwen Ansell (freelance arts writer and researcher), interview by Tings Chak, Johannesburg, South Africa, 11 October 2019.

3 Mandla Langa (Director of the Contemporary African Music and Arts organisation), Zoom interview by Tings Chak, 15 July 2020. For more on the history of Cuban posters, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Art of the Revolution will be Internationalist, dossier no. 15, 8 April 2019, https://thetricontinental.org/the-art-of-the-revolution-will-be-internationalist/.

4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 180. For more on Fanon, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Frantz Fanon: The Brightness of Metal, dossier no. 26, 2 March 2020.

5 Thami Mnyele, ‘Observations on the State of the Contemporary Visual Arts in South Africa’, in Thami Mnyele + Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective, eds. Clive Kellner and Sergio-Albio González (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009), 27.

6 Bheki Langa, ‘Isandlwana Incarnate’, Medu Art Ensemble Newsletter 5, no. 1 (1984): 28, Judy Seidman’s private collection.

7 Judy Seidman, ‘Mayibuye iAfrika: Thoughts on Subterranean Archives; The Untold Story of South Africa’s Art in Africa’, keynote address given to CFP: Conference on Recovering Subterranean Archives, Stellenbosch University, 17–18 January 2019, unpublished, Judy Seidman’s private collection.

8 Sekou Touré, ‘The Political Leader Considered as the Representative of a Culture’, paper presented at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Rome, 1959, quoted in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 206.

9 For more on the early period of the Communist Party of South Africa and the resistance movement after its banning, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Josie Mpama, Studies on Feminisms no. 5, 21 March 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/20230315_Josie-Mpama-Web.pdf.

10 ‘Freedom Charter’, Department of Education, Government of South Africa, 2005, https://www.dffe.gov.za/sites/default/files/docs/publications/history_freedomcharter.pdf, 12–13.

11 For more on the history of mid-century politics and the Black Consciousness Movement, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Black Community Programmes: The Practical Manifestation of Black Consciousness Philosophy, dossier no. 44, 10 September 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-black-community-programmes/.

12 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The 1973 Durban Strikes: Building Popular Democratic Power in South Africa, dossier no. 60, 24 January 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-1973-durban-strikes/ and ‘Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life’, newsletter no. 37, 12 September 2019, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/strikes-have-followed-me-all-my-life-the-thirty-seventh-newsletter-2019/.

13 Langa, interview by Tings Chak.

14 Mongane Wally Serote (National Poet Laureate and chief executive officer of the Freedom Park Trust), Zoom interview by Tings Chak, 14 September 2023.

15 ‘A Brief Description of Medu Art Ensemble’, in Thami Mnyele + Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective, eds. Clive Kellner and Sergio-Albio González (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009), 77–78.

16 Serote, interview by Tings Chak.

17 Langa, interview by Tings Chak.

18 Gilbert, ‘Singing Against Apartheid’, 433.

19 Serote, interview by Tings Chak.

20 Serote, interview by Tings Chak.

21 Barry Gilder, ‘Of Activist Writers and Cultural Conferences in Exile: Political, Literary, and Personal Implications’, in Mintirho ya Vulavula: Arts, National Identities, and Democracy, eds. Innocentia J. Mhlambi and Sandile Ngidi, (Johannesburg: Mapungubwe Institute, 2021), 174.

22 Antawan I. Byrd and Felicia Mings, eds., The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster 1979–1985 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020), 136.

23 Clive Kellner and Sergio-Albio González, eds., Thami Mnyele + Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009), 158.

24 Gilder, ‘Of Activist Writers’, 162.

25 Kellner and González, Thami Mnyele, 186.

26 Thami Mnyele, Opening Remarks 1982 South African Exhibition, July 1982, unpublished paper, Judy Seidman’s private collection.

27 Abdullah Ibrahim, ‘Tula Dubula’, Antiwar Songs, accessed 30 September 2023, https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=en&id=42294.

28 Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), 210.

29 Dikobe wa Mogale Ben Martins, ‘The Necessity of a National Art for Liberation’, speech delivered at the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, 5 July 1982, unpublished, Judy Seidman’s private collection.

30 Thami Mnyele, ‘Art Can Never Be Neutral’, paper written on 23 September 1981, unpublished, Judy Seidman’s private collection.

