24 March 2025
Text and audio of a speech by IBT supporter Barbara Dorn at University College London, 12 March 2025.
It is very timely indeed to be holding a discussion on imperialism. We are right now in the midst of a process of disruption in imperialist alignments, prompted first by the Trump administration’s talk of annexing both Greenland and its imperialist junior partner of Canada and, second, its withdrawal of support to Ukraine and attempted rapprochement with its imperialist rival Russia, and then a dizzying pivot back to Ukraine, in attempts to negotiate a ceasefire.
Meanwhile we have seen desperate attempts by imperialist leaders of the European Union to fill the gaps, with Keir Starmer and Justin Trudeau (just ex-Prime Minister of Canada) trying to keep the connection to the US alive. Donald Trump would like to see a reduction of hostilities (and expense) in Ukraine and the Middle East, with a flow of valuable minerals into US coffers and luxury resorts along an ethnically cleansed Gaza coastline. This would allow him to turn his attention to China, where the still largely centralised and planned economy, despite the distortion of capitalist penetration, competes with Trump's support base in big tech, such as Elon Musk and his friends, in the building of computer chips, AI systems and other technology.
Events are still very much in flux, but there is no doubt that we are living in a world of inter-imperialist rivalry and conflict in which the future of humanity is in grave danger.
This is a world, however, qualitatively similar to that described by Lenin during WWI a hundred years ago in his classic work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. This is a world in which the most powerful states, dominated by monopoly and oligopoly “finance” capital, exploit all the other countries through the export of capital and the realisation of super-profits, backed up by military force and international diplomacy.
Granted, much has happened in the intervening century—WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. And of course the Cold War. The Soviet workers’ state, degenerated as it was—and the replication of its economic and social model after WWII to Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba—took vast swathes of the earth’s surface out of the reach of imperialist exploitation. Until 1991, the inter-imperialist rivalry that Lenin described—the rivalry that led to two world wars—was somewhat muted. Instead, the imperialist powers largely collaborated to counter the threat of the deformed and degenerated workers’ states.
The process of decolonisation (the first indications were noted by Lenin in his work) accelerated in this period. Most colonies, primarily in Asia and Africa, moved from direct occupation by imperialist states to a formal independence yet were still subject to neocolonial exploitation and more covert control.
Counter-revolution in 1991, the end of the Soviet Union, opened up a new era. Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries were left in a state of economic shock and devastation. Many became neocolonies of Western imperialism through the mechanism of the European Union backed up by the military might of NATO.
Russia, too, was expected to be easy prey for imperialist exploitation, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Under Vladamir Putin, utilising copious access to natural resources together with military and civilian infrastructure inherited from the Soviet Union, Russia began pushing its way back to the status of an economically weak imperialist power (which was just as Lenin had characterised it in 1916).
By the time of the war in Georgia in 2008 it was clear this had been achieved. Russia was an imperialist, not in the sense of equivalency with the US, Britain, France or other first-tier imperialist countries, but as a powerful state able to flex its muscles and gain economic benefit from intervening outside its own borders.
This was reinforced in 2014 by events in Ukraine, in which a government inclined to be a client of Russia was replaced by one more acquiescent to the West. At that point, Russia took the precaution of securing Crimea and its naval port at Sevastopol. Meanwhile, Russian influence expanded from its “near-abroad” (the countries close to it) to the Middle East, Africa and even South America.
We characterise the ongoing war in Ukraine as an inter-imperialist conflict, in which the US, Britain and their NATO allies are using Ukraine as a proxy to wage war against an imperialist rival, Russia. We call for the defeat of both sides—not neutrality, but the defeat of both sides. That defeat has to be carried out through the action of their own working classes, in preventing weapons manufacture and transport, soldiers turning against their officers, and a mass militant anti-war movement.
Of course, our emphasis is primarily on the defeat of our “own” governments and its allies. Here, today, in Britain, we oppose Starmer’s efforts to compensate for the US pulling out (or not pulling out) of Ukraine and assurances of British support. We call for British troops out of Ukraine—and there are British troops in Ukraine—and no more arms transports. Not a penny, not a person for imperialist war. And if the International Bolshevik Tendency had a Russian section, which we sadly do not, they would act in a symmetrical fashion against their own imperialist rulers.
But some leftists today are failing to recognise this multi-polar world—that it has become a time of imperialist conflicts. They are stuck in a unipolar world, as we saw in the Cold War. They say that Russia cannot possibly be imperialist, that it is a betrayal of opposition to our own states to call Russia imperialist. This leads them to argue that Russian workers should fight for the victory of their own ruling class, should fight for the victory of one imperialist state against another.
I bring this up because we often hear the refrain “Why don’t all you communists just get together?” These differences are important. Fighting on different sides of the barricades in Ukraine is no basis for the building of a serious communist organisation. These differences are real.
I assume all here agree with the necessity of building a communist party in Britain capable of carrying out a revolution, a section of a revolutionary international. To do this we need to first understand the world we live in and, second, have a plan for what to do about it. We call that plan a programme—and clarity on our tasks relating to imperialism is the backbone of that programme today.
We cannot build a communist party with those who support one imperialist state against another, whether it is defending Russia out of some kind of reverse nationalism or those so-called leftists who actually call on the British government to send more weapons to Ukraine.
A key aspect of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which also applies today in its essence, is that of the labour aristocracy. Lenin argued that imperialism provides a material basis for a layer of the working class within the imperialist countries to be bought off with a small proportion of the spoils of exploitation. That layer is politically represented by the trade-union bureaucracy and social-democracy—here by the Labour Party. We have seen the way that Starmer postures as chief imperialist power-broker—Labour is a pro-imperialist party through and through.
After the betrayal of social-democratic parties in supporting their own rulers in WWI, Lenin argued for a split in the workers’ movement along political lines. We cannot build a communist party with those who believe that capitalism will be overthrown via a Labour victory in a general election.
In the non-imperialist countries, the equivalent is the national bourgeoisie, who rule (somewhat reluctantly) on behalf of their imperialist masters—again bought off with spoils of exploitation. A key pillar of the communist programme is to defend non-imperialist countries under attack from imperialism, military resistance in Palestine, the Middle East and Africa and victory for any who fight against imperialism.
But we give no political support to these forces—instead we call for class struggle within the non-imperialist world, just as in the imperialist countries. Only the working class can defeat imperialism and its proxies. We cannot build a party with those who uncritically cheer for Hamas, “the Syrian revolution” etc.
Political beliefs are not fixed—we’re here to debate them. Beliefs are built out of objective reality and can change with that reality. We build the communist party we need by fighting for a consistent anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist programme, that is the key—in which the working class independently fights for its own emancipation.
Related articles
US Election: Imperialism & War (4 November 2024)
Inching towards World War III: US imperialism targets Russia & China (1917 No.47)
Revolutionaries & Imperialist War: IBT study class (1917 No.45)