Imperialism and Imperialist Wars Today

The following is the contribution of the CWPUSA to the discussion of the communist parties and organizations of the Americas on 4 May 2025

The communist movement of today remains mired in a decades-long crisis brought to an existential level following 1991. The workers of the world remain firmly under the boot of the capitalists while our revolutionary movement is hindered by ideological confusion down to the very foundations of our worldview. As a prerequisite to putting the communist movement back on firm footing is the clarification of elemental questions of our time. Paramount among these contentious questions is that of imperialism.

At the time of the Great War, the imperialist bloodletting that drove millions of workers to their deaths fighting each other on behalf of one group or another of bankers and industrialists, the question of imperialism presented a sharp divide amongst the parties of the Second International. Conceptions developed by Kautsky, Luxembourg, and Lenin led to bitter ideological struggles. As history played out, the theories of one camp were validated by the practice of revolution. Lenin’s theories of imperialism and the implications for the strategy of the proletarian revolution proved scientifically correct. The opportunists of then and today have devoted great effort hacking at Lenin’s theory with rubber knives—no wounds inflicted, but plenty of noise—none the wiser that history has already passed judgement.

As part of the effort to regroup the revolutionary forces internationally, clarification on the conception of imperialism is a cornerstone to building the unity and strength the workers’ movement requires. Our brief work here represents our contribution to that effort.

Definition and Characteristics of Imperialism

1 - Concentration of Production

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed their analysis of capitalism in an era of intense competition amongst emerging industrial capitals. Following centuries of primitive accumulation through means of “blood and fire” across the globe, the bourgeoisie in Europe initiated what we call today the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. For decades, the capitalists in new industries competed for dominance in their markets, battling each other out for the largest share of the spoils of exploitation. The needs of this competition led to ever larger capitals accumulating, concentrating, to squeeze out their competitors and crush small producers. Larger capitals are better able to compete as they assert control over greater parts of the production process. They can manage the price of their inputs on a greater scale, giving them an insurmountable advantage.

In this way, concentration of production in all sectors of the economy occurs over time in capitalism. By the very laws of “free” competition, concentration emerges. The large capitals formed monopolies—entities that control a significant or even all of the production in their sector (sometimes even multiple sectors). These great monopolies, capitals which play a dominant or leading role in their industry or even multiple industries. Giants such as AEG, Siemens, Standard Oil, US Steel dominated their fields of production on immense scales. Thus, monopolies are a new, emergent property that followed the era of “free” competition in capitalism. This concentration of production exacerbates the contradiction at the heart of capitalism: the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation. The concentration and monopolies birthed by competition drive the socialization of production of capitalism to atmospheric heights, notably in the realm of research and development. In this way, monopolies bring capitalism to the brink of its historical utility.

2 - Domination of Finance Capital

At this time also emerged banking monopolies in the major capitalist states: notable examples include Deutsche Bank in Germany, Barclays in the UK, Paribas in France, and J.P. Morgan in the United States. These mammoths of finance rose to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, following a path of consolidation similar to that of the industrial monopolies.

Having undergone a process of centralization, gobbling up smaller banks and financial houses, these institutions advanced beyond their traditional role as lenders. Through the acquisition of shares and permanent entanglement in industrial operations, they became the owners of capital itself, wielding influence not only through credit but through direct control of corporate policy and operations via interlocking directorates (Boards of Directors) and shareholding structures (acquisition of shares). They were no longer external to industry, they had developed into the nerve centers of the capitalist system.

This fusion of banking and industrial capital marks the rise of what Lenin called finance capital: capital in its highest form, concentrated, abstracted, and capable of coordinating the movement of entire sections of national economies. Under finance capital, the separation between the ownership and application of capital reaches its apex. Industrial capital, concerned with the mechanics of production, increasingly falls under the direction of finance capital, which governs with the sole aim of expanding accumulation. This is no longer the “free” competition of Marx and Engels’ days, it is competition between giants, waged through domination of credit, mergers, price-fixing, and political control.

