The understanding of the nature of the world system is, or should be, a central question for the Left in the United States. We live in what the Left used to call “the heart of the beast”—the largest world power on the planet—armed to the teeth with weaponry capable of destroying the world’s cities many times over. There are about 3800 active US nuclear warheads with about 1600 actively deployed around the world—each on average about 80 times more powerful than the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. US military spending surpasses the military spending of the next 10 countries behind it. With several hundred military bases covering the globe and with an active and reserve personnel of about 2 million people—and with an overwhelming advantage in “conventional” firepower compared to any other nation—the United States is far and away the largest military superpower in the world.

And yet, over the past decades the Left has become confused on the question of US foreign policy—lacking any clear framework for understanding it or what drives it. Over some decades, a proud tradition of staunch opposition to US intervention abroad as a result of its war on Vietnam has, over the years, been substantially eroded.

As I wrote in an article some years ago, on the eve of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq:

The left in the U.S. developed a proud tradition of opposition to U.S. military interventions abroad because of the Vietnam War and the movement against it. The “Vietnam syndrome”–the reluctance on the part of the U.S. to engage in full-scale military intervention after its defeat in Vietnam– was paralleled on the left by a view that U.S. intervention abroad, whatever its stated motivation, was about projecting U.S. power at the expense of the world’s oppressed and exploited. For the Marxist left, anti-imperialism was more than just an opposition to intervention, but a framework for a world capitalist system dominated by a handful of great powers.

However, the end of the Cold War and the winding down of the national liberation movements in the 1980s created a political vacuum whose result was great confusion on the Left. Many were taken in by the ability of the US to present their military actions in places like Panama, Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, and Iraq as either “humanitarian interventions” or as efforts to remove brutal dictators and restore democracy. In more recent decades, the US has been able to cloak its predatory aims under the guise of the “war on terror”—though its own terror far exceeds that of those it attacks. In addition, the subsequent rise of the global justice movement built on a narrative of the world system as one in which rootless, nationless capital dominated the world rather than powerful states. As a result, the question of US imperialism—both practically and theoretically— continues to be largely off the radar of the Left today.

As a contribution to a basic understanding of the nature of the “beast,” we republish chapter 10 of Paul D’Amato’s book the Meaning of Marxism. (Footnotes have been removed).

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The late historian Eric Hobsbawm calculated that 187 million people died from wars in the twentieth century—more than the total world population in AD 1000 and a tenth of the total world population in 1913. This century—with the US wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, its drone attacks, and its military interventions in several other countries—promises similar, if not worse, barbarism. Given this grim picture, it is tempting to see war as something that is inherent in human nature—something we are “hard-wired” to do. In this view, war comes from the fact that people naturally divide into groups—racial, ethnic, linguistic—and develop hostility to those who are “different.” This concept has been reinforced by various pseudo-scientific studies that compare humans to other animals—though they are careful to choose only the aggressive ones—in order to show that we relish war. In The Dark Side of Man, Michael Ghiglieri, a protege of primatologist Jane Goodall, argues that men are biologically programmed to commit rape, murder, war, and genocide, and that this tendency derives from our closest primate, the chimpanzee.

“Chimpanzee-like violence,” write primatologists Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham in another book, Demonic Males, “preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”

The reference to primate behavior to explain human behavior is highly selective. Some experts argue that the chimp example itself exaggerates the level of violence among them—for example, the famous researcher Jane Goodall noted that violence among chimpanzees increased considerably when she and her fellows began providing bananas to them, thus altering their natural patterns of behavior. Instead of choosing allegedly violence-prone, hierarchically organized chimps, why not use the equally genetically close to human primates, the bonobos? “Had Bonobos been known earlier,” writes authors Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting, “reconstructions of human evolution might have emphasized sexual relations, equality between males and females, and the origin of the family, instead of war, hunting, tool technology, and other masculine fortes. Bonobo society seems ruled by the ‘Make Love, Not War’ slogan of the 1960s rather than the myth of a bloodthirsty killer ape that has dominated textbooks for at least three decades.”

But the real point is that human behavior cannot be understood by studying nonhumans. It may be true that human beings have the capacity for aggression, submission, and a host of other behavioral traits. But for every example of aggression in human behavior, we can also find peaceful cooperation and sharing. Moreover, it is a big step from aggressive behavior and systematic, armed conflict, that is, warfare. If human beings are naturally warlike, one wonders why it is necessary for governments to take young men at a very early age and put them through a rigorous retraining to make them capable of systematically killing other humans.

As noted in a previous chapter, our ability to change culturally—mediated through cooperation, tool use, and language—makes human beings adaptable to different environments—and capable of exhibiting, depending on the context, a wide range of potential behaviors. In short, we are not hard-wired for little else but cooperative behavior.

One of the most popular anthropology books—still used in many introductory classes—is the 1968 Yanomami: the Fierce People by Napoleon A. Chagnon. The book examined a group of Amazonian hunters who were gripped by constant warfare. Chagnon claimed that the violent lifeways of the Yanomami represented “a truly primitive cultural adaptation . . . before it was altered by or destroyed by our culture.”

Chagnon’s account has been used repeatedly to bolster the idea that warring was the normal state of tribal peoples before contact with Europeans. But the Yanomami were far from being a pristine culture. The Yanomami had contact with Europeans beginning in the mid-1700s, when slave-catchers invaded their territory. Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson argues convincingly that there was a big spike in warfare among the Yanomami beginning in the 1950s as a result of game depletion, disruption of the culture caused by the introduction of devastating European diseases, and, most importantly, “antagonistic interests regarding access to or control over trade in Western manufactured goods.”

For the majority of our time on the planet, as noted earlier in this book, we have lived largely in foraging bands with no formal hierarchy, no standing armies, no class divisions, and no state structures. Food and other resources were shared. In these societies, warfare was far less frequent, and its character far less severe, than today’s warfare. “Under conditions where portable wealth does not exist,” wrote anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, “where food is too perishable and too clumsy to be accumulated and transported; where slavery is of no value because every indi- vidual consumes exactly as much as he produces—force is a useless implement for the transfer of wealth.”

