At the most fundamental of levels, imperialism, as it has existed since the beginning of the 20th century, is a structure. This structure's primary feature is the concentration, in just a handful of countries, of the capacity to continually revolutionise the means of production: to continually upgrade the productivity of labour across the whole of society through the use of increasingly powerful and complex technologies.
These production technologies increasingly replace human labour with machines. This process can be manifested in huge manufacturing complexes as well as more fragmented systems of production knitted together through telecommunication and computer complexes.
As the scale of production increases – as individual companies try to monopolise larger and larger sectors of the world – so does both the complexity of the production process and the capital that needs to be invested to initiate any new productive activity. Only the few imperialist countries that were already socially and materially industrialising at the turn of the 20th century have been able to achieve this: the tiny imperialist club of the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
The imperialist structure is one of concentration of wealth and centralisation of the highest levels of productivity. Outside the imperialist club, even the biggest countries – such as China, India or Brazil – can only achieve the use of the highest levels of technology for production in niche sectors of their economies – not across the society as a whole so as to raise the average level of productivity.
Across the Global South, even in the largest economies, the GDP per capita remains lower than in the imperialist countries. This is true even in a country like China which has amazingly been able to eliminate the worst of the poverty that its hundreds of millions of people faced immediately after the revolution in the 1940s.
This structure, however, is still inhabited by nations which are each controlled and managed by national states: the executive committees, so to speak, of their ruling classes. In most countries of the world, these are capitalist classes, either rich and developed or less so. A few countries have states that are the instruments of the working class, such as in Cuba.
There is a tension between a world inhabited by a few hundred separate nations, with their separate states and ruling classes, and a global structure from which nobody can escape. International conflicts appear as conflicts between nations: whether outright wars, economic rivalries, diplomatic clashes or whatever. The fact that all these conflicts between individual nations, classes and states take place within this system that divides the world into rich and technologically strong or poor and technologically deprived societies, means that each individual international conflict can have implications for the strengthening or the weakening of the system.
Systems act to impose constraints and enforce the way social and material energies must flow. This aspect will often operate almost automatically based on the ongoing practices of trade, finance and legal structures. At the same time, this global system must also be defended by those interests that it benefits. Resistance to its laws and practices, and in particular to the level of centralisation of wealth and control, also needs to be defeated, whether this happens within a nation or by a nation resisting the global centralisation.
Imperialism needs to make sure that a country doesn't opt out of the system or start to relate to it in a way that weakens its authority, such as when a social revolution begins – as happened in China, Cuba, Vietnam or Venezuela, for example. Imperialism also needs to make sure that capitalist classes in countries outside the imperialist club are not allowed to claw back too much wealth from the rich imperialist powers.
The United States Behemoth
The way the global imperialist system of capitalism has developed during the 20th century, especially in the aftermath of World War Two, the primary protector of the imperialist order is the United States. The US is often called a global power, which it is, but it is also a monstrous imperialist behemoth. It is crucial to understand the US state and its capitalist classes position as a lynchpinin the whole system. It is not just another individual state that happens to be rich and powerful which sometimes rivals other imperialist powers (which it does) or a bully towards a Global South country, which it also is. It is not simply these things.
The United States has the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world, larger than all of the other NATO forces combined. It has hundreds of military bases and installations in probably 80 countries. Its ships patrol waters thousands of miles away from its own coast. It has a monstrous nuclear weapons capacity. It has an Intelligence force that operates in scores of countries and which, with the US army, has been involved in scores of coups and military operations. This is all supplemented by a powerful spy satellite network. It has shown almost no reluctance to be everywhere and anywhere.
Additionally, it is the most powerful member in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank as well as having the largest number of globally dominant investment banks in the world.
This behemoth is the single biggest force enforcing the system of centralised monopoly of high-end production around the world and thus holding back the development of the whole of the Global South. For many of the smaller or weaker Global South countries, this has meant ongoing, and often deepening, privation and extreme misery. In a country like China, which has eliminated the worst of its poverty, the imperialist system makes every inch forward in its progress harder. Now the US behemoth has launched an economic war on China aimed at keeping it from progressing.
The US is not just acting on behalf of the US. It is the defender-protector of the whole imperialist structure. This means that the outcome of any conflict between individual nation-states in the world today must be assessed also in terms of whether the behemoth will be strengthened or weakened. If the behemoth is strengthened, then all peoples of all countries will be put in a more vulnerable situation. The US behemoth is indeed a global monster.
So we must ask horrible questions like: what outcome in the current military conflict between the Ukraine and Russia will either weaken or strengthen the behemoth? To what extent is it actually a war by proxy by the behemoth in defence of the global system aimed, in this case, of keeping Russia in place, and also, in the end, strengthening the hand of foreign capital in the Ukraine itself? The behemoth strengthened here is the monster strengthened everywhere.
The weaker the behemoth, the more space there is for resistance. In the end, a weaker behemoth should also not be the end goal, but the liberation of the world from the imperialist system and the behemoth and smaller monsters that partner with it.
Australia is one of the smaller monsters with a record of working with the behemoth in many wars or oppressive moves against the countries of the Global South: Malaya, Vietnam, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Afghanistan, Iraq and now the disgusting support for the occupation of and genocide in Palestine. In the current barbaric siege by the Israeli state against Palestine, US Military force is there again in the shape of the US Navy on stand-by.
Socialists, and all democratic humanists in Australia, must commit to spreading an understanding of imperialism, of the US central role in preserving it and of the Australian state and ruling classes happy participation in its preservation while sucking out profits wherever possible. Understanding all this and its inhumanity, will also increase understanding of why the Australian ruling class doesn't give a s**t about the Australian common people: they don't care about people full stop.
Source: https://red-ant.org/2023/11/01/nations-in-the-era-of-the-imperialism-behemoth/