31 Mnyele, ‘Observations’, 27.

32 Keorapetse William Kgositsile, ‘Culture and Resistance in South Africa’, Medu Art Ensemble Newsletter 5, no. 1 (1984): 23, Judy Seidman’s private collection.

33 Kgositsile, ‘Culture and Resistance’, 29–30.

34 Mnyele, ‘Observations’, 26.

35 Mnyele, ‘Observations’, 25.

36 Mnyele, ‘Observations’, 25.

37 Judy Seidman (cultural worker and visual artist), interview by Tings Chak, Johannesburg, South Africa, 8 June 2020.

38Non-racialism is a prominent ideology and political tradition in South Africa that was born out of opposition to the racialised system of apartheid. The term is enshrined as a founding value in chapter one of the Constitution of South Africa, although its precise meaning is contested by different political forces. The Communist Party of South Africa was a leading organisation of non-racial politics, whilst, for example, the ANC reserved its membership exclusively for Africans up until 1969. See Imraan Buccus, ‘The Dangerous Collapse of Non-Racialism’, New Frame, 30 July 2021.

39 Mnyele, ‘Observations’, 25.

40 Fischer, The Necessity of Art, 111.

41 Serote, interview by Tings Chak.

42 Lindiwe Mabuza, ‘Epitaph of Love’, Medu Art Ensemble Newsletter 5, no. 1 (1984): 27, Judy Seidman’s private collection.

43 Diana Wylie, Art and Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, South African Artist (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 201–202.

44 Kellner and González, Thami Mnyele, 192.

45 Langa, interview by Tings Chak.

46 Barry Gilder (South Africa’s ambassador to Syria and Lebanon), Zoom interview by Tings Chak, 8 August 2023.

47 Langa, interview by Tings Chak.

48 ‘Wealth Distribution in South Africa’, World Inequality Database, 16 April 2020, https://wid.world/es/news-article/how-unequal-is-the-wealth-distribution-in-south-africa-4/#:~:text=Key%20results,bottom%2090%20%25%20as%20a%20whole.

49 Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions, International Week of Anti-Imperialist Action and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, July–December 2020, https://antiimperialistweek.org/en/posters/.

50 For more on this history, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘The Politic of Blood’: Political Repression in South Africa, dossier no. 31, 4 August 2020, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-31-political-repression-in-south-africa/.

51 Kgositsile, ‘Culture and Resistance’, 29.

52 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 232.

The art in this dossier uplifts icons of left political traditions within Latin America’s new progressive wave: the flag, symbolising justice; the sickle, symbolising agrarian reform; the monument that celebrates people’s history rather than a colonial past; the hammer for the unity of workers; and the red star of internationalism. These symbols, depicted using tarot-like iconography that draws from the imagery of Latin American and Caribbean artists and movements, directly contest the icons of the emerging fascist and right-wing movements in the region (featured in the images of dossier no. 47, New Clothes, Old Threads). In dossier no. 70, What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin America?, we present a second set of cards that amplify the aspirations and cultural richness on the continent and point toward a desired future for its peoples.

Foreword

Over the last centuries, both the countries wrongly called ‘underdeveloped’ and those regarded as ‘developing’ have been victims of Western powers’ systematic policy to intervene in their internal affairs in order to ensure the usurpation of their resources. With varying degrees of intensity, intervention has been a permanent variable that has severely limited these countries’ autonomy to pursue decolonisation processes and has prevented them from seeking development alternatives that break with the dispossession and abuse at the hands of those who believe themselves to be the owners of the world.

In periods when transnational capital’s rate of profit has increased, intervention is carried out with low intensity, and a degree of liberal democracy is allowed to function. Western powers determine the extent to which this is permitted and impose the ever-present limits that prevent people from putting their resources at the service of their own development. When the people try to use their resources in this way, the intensity of neocolonial intervention increases to distort the course of history once again in the Western powers’ favour, even at the cost of trampling on the rules that they themselves defend when times are good.