Modern-day and recently existing hunter-gatherer societies cannot be said to be living or to have lived in a state unaffected by the impact of global capitalism over the past couple of centuries. Yet studies reveal that many of these societies either have no war at all or are considered “unwarlike.” An extensive 1940s study of existing anthropological data, the Study of War, found that among 590 different societies reviewed, 64 percent were either found to have no war or to be unwarlike—and half of those relatively peaceful societies were nomadic foraging societies.8They were not nonviolent societies—but feuds and the occasional revenge killing can hardly be compared to the massive slaughterhouse that is modern-day warfare.

The character of war in pre-class and pre-state societies of which we have any record was vastly different from modern warfare. There were no professional groups of fighters. Men (and sometimes women) were hunters or fighters, as conditions demanded. Often, war consisted of skirmishes that broke off as soon as anyone was killed or injured. Among Plains Indians, war parties tried to avoid combat that resulted in death, and “counting coup,” touching an enemy’s body with the hand or a special stick, ranked as a higher feat than killing. Renegade Rhode Island colonist Roger Williams noted that the fighting between the Indian nations he observed was “farre lesse bloudy and devouring than the cruell Warres of Europe.” According to Captain John Underhill, a leader of a massacre on an undefended Pequot village in 1637, a group of Narragansett Indians allied with the English withdrew from the attack, complaining that the English style of warfare “slays too many men.”

Only with the rise of agriculture and the production of a surplus—which in turn produced the first ruling classes (the keepers of the surplus)—did warfare become a systematic practice, engaged in by specially armed subjects of a ruler in order to gain wealth and slaves. The rulers in turn created loyalty among their armed retainers by giving out the spoils of conquest—land, slaves, and goods.

But the struggle for the surplus didn’t just produce wars between rival kingdoms. Class society also gave rise, inevitably, to violent conflict between social classes over how the surplus was used. Systematic warfare came with the emergence of the state— of special armed bodies whose purpose was both to protect the position of the minority who controlled the surplus (from the majority who produced it), as well as pillage the wealth produced by other groups.

Modern warfare has economic rather than biological roots. “In the modern world undoubtedly the most potent cause of war is economic rivalry—a purely cultural phenomenon having no biological basis whatsoever,” wrote anthropologist Ashley Montagu. But even the wars of conquest and plunder by Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire pale in comparison to war as it developed under capitalism.

The “White Man’s Burden”

The idea of peaceful competition is an invention of economics professors. War, conquest, and plunder accompanied capitalism from its inception. With the emergence of the world’s first commercial powers in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, violence was the rule rather than the exception. As the merchant capitalists became powerful, they depended upon their “home” governments to extend their markets and sources of raw materials and goods by force. What we know as freewheeling pirates on the open seas were often employees of one state, hired to capture and plunder the booty stolen, extracted, or extorted from some part of the world by another state. The market and the state intertwined, producing a system of competing states, fighting in Europe, North America, and Asia for control of the world’s trade and the creation of colonies that could be exploited for raw materials and labor.

In the European powers’ struggle for supremacy in North America, Native American peoples were deliberately pitted against each other. European encroachment on their farmlands and hunting grounds, and the introduction of European diseases decimated their ranks, pushing them westward and forcing them to cling to survival in tiny enclaves. Massacres were common. Marx described in Capital how

in 1703 those sober exponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of 40 pounds on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720, a premium of 100 pounds was set on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices were laid down: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, 100 pounds in new currency, for a male prisoner 105 pounds, for women and children prisoners 50 pounds, for the scalps of women and children 50 pounds.

This earlier, commercial, and colonial form of imperialism—which as we’ve seen also involved the slave trade and forced labor—gave way later to a new form of imperialism based on the rise of industrial power.

At the time Marx cowrote the Communist Manifesto, industrial capitalism had developed only in Britain and a few European countries. But as the twentieth century approached, capitalism became a truly global system. The relatively small capitalist enterprises of the early phase of industrial capitalism gave way, in the process of competition and crisis, to monopoly—the dominance of one or a handful of giant conglomerates over a single market. With the growth of monopoly capitalism, capitalist production burst the bounds of the nation-state.

The period of the 1890s found the most powerful new industrialized states—Britain and France, and soon the United States, Germany, and Japan—scrambling to divide the world between themselves into colonies or “spheres of influence.” The new imperialism was marked off from its predecessors by the sheer scale of the conquest. In 1876, for example, Africans controlled almost 90 percent of African territory. By 1900, Europeans controlled 90 percent of African territory. Indeed, the entire surface of the globe was conquered and divvied up between a tiny number of powers.

The great powers sought colonies and semi-colonies in order to secure sources of raw materials (produced with cheap, sometimes forced, labor) and investments, as well as to keep out competing empires. In southern Africa, Black Africans were forced off their land and compelled to work in gold and diamond mines, making a handful of men like Cecil Rhodes and J. B. Robinson extremely rich. (Knowing this, I wince every time I turned on the radio to hear a bouncy advertisement for J. B. Robinson jewelry.) When gold was discovered in Matabeleland in the 1880s, Lobengula, chief of the Matabele people, refused to accept a treaty he had been tricked into signing that gave Rhodes and his associates the right to mine for gold anywhere they wanted. Rhodes, who was already rich from mining diamonds, organized an army and invaded Matabeleland, massacring thousands using the Maxim gun. Each of the 672 soldiers in Rhodes’s army was promised six thousand acres of land and twenty gold claims. This is how Britain brought “enlightened” rule to Africa. The massacre prompted the poet Hillaire Belloc to write: “Whatever happens we have got / The Maxim gun and they have not.”

The case of the Belgian Congo is the most horrific example of how the effort to extract maximum profit could lead to mass murder. King Leopold of Belgium formed a society called the International Association of the Congo, whose “noble aim” was to render “lasting and disinterested services to the cause of progress.” The association’s lasting service was, in reality, to provide a humanitarian cover for naked plunder. Leopold established a system to force Africans in the Congo River Basin to collect ivory and rubber. In order to force Africans to work, the colonizers sent armed militias to exterminate selected villages to compel other villages to submit. “To gather rubber in the district,” wrote a former district commissioner in the Congo, “one must cut off hands, noses, and ears.” Historians estimate that Leopold’s “humanitarian” enterprise resulted in the deaths of roughly six to ten million people between 1885 and 1908. This genocidal treatment of Africans was extremely profitable. The Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and Exploration Company made a profit of more than 700 percent in the Congo.