We are familiar with finance capital in our own time. Public figures such as Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, or tech-aligned financiers like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, occupy commanding heights in today’s global capitalist system. Institutions like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street hold controlling stakes in virtually every major corporation, from weapons manufacturers to pharmaceutical firms to tech monopolies. In China, the capitalists have their own finance capital: massive state-owned banks like ICBC and industrial giants like Sinopec coordinate capital and policy, expanding their reach globally through the Belt and Road Initiative. In Latin America, entities like Grupo Aval, Itau Unibanco, and Grupo México link finance and industrial capital across borders. In Africa, we see similar concentrations of power in figures such as Aliko Dangote, whose empire binds banking, industry, and state support into one vast apparatus. Across Europe, banks like Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, and the European Central Bank operate as levers of continental-scale finance capital.

Wherever in the world we look today, finance capital directs the global economy not towards the imperatives of accumulation. And with its dominance comes a corresponding evolutionary shift in capitalist strategy: no longer content to merely export goods, capital itself seeks new territories, new returns, and new arenas to battle against other monopolies for their competing claims to profit.

3 - Export of Capital

Uneven development of capitalist relations of production within countries and throughout the world is an absolute and empirically observable law of capitalism. While today virtually every inch of the globe has been drawn into the capitalist mode of production, this is a relatively recent development in history. The past few centuries bore witness to the process of each section of the world developing capitalist relations of production at different points in time and under widely varied initial conditions. Once monopolies emerge out of competition, capital tends to become “over-ripe” in its own national bounds, seeking new fertile areas for profitable investment elsewhere. This then leads to the export of not only commodities, but capital itself.

Lenin provides the examples of British and French banks investing billions of marks abroad. In Germany, Deutsche Bank invested heavily in Turkish railroads to receive massive returns in interest and dividends.

Today we see numerous examples of the export of capital. Tech giants such as Apple and Microsoft invest billions in factories in East and Southeast Asia. China Development Bank invests its gargantuan assets—hundreds of billions, in infrastructure projects in regions as widely dispersed as Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The export of capital sets the stage for both international coordination and competition of capitals. What Lenin observed at the time has only ballooned to astronomical proportions in the present epoch as more states than ever before vie for higher positions on the imperialist pyramid.

4 - Formation of International Monopolies

These monopolies and finance capital that are now competing with each other on the world stage then tend to form combinations amongst themselves to coordinate and more precisely exert their control over markets that now stretch across whole continents and oceans.

These combines (syndicates, trusts, alliances) then compete with each other. At the start of the twentieth century, the competition amongst US-based Standard Oil and the German-backed (via Deutsche Bank) oil fields of Romania, Austria, and Dutch colonies.

A century later, we observe today ever more massive combines. The most notable example is OPEC+, a veritable cartel determining oil production to control the price of the commodity between a handful of powerful oil monopolies in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, UAE, and others. Tech giants—Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple in the US; Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance in China—have long been coordinating their respective domains in processing, search engines, hardware, and now in the emerging AI industry.

These international monopoly associations extend their reach across the world, coordinating their investments and alliances, setting the stage for competition and carving up the entire world amongst these warring groups of capitals.

5 - Division of the World

With the rise of monopolies, finance capital, and these international associations, the entire world became a battlefield for capital expansion. By the dawn of the 20th century, the major powers had already divided the globe, through conquest, colonization, and economic domination. Lenin stated that the division of the world was complete. That is not to say that redivision was finished, rather to the contrary, redivision of regions amongst the competing powers was to be a permanent state of affairs. Capitalism-imperialism had arrived in full force.

Colonies were seized not only for raw materials, but to absorb surplus capital, secure cheap labor, and control markets. Britain’s global empire, France in Africa and Indochina, Germany’s late imperial push, and the U.S. role in Latin America and the Philippines all reflected this process. World War I, the first war of imperialist redivision, confirmed Lenin’s analysis in blood. In the century since then, the contest for redivision has continued to be a violent affair.