Periods when transnational capital’s rate of profit decreases usually coincide with an increase in the influence of the left and the forces that fight for the emancipation of peoples across the world, a dynamic that is most often the result of the exacerbation of inequalities and abuses of the ruling classes. In these periods, intervention usually increases in intensity, promoting the destabilisation of governments that are not subordinated to the Western powers’ interests. This takes place through coups and the promotion of a far-right discourse that is focused on extremely conservative values and promotes the hatred of anyone different, which is expressed in nationalist and anti-immigration content and discourse that is focused on order, security, and the right to property that only those promoting this discourse enjoy.

In recent decades, alongside traditional coups we have seen the use of hegemonic media and judicial systems to persecute and imprison indigenous and left-wing leaders who might otherwise threaten the empire’s hegemonic interests. This has resulted in judicial coups and character defamation on numerous occasions, with devastating effects for the world’s democracies.

Dossier no. 70, What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin America?, delves into how the processes described above have unfolded in recent decades in Latin America following the end of the US-imposed dictatorships across much of the continent, which sought to appropriate the resources of a continent that the US has considered as its own since the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. This dossier provides a general overview of the rise, fall, and resurgence of what have been called the progressive waves of Latin America, which arose in a context marked by the disappearance and failure of the Soviet experience and the near-complete lack of a concrete horizon of transformation that would allow people to envision definitively overcoming capitalism and its current expression, neoliberalism.

It is clear, nonetheless, that neoliberal capitalism is absolutely incompatible with democracy, since maintaining the rate of profit for transnational capital can only make the lives of the majority even more precarious, sharpening the contradiction between capital and labour and accelerating the destruction of the planet with its constant refusal to take seriously the environmental and social crisis that this system has put us in.

There is a key role, then, then, for the left to play. The increasing influence of far-right discourse can be explained, in part, by the left becoming distant from its own people and by its own government programmes, which, though they have distributed the wealth generated by capitalism with greater equity in successive progressive waves, have not managed to transform the productive base or resolve, in a sustained manner, either the essential problems of the people or the ecosystems of which we are an inseparable part.

The political centre, whether in its centre-left or centre-right variants, which is sanctioned – at least formally – by the majority of the population, has been alternating in governments around the world for decades without resolving the most pressing issues of the people. This has led to a precipitous fall in support for these projects around the globe.

This collapse has given way to the resurgence of highly combative discourse among right-wing forces that is even more extreme than in the era of fascism almost a century ago. This discourse is focused on promoting unrestricted ‘freedom’, hatred towards anyone different, and the rolling back of certain values, which has allowed these right-wing forces to resonate with the discontent, indignation, and disillusionment spreading among the most vulnerable sectors of the working class.

Meanwhile, on the left, which remains fragmented between political parties and social movements, rebellious and truly transformative discourse has almost disappeared, and struggles to humanise capitalism have become widespread. This leaves behind the main contradiction between capital and labour as the left mainly opts to take action in the political superstructures of capitalism in the absence of a concrete horizon to overcome it.

As if this were not enough, the right wing of the world is united and coordinated in defending and promoting its interests, while the left is divided and engaged in internal squabbles without any ability to recognise the enemy in each of its societies.

Reconstructing a concrete horizon – socialism – and building the unity of the left are key challenges in identifying and addressing the dilemmas we face. In order to do this, we must break from the language of our oppressors and create one that is truly emancipatory. Integration and coordination are no longer enough. A true understanding of what Karl Marx called the material unity of the world is essential to achieving the total unity of peoples and joint action across the planet.


Introduction

When Hugo Chávez won the Venezuelan presidential elections for the first time in 1999, a new and profound chapter began in the history of that country and of the Latin American and Caribbean region. In the twenty-five years since, numerous popular mobilisations in defence of natural resources and against neoliberal governments and platforms, such as the World Social Forum, led to uprisings among the people of Latin America, which were transformed into electoral victories for progressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, among others. More than an epoch of change, the scenario came to be defined as a ‘change of epoch’ whose impacts went beyond the limits of the American continent and inspired the left around the world.