The impact of British rule in India was no less atrocious. India on the eve of its conquest by the British in the 1750s was economically as wealthy as Europe. But forced labor, the wrecking of India’s textile industry with cheap British manufactures, and the destruction of India’s traditional irrigation and granary systems all combined to drain India’s economy for many decades. Tens of millions of people died of starvation in a series of devastating famines. In Britain, criticism of the stinginess of its famine relief in India was brushed aside on social Darwinist grounds: “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation,” finance minister Evelyn Baring assured his colleagues, only “serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.” Aside from the construction of railroads—which in any case the British set up only in order to transport troops and move India’s wealth out of the country—India was for a long period underdeveloped by British imperialism. “If the history of British rule in India,” concluded historian Mike Davis, “were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per-capita income from 1757 to 1947.”

The Eagle and Its Talons

There is a peculiar national myth told in this country that the United States is neither an empire nor imperialist. We are, so the tale goes, a freedom-loving nation that goes to war only for noble causes like spreading freedom and democracy or defending the weak against the strong. “America the benevolent,” wrote historian Sidney Lens,

does not exist and never has existed. The United States has pilfered large territories from helpless or near-helpless peoples; it has forced its will on scores of nations, against their wishes and against their interests; it has violated hundreds of treaties and understandings; it has committed war crimes as shocking as most; it has wielded a military stick and a dollar carrot to forge an imperialist empire such as man has never known before; it has intervened ruthlessly in the internal life of dozens of nations to prevent them from choosing the leaders they did want or from overthrowing, by revolution, ones they didn’t.

This shouldn’t surprise us, since the nation was founded on continental conquest based on the dispossession of lands occupied by the indigenous people who already inhabited it, as well as the carveout of a large part of Mexican territory in the West.

The United States emerged as a world power in the late 1800s, and quickly became the biggest economic power in the world. But it emerged as a power after the scramble for colonies was mostly completed. As a result of this, the United States found it congenial to develop a more informal empire. Where it was unable to establish its own exclusive sphere, for example in China, Washington advanced the “open door” policy in order to push its way in. But in its own “backyard,” the Caribbean and the Pacific, the United States established a “closed door” policy, using its military power to establish absolute hegemony. When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, it claimed that it was motivated by a desire to free Spanish colonies—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, from Spanish tyranny. As payment for this benevolent service, the United States made colonies or protectorates out of all of them.

Politicians in Washington were not above justifying conquest on racist grounds, either. President William McKinley explained to a group of Methodist Church leaders in 1899 that granting the Filipinos “self-government” would undoubtedly create “anarchy and misrule.” Therefore, the only choice for the United States was to “take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

But first the United States had to send seventy thousand troops to the Philippines to crush the independence movement there, which had first developed in opposition to Spanish rule, but had since turned against the Americans. One historian describes how by 1901 the war had degenerated into a mass slaughter. After Filipino nationalist guerrillas attacked a town in Samar under US occupation and killed fifty-four US soldiers, the American military instigated a reign of terror on the island:

General [“Howlin’ Jake”] Smith, fresh from his “victories” in northern Luzon and Panay, was chosen to lead the American mission of revenge. Smith’s order to his men embarking upon the Samar campaign could not have been more explicit: “Kill and burn, kill and burn, the more you kill and the more you burn the more you please me.” . . . When asked to define the age limit for killing, Smith gave his infamous reply: “Everything over ten.” Smith ordered Samar to be turned into a “howling wilderness” so that “even the birds could not live there.”

In the end, the US Army’s murderous scorched-earth policy wiped out upwards of a million Filipinos.

The barbarism of the United States in the Philippines prompted the great satirist Mark Twain to become a staunch opponent of imperialism. “I left these shores . . . a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific,” Twain told a New York Herald reporter in 1900. However, he explained, “I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.” He concluded, “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Even where the United States shunned formal colonies, its practices were almost identical. In the Caribbean, the United States made a practice of demanding that countries hand over control of their customs houses to US officials and banks, in order to ensure repayment of loans. When a country refused, the United States invaded. Marines occupied Haiti and stayed there from 1915 to 1934, for example. They imposed a new constitution that opened up Haiti to foreign land ownership and handed the country’s customs houses and banking system over to the National City Bank of New York, and crushed all resistance.

Woodrow Wilson in 1907 clarified how, for the United States, the “open door” policy was a strategy to maximize US dominance: “Since trade ignores national boundaries, and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.”

Imperialist Rivalry and War

As the earth became completely carved up into “spheres of influence” between the great powers, competition between them intensified. A “balance of power” was maintained by each state arming itself to the teeth. But the balance was continually in danger of being upset by the emergence of a new power eager for a slice of the imperial pie.

Lenin, writing at the time of the First World War, described this new period of capitalism as imperialism—in a nutshell, capitalism in its monopoly stage, the world market dominated by giant capitalist trusts, backed up by powerful states fighting to carve up the world amongst themselves. He called monopoly capitalism “the economic essence of imperialism,” noting its main features as “monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations.”

Lenin’s analysis, written in 1916 in the midst of the slaughter of the First World War, pointed to how imperialism was not a policy, but a new stage in the development of capitalism that grew out of earlier conditions. Just as “free” competition gave way to monopoly, so “free trade” gave way to trade wars and armed conflict. The logic of imperialism was grounded in international economic competition between states, leading to war.

There were people at the time, like German socialist Karl Kautsky, who argued that the creation of a world market and economic interdependence between nations would make war obsolete, creating a new system of “ultra-imperialism.”30 Unfortunately, the fact that there is economic interdependence does not lead to peaceful relations between states, much less their disappearance. Two tendencies always have to be kept in mind, as Lenin noted, in capitalism’s development: on the one hand, “the awakening of national life . . . and the creation of nation states” and, on the other hand, “the development and growing frequency of international intercourse” and “the break-down of national barriers.” These two contradictory tendencies—toward interdependence on the one hand, and toward consolidation of national states on the other—have been constant features of capitalism throughout its history. The balance between the two tendencies, and the way the contradiction has expressed itself, has shifted. But the contradiction remains, even today, at the heart of world capitalism.