While the old empires have largely vanished following decolonization, the contest for redivision has not ended. Instead, the capitalist-imperialist world system has only now been generalized. In fact, many of the previously colonized states from the past two centuries are now intensely vying for top positions in the imperialist world order. China, Brazil, India, Iran, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and South Korea are notable examples of states with developed capitalist relations of production, their own gigantic monopolies, and their own finance capitals competing on the world stage.

China’s rise in particular has upended the historical dominance of the North Atlantic capitalist powers (USA, UK, France, Germany), threatening a direct confrontation between them. In the view of some US capitalists, the war between the US-led bloc and China has already begun. The opening salvos have been shot. In Ukraine, in Latin America, in Africa, the direct clash between US and Chinese monopolies has ignited in the past decade especially. Russia, now fully integrated into the imperialist system again, has fought tooth and nail to clamber back up the ladder for dominance, leading to the historic tragedy in Ukraine where hundreds of thousands of workers have had their lives destroyed by the competing ambitions of Russian capital and the US-NATO-EU on the other.

This concrete analysis of concrete conditions verifies that the Marxist-Leninist view imperialism remains indispensable as a scientific analysis of world affairs. Imperialism adapts, but its essence, the capitalist mode of production, persists. The division of the world among capitalist powers continues to fuel conflicts, crises, and war. Only the revolutionary movement of the working class can combat this barbarism. But first, we must address some distortions of the Marxist-Leninist view.

Distortions of Imperialism

In his work on imperialism, Lenin strongly criticized the conceptions advocated by the reformists and bourgeois conciliators. Foremost amongst them was Kautsky, whose theory of ultra-imperialism posited that the imperialist states would find it in their mutual interest to cease violent confrontations and instead resolve conflicts through mergers. This would, in his imagination, lead to a convergence of the powers into a large association wherein wars are no longer necessary. As history played out over the next century, Kautsky’s theory has proven magnificently false.

This has not stopped the ideological heirs of Lenin’s opponents rediscovering the invalid conclusions in a number of varied forms. In the century since the October Revolution, conceptions of imperialism have proliferated. Many claim to have developed on Hilferding and Lenin, but generally these “new” theories have in one form or another succeeded in burying the class struggle at the base of capitalist relations. World systems theory, dependency theory, and a few others have taken on Kautsky’s bourgeois-apologist tradition. For the sake of brevity, we will group these largely homogenous theories under dependency theory. It is important to note that these fields of thought all share the “core-periphery” divide as central to their frameworks.

Dependency theories, systematized by thinkers such as Eduardo Galeano, Samir Amin, Theotonio dos Santos, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and others, posits that underdeveloped nations remain poor or subjugated because they are structurally dependent on and exploited by the developed capitalist countries, which extract value and maintain dominance through the unequal exchange of commodities, establishing a global system where wealth accumulates in the “core” and underdevelopment and poverty persists in the “periphery.” Thus, the entire world is a unified system where the hegemonic “core” oppresses the “periphery”.

The fatal shortcomings in this distorted conception of imperialism lay in their schematic and rigid analyses of complex, dynamic phenomena. Further, many of these theorists rhetorically accept Marxist concepts as valid but do not consistently apply the dialectical materialist method. This results in a class-neutral tendency that advocates for the development of the “periphery”, popularly referred to as the Global South (a theoretically and geographically problematic designation that holds as much water as “non-Eurovision countries” would). However, this advocacy does not take the form of advocating for the working class seizure of power in those countries but instead ignores the class divisions of the states in the “periphery”. This reveals dependency theory’s fundamentally flawed approach to imperialism as a mere balance of forces rather than a description of the relations of production of class society at a given stage of development. This stands in total opposition to the categories elaborated above which are all based fundamentally in the labor-capital contradiction.