The rise of anti-neoliberal struggles and different popular projects’ access to political power coincided with a deep crisis in the United States’ control over the region. The new century that was emerging marked the failure of the neo-conservative strategy that lay at the core of US power. With the reorientation of its foreign policy, the US directed its imperialist energies towards the Middle East and embarked on its failed wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. In this context, the people of Latin America enjoyed greater levels of freedom to drive forward a continent-wide anti-imperialist strategy. Though the US government registered a certain level of concern about the anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal advance in the region, it was unable to stop it. The defeat of the 2002 coup against President Chávez in Venezuela, in which the president was able to return to his post following three days of massive popular uprisings during the time of his kidnapping from 11–13 April, and the fight against the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 2005 constituted two key milestones in this change of epoch, as Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader reminds us in his book The New Mole.

This combination of factors impeded the advance of a neoliberal agenda and led to a period defined by social achievements and protections for workers: the leadership of historically sidelined and exploited sectors, the people’s increased participation in the government, and a deepened independence and sovereignty of countries across the region, with the strengthening of existing regional institutions such as the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the formation of new ones such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The most radical sector of this movement built the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), a continent-wide platform founded by Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez that promotes the twin goals of sovereignty and regional integration.

The duration of this progressive wave, often referred to as the ‘pink tide’, varied in countries across the region. Though the emergence of China as a global power, the formation of other platforms to strengthen the Global South, and the weakening of US hegemony accelerated this rise, the 2008 financial crisis contributed to its decline and provided the conditions for a US counter-offensive against a rebellious continent. This US counter-offensive, which employed a range of tactics, manifested in a series of coups across the region including in Haiti (2004), Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), Brazil (2016), and Bolivia (2019), as well as attempted coups in Ecuador (2010) and Venezuela (2019). At the same time, the US led a hybrid war against Venezuela while the right and the far right enjoyed electoral victories in a number of countries in the region.1 This shift, which defined the 2010s, was a response to the global financial crisis, which drove US capital and imperialism to seek to control strategic natural resources, intensify their exploitation of the workforce, and reduce social rights. The ultraliberal project – i.e., accumulation through the increased plundering of nature and super-exploitation of labour – was also unable to proffer any solutions, and the shift to the right only increased the contradiction between capital and labour with direct attacks on the most vulnerable populations.

The popular dissatisfaction generated during this period soon led to protests and the electoral defeats of these neo-fascist projects (such as of Jair Bolsonaro in 2022). Furthermore, a decisive role was played by women and indigenous, black, and LGBTQIA+ people in this historic period, evidenced, for instance, by feminist movements such as Ele Não (‘Not Him’) in Brazil and Ni una menos (‘Not One Less’) in Argentina that resisted the advance of the far right. This tendency was also reflected in the electoral victories of the progressive leaders Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico (2018), Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina (2019), Luís Arce in Bolivia (2020), Pedro Castillo in Peru (2021), Gabriel Boric in Chile (2021), Gustavo Petro in Colombia (2022), and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil (2022).

However, today’s progressive new wave faces a different reality than the progressive wave that began with the presidency of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1999. On the one hand, there is a profound crisis of civilisation that encompasses financial, social, environmental, and political crises and a coordinated offensive by the global right; on the other hand, the world is becoming increasingly multipolar. The challenges, limits, and contradictions present in this disputed continent are the focus of this dossier, which was prepared by the Brazil and Argentina offices of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research in the hope that these reflections on current affairs in Latin America and Caribbean can inform popular movements and regional groupings, such as the Continental Platform of Social and People’s Movements (ALBA Movimientos) and the International People’s Assembly.


 The Dilemma facing the New Progressive Wave

In August 2023, for the first time in fourteen years, the heads of state of the eight countries that share the Amazon met in Belém (the capital of Pará, the state in Brazil most affected by deforestation and wildcat mining). The main topic discussed at the Amazon Summit was the need to avoid the ‘point of no return’ beyond which the Amazon rainforest biome will lose its capacity to regenerate and will begin to transform, irreversibly, into a savannah. Though the event was successful in terms of President Lula da Silva’s strategy to reposition Brazil as a leader in regional and global diplomacy and an unofficial spokesperson for emerging countries, the summit’s final communiqué was criticised for containing many wishes but few concrete proposals, a result of the lack of consensus on this issue in the region.