In addition to its role in maintaining class rule, capitalists needed a centralized state as a means of creating a single, unified market that could facilitate commerce. But the state is also crucial in providing necessary infrastructure, and sometimes the pooling of capital resources needed for national capitalists to operate and compete effectively.

As capitalism burst the bounds of the nation-state, the coercive military function of the state took on a new dimension—that of protecting (and projecting) the interests of the capitalists of one country over those of another. The role of the state increased, the size of the state bureaucracy increased, and the size of its coercive apparatus increased. “The development of world capitalism leads,” wrote Russian revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin, “on the one hand, to an internationalization of economic life and, on the other, to the leveling of economic differences—and to an infinitely greater degree, the same process of economic development intensifies the tendency to ‘nationalize’ capitalist interests, to form narrow ‘national’ groups armed to the teeth and ready to hurl themselves at one another at any moment.”

It is true that, as Trotsky wrote during the First World War, “the natural tendency of our economic system . . . is to seek to break through the state boundaries. The whole globe, the land and the sea, the surface as well as the interior, has become one economic workshop, the different parts of which are inseparably connected with each other.” But this process, rather than leading to peaceful competition, leads to a struggle for dominance: “The way the governments propose to solve this problem of imperialism is not through the intelligent, organized cooperation of all of humanity’s producers, but through the exploitation of the world’s economic system by the capitalist class of the victorious country; which country is by this War to be transformed from a great power into a world power.”

Two devastating world wars that consumed millions of lives underscored the truth of Trotsky’s observation. The whole history of world conflict up to the present day consists of the continual rejigging of power relations between a handful of states and their allies. The economic relations between different states continually change (think of the recent rise of China and India), compelling new trade and diplomatic intrigues, as “upstarts” try to assert their power and the established powers try to hang on, or expand, what power they have. Ultimately, force decides who is to be top dog. But since the economic balance of forces keeps changing, new conflicts always emerge and the game begins anew.

Today, we no longer have a world divided between many contending colonial powers, as in the early twentieth century. A series of anticolonial movements and revolutions, combined with the declining economic value of the colonies, put an end to this era in the years following the Second World War. The United States emerged as the world’s dominant power, both economically and militarily. Instead of a world divided between several centers of world power, imperial rivalry took the form of a Cold War between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, in a balance of terror appropriately called “MAD”—mutually assured destruction.

Much of the conflict of the Cold War took the form not of direct military conflict between Soviet Union and the United States, but of smaller conflicts on the system’s periphery, such as the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Russia was never economically strong enough to challenge US hegemony over major parts of the globe. Ideologically, though, the United States used the Russian threat as an excuse for whatever interventions it undertook, such as when it destabilized and overthrew nationalist regimes it opposed. Fighting communism was used as the excuse to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the Allende government in Chile in 1973, and many others.

The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of imperialism or military conflict, but it has changed the playing field. The United States emerged as the sole superpower, more than twice the size of its nearest economic rival and several times bigger militarily. Even today, the United States accounts for half the world’s military spending. It is the only state with a truly global military reach, boasting 725 military bases around the globe, not including the United States. The logic of imperialist rivalry compels America’s rulers to continually demonstrate and reinforce this dominance, lest its relative position in the world pecking order slips or any potential challengers detect any weakening.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States cast around for a new rationale for its role as global hegemon. It found it in the “war on terror.” The Bush administration saw in the September 11, 2001, tragedy a unique window of opportunity— a modern-day Pearl Harbor—that created ideal conditions for advancing its agenda. Some months after September 11, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the attacks as an “enormous opportunity,” and that the United States “must move to take advantage of these new opportunities.”

The invasion of Afghanistan was first and foremost a warm-up for the invasion of Iraq, and was secondarily about establishing a strategic military presence in Central Asia. Overthrowing the Taliban and going after al-Qaeda was merely a pretext. Likewise, the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with the character of the Iraqi regime. The United States has always supported “friendly” dictators—and continues to do so. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003, in the extremely accurate preinvasion prediction of Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was “not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.” Rather, the war was intended “to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman.” They never had an “exit strategy,” argued Bookman, not out of incompetence, but because the United States was interested in creating “permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.”

It is tempting to see the movement of American imperialism into overdrive after September 11 as the product of temporary insanity. Some of the pronouncements of the Bush administration would have come off as almost Monty Pythonesque if it weren’t for the terrible bloodletting they justified. “The generals in Iraq must understand clearly there will be consequences for their behavior,” Bush smugly warned on the eve of the US invasion. “Should they choose . . . to behave in a way that endangers the lives of their own citizens, as well as citizens in the neighborhood, there will be a consequence. They will be held to account.”40This is reminiscent of the Spanish requierimiento, an official document that sixteenth-century conquistadors were meant to read out loud to their victims (in Spanish, a language those about to be attacked could not understand) before they conquered them. The document insisted that its listeners bow down to the Church and the Spanish Crown, warning:

But if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it . . . we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their highnesses. We shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey. . . . And we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us.

The text may be arcane, but its twisted logic is utterly modern. Obey the United States, and if you refuse, you will be to blame for the destruction we visit on you. Only now a twist is added: Since we are here to give you “freedom,” you have no reason to resist. “We’re here to give you your fucking freedom,” a US Marine shouted at a crowd of Iraqis protesting the occupation in Baghdad. “Now back off.” The insanity thesis ignores the essential continuity in US foreign policy. The disagreements between different administrations and parties in Washington have not been over whether the United States should militarily and economically dominate the world, but how (unilaterally or with subordinate allies?). Democrat Bill Clinton, it should be recalled, ratcheted up the military budget by $112 billion, rehabilitated Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program, and sent troops into other countries more times than all four previous presidents combined. He enforced devastating sanctions against Iraq that resulted in a dramatic increase in child mortality rates. Indeed, the Clinton administration made the case for intervening in “failed states” to impose “regime change,” setting the table for what was to come.

Three of the chief goals of US imperialism today, according to Chalmers Johnson, are: to “maintain absolute military preponderance over the rest of the world, a task that includes imperial policing to ensure that no part of the empire slips the leash”; “attempting to control as many sources of petroleum as possible, both to service America’s insatiable demand for fossil fuels and to use it as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions”; and “providing work and income for the military-industrial complex (as, for example, in the exorbitant profits Halliburton has extracted for building and operating Camps Bondsteel and Monteith).” This comprehensive framework has the advantage of explaining not only why the United States invaded Iraq (oil) but why it meddles in Africa, Asia, and every other corner of the globe. Obama’s presidency has not diverted from Washington’s goal of maintaining US military and economic hegemony. The style may have changed—as a necessary part of rehabilitating the tarnished image of the United States resulting from Bush’s disastrous overreach in the wake of 9/11—but the substance of US foreign policy remains.