It is on this basis that some dependency theorists diverge from each other in form but not in essence. Some postulate that the “core” of today is the United States while the rest of the world constitutes the “periphery” or “semi-periphery”. Others extend the core to include the US and the Western European states and maybe Japan. Thus the claim is made that we currently live in a unipolar world dominated in whole or largely by US imperialism. The development of a multipolar world order that undermines this present state of affairs is categorically revolutionary by this distorted view.

On the one hand we have the conception of imperialism elaborated by Lenin, which leads naturally to the conclusion that the struggle for working class power is the task of the revolutionary movement, made all the more imperative and ripe in the imperialist age. On the other hand, we have the distorted view of imperialism presented by dependency theory that ignores the class structure of the states in the periphery, absolutizes inter-dependencies as oppressive relationships, and provides no meaningful political program to the workers of the world.

While the elaboration of the distorted views of imperialism remains to be further expounded upon, we will limit ourselves here to this exposition.

It must be emphasized that the need to obtain clarity on this question is urgent and central to our movement. The outbreak of new imperialist wars redividing the world and the threat of new fronts opening up means that the communist forces must be steeled in our stance towards imperialism and the wars it gives way to in our time.

What is Our Stance Towards Imperialist Wars? 

Lenin revealed that imperialist wars are led by the bourgeoisie, offering no real benefit to the working class, regardless of which side emerges victorious. 

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism

V.I Lenin, On the Slogan of the United States of Europe

As a result, imperialism inevitably leads to disputes, shifting alliances, contradictions, and antagonisms that can only be resolved through crises and wars.

To support one imperialist faction over another is merely to choose between different bourgeois rulers, a choice that holds no advantage for the proletariat. Instead, under conditions of an imperialist war, the true interest of the working class lies in the defeat and overthrow of its own bourgeoisie. 

Today, opportunist forces increasingly align with the imperialist bloc led by China and Russia, much like the collapse of the Second International, where many parties surrendered to bourgeois positions on war. Both unipolar and multipolar narratives obscure this reality, providing ideological cover for the imperialist and capitalist nature of interstate alliances such as NATO, CSTO, and the Shanghai Treaty, which merely represent disputes over a new division of the world rather than a struggle between capitalism and socialism.

The stance toward war must be a stance toward class struggle and socialist revolution, with the goal of transforming imperialist war into the only true war of liberation, the war against capitalism itself. The Communist Workers’ Party of the USA (CWPUSA) rejects all capitalist alliances and stands firmly against imperialist war.

Imperialism, by its very nature, is inherently militaristic and aggressive, driven by an objective tendency toward war and reaction. Capitalist powers and their monopolies continuously compete for dominance within the imperialist system, leading to the division and redivision of the world as they attempt to overcome the historical limits of capitalism through militarism and war. These inter-imperialist conflicts arise over control of vital resources such as oil, gas, and other raw materials, as well as markets, trade routes, territories, and cheap labor, all accompanied by an escalating arms race and nuclear threats. To circumvent direct involvement, imperialist powers, including Russia, China, South Africa, and the US, also fund private armies to serve their geopolitical interests. 

Today, the central axis of inter-imperialist rivalry lies in the antagonism between the US and the European Union on one side and China and Russia on the other, with the latter leading the BRICS alliance and forming regional partnerships across Asia and the Middle East with economic, political, and military objectives. At the same time, contradictions and conflicts, such as the trade war between the US and the EU, further expose the fractures within the imperialist system.

Current Imperialist Conflicts and the Role of the US

Modern imperialist wars are exemplified by the ongoing three-year conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and over 50 war fronts worldwide. At the center of these wars is the role of the United States and its allies, which continues to fight to maintain its dominant position at the top of the imperialist hierarchy. Under the current Trump administration, building on the work of the Biden administration, the US persists in its trade wars, escalates protectionist policies through tariffs, and even entertains extreme measures such as the annexation of Greenland to exploit Arctic resources and transport routes. It also contends with China over control of the Panama Canal, a crucial link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and has even staked claims over Canada. The struggle for control over trade routes, energy reserves, rare earth minerals, and technological supremacy, particularly in artificial intelligence, continues to fuel imperialist conflicts globally.  