Even though President Lula emphasised the fight against the climate catastrophe during his speech at the summit, he nonetheless advocated for oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River, a posture that was subsequently criticised by President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who advocated for an end to oil, coal, and gas extraction in the Amazon region. The disagreement between the two reflects a strategic and complex question: what does the future hold for the countries of Latin America, and the periphery of capitalism, in the current geopolitical context and the financial and environmental crisis? Considering the deindustrialisation of industrial parks that the region has experienced during the neoliberal period, the outdated technology in what remains of this structure, and the exodus of the production of knowledge and high technology in the international division of labour, how can Latin America develop, position itself as a sovereign territory, and escape the colonialist trap of being a mere exporter of raw materials?

Though the structural crisis of the capitalist system has deepened since 2008, this does not mean that this system is nearing its end nor that it is on the verge of self-destruction, but rather that capitalism is incapable of resolving the crisis that it has generated on its own terms.2 This is especially true in its ultra-financialised phase. It is well known that many of the social policies of the first pink tide resulted, in part, from the global economic growth experienced at the beginning of this century, which boosted demand for agricultural, hydrocarbon, and mineral commodities. However, since the 2008 financial crisis, attempts to recover the losses experienced at the centre of the capitalist system in the Global North have only increased the super-exploitation of labour, old and new contractual forms such as ‘uberisation’, and the destruction of nature. The crisis also boosted the United States’ counter-offensive to regain political control of the region and, consequently, of its natural resources. The case of Brazil is quite illustrative: within a few months of the parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, measures were implemented that greatly weakened labour laws and redirected oil extraction profits from social funds to foreign shareholders of the state-owned Brazilian oil giant Petrobras.

According to Brazilian professor José Luís Fiori, as the US recognises that its national values are not universal, it turns to its ‘national interests’ as its only compass and, to maintain what it refers to as its ‘position of strength’, it admits that its economic prosperity, as well as its currency and finances, are a fundamental instrument of its struggle for international power.3 In Fiori’s interpretation, the US has given up on offering the countries that see it as a model any hope of a pathway to the future. Nowadays, unlike during the Cold War – when the US proffered a world of democracy and economic prosperity for those who joined the capitalist bloc – it only offers recognition of its global power, reinforced by its military empire and technological competition. As US economic control declines, it turns with ferocity to its military power to sustain its domination of the world. For the United States, projecting the idea that there is no other possible future is central, which, as we will see, is reflected in the discourse of the Latin American far right.

China’s emergence as a global power is another fundamental factor that has triggered this new US offensive. Today, China is the main trading partner of nine Latin American countries. In 2021, imports and exports between China and Latin America reached US$247 billion – US$73 billion more than imports and exports between the United States and Latin America (excluding Mexico).4 According to the World Economic Forum, trade flows between Latin America and the Caribbean and China will double by 2035.5 China’s policy differs significantly from US aggression, though the country’s strategy towards the region is nonetheless quite pragmatic, and automatic alignment with China is no guarantee of an alternative for the continent.6 As the Argentine researcher Claudio Katz writes:

Beijing is well aware of Washington’s great sensitivity to any foreign presence in a territory it considers its own. For this reason, it is especially cautious in this region and avoids interference in the political sphere, limiting itself to advancing its interests through fruitful business relations. Its only extra-economic demand involves its own interests in reaffirming the ‘one-China principle’ in the face of ruptures with Taiwan. China does not act as an imperialist dominator, nor does it favour Latin America.7

Lastly, environmental issues can no longer be neglected. The more frequent the disasters caused by the climate catastrophe, the more inoperative and innocuous the communiqués of the diplomatic forums that are supposed to be acting on the Kyoto and Paris agreements. As Vijay Prashad, director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, explains, the shift away from carbon-based fuel has been stalled by three main obstacles: right-wing forces that deny the existence of climate change; sections of the energy industry that have a vested interest in carbon-based fuel; and Western countries’ refusal both to admit that they remain principally responsible for the climate catastrophe and to commit to repaying their climate debt by financing the energy transition in developing countries whose wealth they instead continue to siphon off.8