Obama signaled the essential continuity between his and Bush’s foreign policy by reappointing Bush’s defense secretary Robert Gates. “Contrary to popular misperception,” writes Ashley Smith, “Obama was never a ‘peace candidate’ nor did he ever intend to be a ‘peace president.’ He has increased military spending, which surpassed $700 billion in 2011, deployed 30,000 troops in his surge into Afghanistan, expanded that war into Pakistan, tried to bully Iraq into allowing an extension of the American occupation, increased drone and black operations in Yemen and Somalia, and launched the NATO air war to topple Washington’s one-time ally Muammar Gaddafi.”

In his Nobel Peace Prize Address in December 2009, Obama offered standard boilerplate arguments about how the United States “has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” (One can only marvel that this sentence could be part of an acceptance speech for a “peace” prize.) Several Republicans notables praised Obama’s remarks. “The irony is that George W. Bush could have delivered the very same speech. It was truly an American president’s message to the world,” said Bradley A. Blakeman, a businessman and former Bush White House strategist.

Obama’s message involved more than speeches. He refused to investigate torture under Bush’s watch, failed to come through on his promise to close down the prison at Guantanamo where the United States indefinitely holds “terror” suspects without trial, and, as already noted, gave himself the authority to assassinate US citizens suspected of engaging in terrorism.

The domestic component of the ongoing “war on terror,” which, despite rhetorical alterations, continued under Obama, has actually intensified since the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. During his first election campaign, Obama criticized the Bush administration for being “one of the most secretive administrations in our nation’s history.” He promised to protect whistle-blowers, calling their acts courageous and patriotic. Once elected, he continued to promise “unprecedented levels of openness.”49 Obama subsequently has proven to be more committed to secrecy and Orwellian levels of state surveillance than any previous president. He prosecuted PFC Chelsea Manning and sent her to prison for thirty-five years for leaking information exposing war crimes committed by the United States in the Middle East— war crimes for which no one was held accountable. He is also seeking to prosecute Edward Snowden, a former defense contractor employee for the CIA, for leaking National Security Agency documents exposing the US government’s two hitherto secret surveillance plans to vacuum up, in collusion with the telecommunications industry, massive amounts of electronic data from US citizens, including records of phone calls, as well as online communication between people inside and outside the United States.50 Alongside the shadow banking system that brought down the world economy in 2008 has grown a secret, shadow government dedicated to protecting US power.

In response to the failed efforts by the United States to leverage large-scale invasions to its own advantage in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has increasingly relied on unmanned drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Africa, which have resulted in the killing of hundreds of noncombatants, including many children. According to a 2012 study by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law, “drone strikes killed 2,562–3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474–881 were civilians, including 176 children.”

The United States has been an imperialist power now for more than a century, cloaking its predatory aims with claims to be spreading democracy, removing tyrants, fighting communism, bringing humanitarian help, and now defending the “homeland” against terrorism. The most significant innovation after September 11 was the brazenness with which pundits proclaimed America’s God-given right to police the world. It is now fashionable to accept that the United States is an empire that has the right and duty to be, in the words of international relations professor and former army colonel Andrew Bacevich, “the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time.”

That does not mean that everything has gone Washington’s way. The defeat in Vietnam was a clear reminder that the beast is not invulnerable. The way in which the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were meant to be cakewalks, turned into quagmires, thanks primarily to the stiff resistance Iraqis and Afghans put up to the destruction of their respective countries, is another reminder.

The “National Interest”

Politicians from both sides of the aisle are fond of making pronouncements about “national interests,” or what’s good or bad for “America” and its “national security.” It is a time-honored practice to present the interests of the dominant class as those of the nation as a whole. An appeal to nationalism justifies all sorts of nefarious practices, from government surveillance and repression to building up large military arsenals and bombing other countries.

The idea of the nation has some basis in reality—everyone on the planet belongs to some nationality and lives in a territory ruled over by a state. But everyone also belongs to a social class, and national policy serves the interests of the dominant one. “Beware of people who make a sacred idol of the State,” writes international studies professor Benedict Anderson, “and beware of those who talk a lot about ‘our splendid ancestors.’ Your pocket is about to be picked.”

Whenever phrases like “national interests” are thrown around to defend some government action—whether it is a spending cut or a declaration of war—it is necessary to ask, in Lenin’s words, “who stands to gain?” “It is not important,” wrote Lenin, “who directly advocates a particular policy, since under the present noble system of capitalism, any money-bag can always ‘hire,’ buy, or enlist any number of lawyers, writers, and even parliamentary deputies, professors, parsons, and the like to defend any views. We live in an age of commerce, when the bourgeoisie have no scruples about trading in honor or conscience.”

In every war the United States has fought, the country’s rulers have claimed it was fought in the “national interest.” Yet in each case the beneficiaries were a minority at the top. Every extension of empire benefited not the majority, whose conditions of life always had more in common with the majority of the people being conquered, but bankers, industrialists, military contractors, and so on. This truth, in wartime, can be a dangerous one for those expressing it. “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder,” Eugene Debs told a crowd in 1918. “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” For that speech, Debs was imprisoned at age sixty-two.

Globalization: The New Frontier-Less Frontier?

Capitalism has always been a global system. But the term “globalization,” as used by politicians and the media, seems to mean something more. What are they referring to? Globalization (sometimes called neoliberalism) is “shorthand for an aggressive program,” first developed in the late 1970s, “that involves government deregulation of industry, privatization of government services and liberalization of barriers to international finance and trade.”56These policies, pushed by international financial and trade institutions like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank over the last twenty-five years, are designed to pry open national markets to US and European capitalist interests. As an ideology, globalization has been used to justify the necessity of domestic austerity measures, job cuts, and social service cuts. “Each national ruling class and government can wash their hands of responsibility, saying essentially, ‘Globalization made me do it,’” writes journalist Lee Sustar.