In Palestine, the current massacre is now followed by plans to expel the Palestinian people, allowing the US and Israeli capital to exploit the region under the guise of creating the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Meanwhile, heightened US military presence in the Middle East puts Iran and Syria in the crosshairs, with NATO and US allies Turkey and Israel playing key roles in advancing imperialist interests.  

The war in Ukraine is also escalating, with Russia gaining the upper hand. The Euro-Atlantic alliance, aligning itself with the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, is heavily supplying and training Ukrainian forces, while NATO countries are being pressured by the US to increase military spending to up to 5% of their GDP. Furthermore, US-led “peace negotiations” serve merely as a strategy to carve up Ukraine, ensure the continued exploitation of its natural resources, and maintain a long-term foreign military presence. The image of Trump as “peacemaker” is shattered by the fragile ceasefire negotiated with Russia which confirms our view on imperialist war.

The War Economy and the Preparations of the Bourgeoisie of the US

The war economy is becoming the central focus of the bourgeoisie in all countries as they prepare for the re-division of the world. However, this economy cannot be understood simply as military spending; it also includes the capitalist planning of all strategic industries. In the United States, the ruling class uses nationalist rhetoric, such as “Make America Great Again,” to manipulate and subjugate the exploited masses in service of its national and international aspirations. The true purpose behind slogans like “America First” is to counter the growing threat of China, which challenges US supremacy in the imperialist system.  

At the head of U.S. imperialism, both Trump administrations have led a protectionist trend, continued under the previous Biden administration and rooted in the defense of US monopolies and their competition with foreign monopolies, a struggle that fuels both trade wars and armed conflicts. A defining feature of the current Trump administration’s policies is the plan to cut trillions from the federal budget to redirect toward defense spending, alongside efforts to revive domestic manufacturing. After all, a country reliant on offshore production cannot efficiently sustain wartime operations.

The US refuses to peacefully relinquish its dominant position within the imperialist system or resolve global power struggles through concessions to its rivals. The US bourgeoisie will not tolerate any measures that could lead to the controlled destruction of over-accumulated capital. To prevent its competitors from gaining strength, the US aggressively employs protectionist measures. The weak and uneven recovery since the 2008 crisis underscores this drive, particularly in the upcoming renegotiation of USMCA, where the US seeks to curtail the economic rise of Canada and Mexico while maximizing the profits of its monopolies.  

A significant shift is occurring, moving the focus from the so-called war on terrorism to preparations for a broader conflict with rival powers. This shift explains the renewed push to revitalize key US industries.  

What drives the imperialist warmongering of the US bourgeoisie? A lurking crisis of capital overaccumulation. These vast amounts of capital require a profitable outlet, without one, the US economy is headed for a deeper crisis. New arenas of competition, particularly in artificial intelligence and advanced technology (semiconductors, battery and EV manufacturing, biotechnology, etc.), present fresh investment opportunities, but US dominance in these sectors is increasingly challenged. The US economy faces mounting instability, including soaring borrowing costs, a growing national debt, declining foreign direct investment (which hit a decade low in 2023 for manufacturing), challenges to the US dollar’s global standing, and the retreat of the dollar’s investment position in the world economy.  

Contradictions within the US bourgeoisie have intensified, as reflected in the election of Trump. Notably, there is an attempt to break or upset existing alliances in order to divide global spoils more favorably. The communication between Trump and Putin, as well as the increasing tensions between the US and the European Union, must be understood in the broader context of imperialist war preparations. The Trump administration is working to drive a wedge in the Eurasian bloc, seeking to isolate China as the primary target of US military and economic measures. As inter-imperialist rivalries deepen, these developments signal an accelerating global crisis and an impending escalation of war.