It is in the midst of this scenario that the new wave of progressive leaders has emerged, though it is more fragmented than during the previous one. In the first wave, there were two markedly distinct groups of progressive leaders: one led by Brazil’s Lula and Argentina’s Néstor and Cristina Kirchner that emphasised structures such as UNASUR and CELAC and one emanating from Venezuela and Cuba that focused its attention on the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA). These two groups were not in competition but rather complemented each other, despite differing in their methods, the velocity and scope of their policies, and their positioning vis-à-vis the United States. The new wave has yet to form any projects at a continental or regional level, even several such projects already exist; instead, what we are seeing are individual or bilateral developments that do not have the strength of scale necessary. As Katz pointed out, this lack of a large-scale project has held back the creation of a project that can resist the United States or develop a sovereign alternative.9 In the words of professor and former Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera:

We are, therefore, faced with a paradoxical fact that characterises the world: neoliberalism does not propose a long-term plan that is not simply a violent and melancholic return to the structures of the past, nor does progressivism present a horizon that has the capacity to overcome the difficulties that emerged from the pandemic and the economic and environmental crisis. Thus, we find ourselves in a moment of collective stupor, of a certain paralysis, in which time seems to be suspended.10

Internal Contradictions

A striking characteristic of the new progressive wave is that it operates alongside a strengthened right wing that exhibits neofascist traits that are reminiscent of but even more ideologically radicalised and politically violent than the old right wing. This new right continues to deploy instruments of destabilisation against leftist leaders, such as lawfare, which uses legal mechanisms to drive an agenda against a target or perceived enemy.11 Colombia’s President Petro is a current target of this strategy, preceded in recent years by the lawfare deployed against Argentina’s Vice President Cristina Kirchner, Brazil’s President Lula, and Ecuador’s former President Correa.

In the case of Peru, the right was not defeated politically or ideologically despite the electoral victory of Pedro Castillo in June 2021. The election of Castillo as a leader of the left coalition who ran a campaign based on a left-wing discourse awakened hope in Peru and a large part of the Latin American left. However, it soon became difficult for him to govern as he found himself embroiled in internal contradictions that led to his removal from office a year and a half after being elected.12

A particularly emblematic case of right-wing radicalisation in the region in recent years was the coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2019, which combined a traditional military coup with fascist methods such as the organisation of urban combat groups; the invasion and burning of the headquarters of grassroots and left-wing organisations; public humiliation, murders, kidnappings, and death threats against political leaders and their relatives; and street mobilisations of urban sectors in areas dominated by the right. More recently, the murder of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in August 2023 in the midst of the electoral process in Ecuador makes it clear that, to some extent, instability remains endemic in Latin America.13

In the wake of the radicalisation of the right, Latin American politics have become increasingly militarised, with the re-emergence of military coups and a rise in police and paramilitary violence. The death of left-wing leaders, which was already common in Colombia and Mexico, has spread to other countries. This trend reflects a return to the political-institutional challenge that seemed to have been overcome by the re-democratisation processes in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, during which civilians gained control of the armed forces and military personnel were held to account for the crimes they committed. In Brazil, there was an increase in political crimes committed by military forces during the government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) and his 2022 re-election campaign. These crimes – such has the military’s participation in the coup attempts during Lula’s inauguration at the end of that year and the beginning of 2023 – have yet to come before the courts. While the new progressive governments in the region have not overcome this dilemma, the active presence of military and paramilitary forces in politics has created an environment of fear that impedes the actions and advancement of left-wing forces and leaders.14

Thus, while the first wave of progressive governments was built based on the programmatic and moral defeat of the neoliberal right, the current political landscape has forced the newly elected progressive governments to prioritise the construction of pacification processes to the detriment of any ideological and programmatic offensive. One example of this is the government of President Gabriel Boric in Chile, which was elected at the end of 2021 when the popular uprisings against neoliberalism and the social malaise it has created were already in retreat. Boric and the left suffered successive setbacks in the following years, with the rejection of the proposal for a new constitution in a referendum and, subsequently, the 2023 elections of the new Constituent Council, tasked with drafting this constitution, in which the right wing won the majority of the seats. As a result of these elections, the extreme right, including those who have historically aligned with the dictator Augusto Pinochet, is poised to play a significant role in drafting the new Constitution.