Some writers see globalization as more than neoliberal economic policies—instead, it is a new stage of world economic development. Capitalist production, trade, and investment are so footloose, the argument goes, that national states have become irrelevant. “This emerging new stage in world capitalism,” writes one left-wing economist, “points to a supersession through transnational integration of ‘national’ economies. Fundamentally, there has been a progressive dismantling of autonomous . . . national production systems and their reactivation as constituent elements of an integral world production system.”

The changes over the past three decades are certainly impressive. State capitalism has disappeared in Russia and Eastern Europe, as part of a steady worldwide trend away from directly state-owned economic economies, industries, or enterprises. World trade, foreign investment, and international financial transactions have increased astronomically over the past few decades. Foreign direct investment increased between 1982 and 2000 from $57 billion to $1.3 trillion.59The volume and value of world exports have grown tremendously since the 1980s, consistently higher than the world GDP growth rate. World merchandise exports increased from $1.84 trillion in 1983 to $7.4 trillion in 2003. Exports really took off after that, rising to $15.7 trillion in 2008, before dropping 15 percent for two years in a row after the onset of the Great Recession.60 As of 2009, some 78,000 transnational corporations (TNCs) with about 780,000 foreign affiliates dominated world trade and production, employing 73 million people (up from 25 million in 1990), whose sales quadrupled from $6 to $25 trillion between 1990 and 2006. According to researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, of the 43,060 transnational corporations they examined in 2011, 147 interlocking corporations—many of them financial sector firms—control 40 percent of the wealth among them, and 737 control 80 percent.

These facts have led some to revive the arguments made by Karl Kautsky in 1914 that economic integration signals the end of imperialism, that is, of competition between states for world domination. “The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project,” argue Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their influential tome Empire. “Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European states were.”63 The Hardt and Negri thesis is especially strange given the scale and number of military interventions by the United States in recent decades. If anything, the United States is far more dominant in the world today than any European power was in the era of classical imperialism. Moreover, it is committed to maintaining, in the words of neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz in a draft policy statement written in 1992, “the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

International economic institutions that are meant to reflect capitalism’s global integration are actually controlled by a handful of nations. The IMF and the World Bank are not located in Washington, DC, by coincidence. The United States established these institutions after the Second World War, and they, along with the World Trade Organization, have been largely under its control. IMF “structural adjustment policies”—under which loans are advanced to poor countries on condition that they privatize, cut public spending, and open up their economy to foreign investment— are examples not of stateless globalization, but of economic imperialism.

There is a great deal of sense to the argument that capital is footloose and global. Transnational corporations are constantly shifting their finances and investments around the world in search of the best return, offering their “allegiance” to those states that give them the best tax breaks and other financial incentives, always looking to park their money in offshore tax havens to avoid having to pay for the infrastructure— or other state provisions that provide some kind of safety net for workers and the poor—without which their businesses could not operate.

But the argument that TNCs are completely stateless is exaggerated. Big corporations like Walmart, General Motors, and Monsanto may have a global reach, but they still rely on their “home” state to provide the proper infrastructure—transportation, communication systems, and so on—necessary for their businesses to run profitably; not to mention the same infrastructure funded and guaranteed by other countries within which they operate. Governments spend a great deal of their revenue helping grease the wheels of big business. As one book noted,

Up to half the total money spent each year by governments on various public policies is used to ensure that business can do business. Denmark spends almost as much on direct business subsidies as it does on defense, policing, and housing and communities combined. The UK government provides more to businesses through various tax benefits and subsidies each year than it extracts in total corporate taxation. It also spends over a quarter of its entire budget purchasing goods and services directly from the private sector. In Sweden, one-quarter of the costs of social protection expenditure are directed towards employers. . . . [B]usinesses’ share of total public expenditure—the amount of public expenditure dedicated to meeting the needs of business—accounts for at least 40 percent of total public expenditure in the major economies, with the highest corporate welfare bill, as a percentage of total expenditure, being recorded in the US.

US multinationals receive enormous amounts of government help in the form of direct subsidies, tax breaks, government-funded university research and development, and a host of other forms of corporate welfare. Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, with more than thirty-five hundred stores nationwide and eighteen hundred overseas, has received state and local subsidies amounting to a billion dollars, according to a 2004 report.66 Between 2011 and 2015, the oil and gas industry is expected to receive $80 billion in tax breaks. (This is particularly ironic, given that oil magnates the Koch brothers, whose Koch Industries has received tens of millions in state subsidies, are founders of the libertarian think tank CATO Institute that rails against corporate welfare.) A 2012 New York Times study found that states, counties, and cities “are giving up more than $80 billion each year to companies,” and that these companies deliberately pit different locations against each other to extract the maximum concessions.

A 1996 Boston Globe study on government handouts to corporations concluded: “The $150 billion for corporate subsidies and tax benefits eclipses the annual budget deficit of $130 billion. It’s more than the $145 billion paid out annually for the core programs of the social welfare state: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), student aid, housing, food and nutrition, and all direct public assistance (excluding Social Security and medical care).”

A stateless corporation is at a disadvantage compared to one backed by an economically and militarily powerful state that can provide various services to give it an edge over its rivals. The United States Export-Import Bank, for example, spends a billion dollars a year to promote the sale of US products overseas, mostly as subsidies to Fortune 500 companies. The member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—that is, the world’s richest countries—impose high tariffs on food imports and give generous subsidies to domestic agricultural interests, without which they would not be profitable. Foreign aid is notoriously employed to pry open foreign markets for the donor country’s products. “There are many companies with worldwide operations,” writes one analyst. “Some even have multinational boards and executive teams. But, almost without exception, the world’s most successful companies remain clearly identified with their countries of origin.”

Perhaps most importantly, business depends on state funds to bail it out in times of crisis; it was the aggressive actions of states—chiefly their central banks—that prevented the 2008 crisis from becoming even worse and reestablished the solvency and profitability of the financial system.

It would also be a mistake to think that the last several decades have been marked solely by a drive toward privatization. Much of the success of those developing or formerly developing nations that have become industrial nations with industries capable of competing with the United States, Europe, and Japan—South Korea, for example—is attributable not to state deregulation and privatization, but to conscious state-led economic planning and coordination. Even in China, which decided to open itself to the world market in the late 1970s, the state continues to play an outsized role in economic ownership and planning. In 2008, state-owned enterprises, though comprising only 3.1 percent of the total number of enterprises, accounted for 30 percent of total assets for all enterprises in China.

