https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3979-4624
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ABSTRACT
With Russia’s attack on Ukraine the decline of the imperialist rule of the United States and its subordinate allies has accelerated, while the emergence of a multipolar world draws nearer. The author first describes how the structure, toolkit, inherent contradictions of imperialism, as well as the role of fascism, have altered in the last century, then explains the challenges imperialism faces today. This is followed by a discussion of the reasons for the Ukrainian war and the unhuman reactions of the North Atlantic powers. The author argues that only the defeat of imperialism and the emergence of a multipolar world will open the road to socialism at global level.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For example: “This is a reactionary imperialist war that we oppose” (In Defence of Marxism Citation2022) or an “inter-imperialist rivalry” (Tuğal Citation2022), Russia is “a middling capitalist-imperialist power” (Leupp Citation2022).
2 Lenin realized already in 1917 that “The imperialist war has immensely accelerated and intensified the process of transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism” (Lenin Citation1917).
3 Amin speaks about profiteers, who “are business people, not creative entrepreneurs. They derive their wealth from their connections with the established government and the system’s foreign masters, whether representatives of the imperialist states (the CIA in particular) or the oligopolies” (Amin Citation2019).
4 Amin (Citation2019) wrote: “. . . the local ruling classes of the peripheral capitalist countries, whether independent or colonies, were always subaltern ruling classes, though still connected to their countries, drawing profits from their insertion into globalized capitalism.”
5 As the outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) of the People’s Republic of China states:
We must ensure the principal position of the people, and work towards common prosperity. We must insist that our development is for the people and depends on the people, and that its fruits are shared by the people. We must safeguard the fundamental interests of the people, stimulate their enthusiasm, initiative, and creativity, promote social equity, improve people’s wellbeing, and constantly help realize people’s aspiration for a better life.
6 Friedman (Citation2014) holds “The single greatest American fear should not be China or al Qaeda. It is the amalgamation of the European Peninsula’s technology with Russia’s natural resources. That would create a power that could challenge American primacy.” See also Friedman (Citation2015).
7 Traynor (Citation2004) described how the American foundations like National Endowment for Democracy or George Soros’s Open Society had created turmoil in Serbia, Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine since 1990; Mackinnon (Citation2008) provided even more details about the links between the American foundations and the “democratic revolutions” of the post-soviet states; Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, outrightly admitted in 2014 that the United States had spent 5 billion dollars to subvert Ukraine (Nuland Citation2014); Igor Lapotanok and Oliver Stone (Citation2017) have made a documentary film about the 2014 events.
8 See https://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?page = search&query = ukraine&skip = 0&querysi = constitution&searchin = fulltext&sort = relevance, Accessed May 3, 2022.
9 The other four: Belarus, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Eritrea, and Syria.
10 Author’s own calculations based on the vote by country in the UN (Al Jazeera Citation2022), the population by country (UN Citation2022a) and the data on the sanctioning countries (Lichfield et al. Citation2022).
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Annamária Artner
Annamária Artner is a political economist, and senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economics of the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest, Hungary. Her main research interests are in the transformation of the world system, global capital accumulation, imperialism, labour markets and crises. She published many articles including “Samir Amin and the Changing of the World” (International Critical Thought, 2022), “Samir Amin and Eastern Europe” (Review of African Political Economy, 2021), “Planning and Social Change” (Critique, 2021), and “Can China Lead the Change of the World?” (Third World Quarterly, 2020).