As with the left, the main figureheads of the right no longer bear the same characteristics as those of the 2000s. If the old right prioritised its socioeconomic principles (defending the free market, monetary stability, commercial and financial openness, fiscal austerity, withdrawal of social rights, privatisations, and so on), today the far right prioritises conservative beliefs and values. This creates a stronger ideological pillar that is more difficult to break because it appeals to religious and moral themes that are rooted in popular culture. In addition to the traditional corruption agenda, the right has doubled down in mobilising to defend the heteronormative nuclear family structure, ‘Christian values’, and the right to bear arms as well as to combat abortion, what it refers to as ‘gender ideology’, and the rights of the LGBTQIA+ population. Using mass digital communication tools, the extreme right emphasises and leverages a postmodern discourse, questioning, relativising, and denying objective truths (such as the climate catastrophe). In doing so, it seeks to present itself as anti-system, all while defending capitalism in full force. This anti-system discourse focuses on the duties of the state, which leaves left-wing forces to defend the institutions and mechanisms of formal, and limited, bourgeois democracy.

The new right-wing offensive that focuses on religious and moral themes thus tends to put the left on the defensive, fearful of incisively opposing agendas in ways that could result in electoral backlash. The debate over the legalisation of abortion in Argentina, for instance, provided an object lesson in how difficult it is for a progressive government to garner mass support around ‘taboo’ topics. Even after abortion became legal in Argentina and was implemented as a public policy, this issue continues to be used to chip away at the popularity of President Alberto Fernández, who supported the measure.

An agenda built on religious and moral themes with no real sincerity about a public dialogue lends itself to exaggerations, manipulations, and fake news that can erode the popularity of progressive candidates and presidents. The sensationalist lies spread on social media alleging Lula’s intentions to close Brazilian churches if elected in 2022, for instance, are further evidence of this. At the same time, the right has used the escalated tensions around so-called family values to hinder the construction of a consensus about more ‘classical’ economic and social themes, such as combating inequality and hunger, distributing income, overcoming the country’s position of dependency in the global arena, and implementing agrarian reform.

This in no way means that the far-right agenda sees economic issues as secondary. On the contrary, as reflected by the rise of Javier Milei in Argentina, economic issues feed primarily on the discontent of the lower and declining middle class, as well as that of the elites, to advance an ultraliberal discourse. Projecting the prospect of a futureless society and lack of alternatives, the far right paints a picture in which it is only possible for entrepreneurs to compete if the so-called ‘obstacles’ placed in their way by the state are removed.

The new progressive wave that we are seeing today does not mean that the correlation of forces in the region is leaning towards the left: the right remains politically active and is competing for power, and, in many countries, it enjoys a parliamentary majority. In part, the left itself is responsible for not being able to change this reality, despite its opponents’ strength on the continent. Firstly, the organisations that are now coming to power in several Latin American countries no longer have the same characteristics as those in the previous wave. This is evidently linked to a general ideological degradation in a context in which geopolitical disputes present themselves much more as struggles for spheres of influence in the world than between antagonistic societal projects. Across the region, the anti-neoliberal political forces elected in the 2000s were, to a large extent, a continuation of the resistance to the dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 2010s, however, the left, faced with the neoliberal offensive, has limited its horizon of struggle and appears to be incapable of overcoming the bureaucratic perspective that to govern is merely to manage the state in a more progressive and humanitarian way.

In other words, the left today has shown itself to be incapable of achieving hegemony when it comes to a new societal project. The irrevocable defence of bourgeois democracy itself is a symptom that there is no prospect of rupture and revolution. This is reflected by the reluctance of certain left-wing leaders to support the current Venezuelan government, which they consider to be undemocratic – despite the fact that Venezuela, alongside Cuba, is one of the few examples of a country where the left has managed to face these crises without being defeated. This meek position and failure to commit to the fight against imperialism marks a significant setback.

This brings us to the debate of whether or not it is possible to overcome the neoliberal order and, therefore, if it is preferable to coexist with it. While in the previous political wave the left’s impulse was to defeat neoliberalism, the horizon now seems to go no further than an attempt to repeat previous experiences. However, the successful experiences of the past may be insufficient to face the most recent transformations of capital and the world of work. If twenty years ago there was talk of a ‘change of epoch’, today the left seeks little more than to create successful governments.

Nonetheless, it is true that Latin American governments have become increasingly aware of the global shift towards multipolarity. Though some of these countries have become closer with China and Russia in recent years, this rapprochement is more a product of pragmatic economic interests than a strategic construction, and very little is said about the importance of these new relationships in confronting US imperialism.