Corporations also depend on other states when they operate overseas, requiring domestic and foreign governments to maintain a “good business climate.” Whatever country they are operating in, corporations rely on the local police and other armed forces in order to keep the class struggle in check, and they depend on borders to manipulate the flow of migrant labor.

Economic integration does not equal peaceful coexistence between nations. The Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin’s thoughts on the matter are still very relevant today. It doesn’t follow from the internationalization of economic life, he argued,

that social progress has already reached a stage where “national” states can coexist harmoniously. For the process of the internationalization of economic life is by no means identical with the process of the internationalization of capital interests. . . . Only those who do not see the contradictions in capitalist development, who good-naturedly assume . . . anarchic internationalization to be organized internationalization—can hope for the possibility of reconciling the “national” capitalist groups in the “higher unity” of peaceful capitalism.

The process of the internationalization of economic life can and does sharpen, to a high degree, the conflict of interests among the various “national” groups of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the growth of international commodity exchange is by no means connected with the growth of “solidarity” between the exchanging groups. On the contrary, it can be accompanied by the growth of the most desperate competition, by a life and death struggle.

Thomas Friedman formulated the relationship between the “free market” and armed force most famously: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.” So long as there is no international (or supranational) state, backed by its own armed forces that represent the world capitalist class, capitalists will need the armed forces of their own national territory.

The economies of Asia are highly integrated and depend on trade with each other. That, however, does not prevent extreme tension from developing between China and Japan, for example, over control of strategic islands. Nor does it prevent the United States, as it witnesses the rise of China as a major world player, from attempting to “pivot” toward Asia as a means to shore up its regional alliances and contain China’s aspirations to become a global power that might challenge US global hegemony. But even short of conflict between big powers, the United States, in order to demonstrate its dominance, routinely engages in armed intervention around the world. It does this not only because it needs, however disturbing this may seem, “practice.” Failing to do so will give other nations and powers the idea that it isn’t willing to back up its claims to hegemony with the appropriate force. How often have we heard the argument from politicians that failure to intervene in some particular region of the world will lead the United States to “lose credibility”?

Ultimately, the established international pecking order of power is a more or less unstable equilibrium that will eventually be shattered and replaced by new arrangements based on the relation of military force and the uneven development of the world economy, in which some states will emerge stronger and others decline. Lenin made this observation in 1916, when formal colonies still existed. Nevertheless, his point is still relevant:

The only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc., is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism. Half a century ago Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, if her capitalist strength is compared with that of the Britain of that time; Japan compared with Russia in the same way. Is it “conceivable” that in ten or twenty years’ time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? It is out of the question.

The prolonged period, dating back to the Second World War, in which the United States has been the dominant world power may seem to contradict what Lenin is saying here. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States hoped to become the world’s sole superpower—and indeed, it continues to pursue that goal. It largely compels the rest of the world—through its superior arms as well as the consensus among other nations that its commanding role internationally should be accepted as the best and only current alternative—to follow its lead. However, beneath this reality, significant molecular economic shifts have taken place that have changed the “relative strength” of the world’s leading economies, so that some years down the road, barring major social transformations, we may face a kind of barbarism on a world scale, given the existence of nuclear weapons, far worse than that of the Second World War.

The End of War

War isn’t hard-wired into our brains, but it is “hard-wired” into capitalism. Its continued existence is bound up with the existence of capitalism itself. War cannot be abolished unless the class interests upon which it rests are abolished. But most solutions for ending war assume mistakenly that war can be gotten rid of without getting rid of the system that breeds it. “Politics must continue; war cannot,” explains war historian John Keegan. “That is not to say that the role of the warrior is over. The world community needs, more than it has ever done, skillful and disciplined warriors who are ready to put themselves at the service of its authority. Such warriors must properly be seen as the protectors of civilization, not its enemies.”

But it is not possible to separate war and politics. Lenin was fond of quoting the nineteenth-century theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz: “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” Keegan’s idea of ending war, perhaps expressed unconsciously, is for the world’s dominant powers—for they control the “world community”— to come together and militarily impose peace. His answer to imperialist war is the answer every aspiring power strives for: a peace based on its own dominance, a “Pax Romana, or a “Pax Britannica,” or a “Pax Americana.” Implicitly, though he states otherwise, he accepts the fact that war and politics are inseparable.

The same confusion surrounds the belief that the United Nations can be an instrument of peaceful conflict resolution. Also established after the Second World War, the UN’s only decision-making body with enforcement power, the Security Council, is dominated by five permanent members—the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China. Each member has veto power over council decisions, ensuring that US interests can never be threatened. It is not an international parliament, but a committee of the most powerful states. When they all agree, the council acts; when they disagree, the big states simply ignore it. John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN as of 2006, gave the clearest description of the organization’s international role: “There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States, when it suits our interest, and when we can get others to go along. . . . When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interest to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests we will not.”

Marx likened the international capitalist class to warring brothers, ready to join forces against threats from below, but also in competition with each other, and therefore able to form only temporary agreements and alliances. One state may possess the power to impose some kind of peace based on its own ability to wield superior force—like a mafia don whose gangs have cleaned out all competitors and created the conditions for “peaceful” commerce in a particular city. This is the peace of the victor; a peace that lasts only until a rival gang emerges to oust the old boss.

Though socialists look to a world without war, no socialist can condemn all wars. Wars of conquest and imperial rivalry are reactionary, but wars are also waged by the oppressed against their subjection. A million mostly working-class men died in the Battle of the Somme (during the First World War) for the sake of profits for the British, French, and German empires. That war was reactionary to the core, even though each side in the dispute claimed to be defending itself against the other. The Civil War in the United States—a bloody affair—was fought to destroy the institution of slavery. That war was progressive and justified.

We live in a world of abundance in which there is no longer any justification for war. Given a different social order, one based upon planned production and distribution for human need, it would be possible to provide everyone with a healthy existence without recourse to exploitation of one by another, or of warfare. But unlike pacifists, who believe that simply an appeal to reason or moral suasion can convince those who rule today to act differently, Marxists understand that war is built into the very fabric of capitalism, and that it can only be abolished when the weapons of the world’s ruling classes are wrested from their hands. We want the end of war, but we also understand that those who hold power in the world will not relinquish it peacefully. Marxists understand that the violence of the oppressor cannot be equated with the violence of the oppressed. As Trotsky explained in his defense of the use of violence by the Russian working class against the counterrevolution in 1919:

When a murderer raises his knife over a child, may one kill the murderer to save the child? Will not thereby the principle of the “sacredness of human life” be infringed? May one kill the murderer to save oneself? Is an insurrection of oppressed slaves against their masters permissible? . . .

Does life cease to be sacred when it is a question of people talking another language, or does Kautsky consider that mass murders organized on principles of strategy and tactics are not murders at all? Truly it is difficult to put forward in our age a principle more hypocritical and more stupid. As long as human labor power and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains. . . . To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him.

In its war against the people of Vietnam, the United States inflicted unimaginable devastation with its use of carpet bombing, toxic defoliation, and systematic massacres of civilians. Though accurate figures are impossible, one more recent estimate concluded that there were 3.8 million violent war deaths of Vietnamese people, combat and civilian, during the war. The war ended in a victory for the national liberation movement in Vietnam because of a combination of mass protests at home, armed resistance to the US occupation in Vietnam proper, and the disintegration of the US Army as soldiers increasingly refused to fight in an unjust war. During the first Christmas of the First World War, German and British soldiers, disobeying their officers, laid down their weapons and fraternized in “no man’s land.” The Russian Revolution of 1917 forced Russia out of the First World War and sparked revolts of workers in Germany and other countries, including mass fraternization between soldiers of opposing countries. This kind of international struggle and solidarity is the key to ending war.

Internationalism

The Communist Manifesto ends with the resounding phrase, “Workers of the world, unite.” This was not simply a moral appeal. Capitalism has created a world working class in the hundreds of millions from whose labor the profits of the world’s multinationals derive. Workers face the same essential conditions the world over. Whether their pay is high or low, all workers are exploited. They therefore have a common interest that spans national borders, in spite of their national differences.

Some argue that the plunder of one nation by another precludes working-class solidarity, because the workers in the plundering nation benefit from the plunder. The steady decline of living standards for American workers, the growing gap between rich and poor and the diversion of social spending toward military spending and corporate welfare make this argument today seem out of touch with reality.

Workers in Europe and the United States, so the argument goes, are better paid because they are somehow benefiting from the comparatively lower pay of workers in Mexico. It is true that an autoworker in the United States and an autoworker in Mexico working at the same level of productivity receive different wages, but they are both exploited, and by the same masters. Indeed, in many cases, well-paid workers are as exploited—in terms of how much surplus work they perform for the bosses— as low-paid workers, if not more. The lowest pay is usually associated with industries that are the most “labor intensive,” that is, where the rate of exploitation is lowest because less labor-saving machinery is employed. The inequality of wages worldwide acts to the detriment of the world working class because it permits capitalists to pit lower-paid workers against higher-paid ones. A rise in the standard of living for any section of the working class, on the other hand, cannot but benefit all.

Capitalism’s economic crises are also increasingly global in scope. That means that struggle also takes on an increasingly international character. In the mid-1840s, when industrial capitalism was limited to Britain and parts of mainland Europe, a series of revolutions spread across Europe. They were bourgeois revolutions, and they ended in defeat, but in each country the working class emerged for the first time as a social force to be reckoned with.

Again, in 1917, the Russian Revolution sparked international revolution. Coming on the heels of world war and economic hardship, it set off a world conflagration. German workers rose up and overthrew the Kaiser, setting up workers’ councils similar to the Russian soviets. There were soviets in Hungary and Finland before the revolution was crushed. Workers in Italy formed factory councils, and in 1920 came to the brink of revolution before they were undercut by moderate socialists. “The whole of Europe,” fretted British prime minister Lloyd George, “is filled with the spirit of revolution.” The war and the Russian Revolution also set off anticolonial revolts in India, Ireland, and elsewhere. Victor Serge described the atmosphere of both bourgeois panic and revolutionary hope in 1918:

The newspapers of the period are astonishing. Each day, in large type with headlines across the page, they carry last-minute dispatches, vague rumors picked up in Stockholm by anxious ears: riots in Paris, riots in Lyon, revolution in Belgium, revolution in Constantinople, victory of the Soviets in Bulgaria, rioting in Copenhagen. In fact, the whole of Europe is in movement; clandestine or open Soviets are appearing everywhere, even in the Allied armies; everything is possible, everything. On 15 October, Vorovsky telegraphs Zinoviev from Stockholm: Revolution builds up in France (so runs the headline of his dispatch in the newspapers); “a workers’ popular movement began two days ago, and is spreading energetically in Paris. . . . The workers are demanding the immediate release of all political prisoners. . . . A Soviet of Allied soldiers has made contact at the front with the Soviet of German soldiers.”

The division of the world into national states means that struggles in each country have a certain tempo and dynamic that is not identical in timing or character. Revolution starts in one or a few states and then spreads. But as the experience of the Russian Revolution shows, any revolution that remains in isolation cannot survive. Engels made this conclusion as early as 1847, in a question-and-answer piece he wrote that was scrapped for the Communist Manifesto: “Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth . . . into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.”

The call for workers to unite across national boundaries, then, is not merely a moral appeal. The material condition for socialism—abundance—exists on a world scale, but not within the confines of national borders. This is true because economic development is extremely uneven, with enormous wealth and productive power concentrated in some regions far more than others. Any country that attempts to fall back on its own resources quickly finds that its production system is too lopsided and incomplete to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Having been shaped in connection with the world economy, one country finds it doesn’t produce enough agricultural products and must import them; another, not enough machinery and spare parts. The problem, moreover, is most acute for countries that were colonies in the past, because their economies were distorted by the needs of the country that exploited them, which usually meant turning them into sources of cheap labor and raw materials, and retarding their industrial development. Cuba, for example, remained dependent on sugar exports for 80 percent of its capital needs for decades. First dependent on the United States, it later depended on Russia for substantial support. But even then, it has never been able to create a fully diversified industrialized economy. This is the reason why the Marxist movement always argued—until Stalinism distorted and inverted the message—that there cannot be isolated pockets of socialist development.