The almost total abandonment of the debate on people’s political participation in the region has been another significant setback. In the previous progressive wave, there was an effort to create new forms of participation that involved not only representative but also direct democracy. These changes took shape, for instance, in the constituent processes in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, in the creation of the Plurinational Republic of Bolivia, and in the emergence of people’s movements and platforms, collectives, and united fronts across the region. Today, however, little is said about the need to change how the region’s democracies function.

Thus, though the new wave of progressive governments in Latin America is significant, it does not have the same transformative tendencies as the previous wave and faces a number of significant barriers to realising this possibility. As Prashad explains:

Even the mildest centre-left governments will be forced to address the serious social crises in the hemisphere, crises deepened by the collapse of commodity prices and by the pandemic. Policies against hunger, for instance, will require funds either from the various domestic bourgeoisie or from the royalties raised for the extraction of natural resources. Either way, these governments will be forced into a clash with both their own bourgeoisie and US imperialism. The test of these governments, therefore, will not be merely in what they say about this or that issue (such as Ukraine), but how they act when faced with the refusal by the forces of capitalism to solve the major social crises of our time.15

Exiting the Labyrinth

The shifting geopolitical order has opened up an opportunity for Latin America. Even though bilateral agreements and specific treaties may, at first, appear more attractive or profitable for each country, taking advantage of this opportunity to further an agenda that centres the wellbeing of its people is only possible within the framework of a collective project that advances regional cooperation and sovereignty. Only by negotiating and acting as a bloc can Latin American countries achieve a lasting and influential position in relation to other continents and blocs.

In this sense, more than institutional structures, what Latin America lacks today is a common project of regional integration and global action. More than new forums and diplomatic spaces, it is necessary to move towards collective productive projects, be they shared infrastructure or technologies, especially when it comes to managing and preserving natural resources. The collective action of countries in the region to protect and manage commodities such as lithium and oil would make it possible to both secure adequate prices for these commodities and prevent corporations’ accelerated destruction of nature. Likewise, at the heart of this project there must be an energy transition that does not resort to dead-end market solutions such as the issuance of carbon bonds. This regional integration must also be financial and monetary. To achieve this, it is important to put into practice a series of measures such as cooperative and collective actions that prevent the global financial system from suffocating economies, as has been the case in Argentina and Venezuela. It is essential to build commercial and local development alternatives, such as cooperative actions by state development banks. There must be a common currency for transactions between the countries in the region.

Finally, a regional integration and transformation project cannot and should not be the work of governments; rather, such a project must take root in and be incorporated by the peoples of Latin America. This can only be achieved through mass organisation and mobilisation, common agendas, and shared spaces for the construction of struggles and political programmes by people’s organisations.


Notes

1 For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America and New Clothes, Old Threads.

2 For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social, The World in Economic Depression.

3 This perspective is particularly evident in National Security Strategy of the United States of America, prepared jointly by the Departments of State and Defence, the Pentagon, and the CIA with the Department of Commerce and the Treasury Secretariat of the US government in 2017. See also: Fiori, ‘A síndrome de Babel’; The White House, National Security Strategy, 3.

4 Jourdan, Aquino, and Spetalnick, ‘Exclusive’.

5 Zhang, ‘China’s Trade with Latin America’.

6 For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Looking Towards China.

7 Katz, Las Encrucijadas de América Latina, our translation.

8 Prashad, ‘Capitalism Created the Climate Catastrophe’.

9 Katz, Las Encrucijadas de América Latina, our translation.

10 Linera, La política como disputa de las esperanzas, 60, our translation.

11 For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social, Lula and the Battle for Democracy.

12 For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social, A Map of Latin America’s Present.

13 On 9 August 2023, Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated while leaving a rally at Anderson College in the city of Quito. The motive for the killing is still being investigated by the local authorities, but suspicions point to a criminal group linked to an Ecuadorian drug cartel.

14 For more on the active role of military and paramilitary forces in Latin American politics, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social, The Military’s Return to Brazilian Politics.

15 Prashad, ‘Latin America’s Fourth Left Wave’.

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