22 June 2026
An IBT delegation attended a three-day conference in Paris on 15–17 May 2026 organized by a promoting committee including the Italian group Lotta Comunista and the French NPA-R, and attended by over 30 organizations. Below is the text of our written submission to the conference (sent to the organizers in early March), on which our speech on the main discussion topic “Imperialist militarisation and social war against the world proletariat” was based.
In French: Rivalité inter-impérialiste et tâches des socialistes prolétariens
Related articles:
China: A Very Deformed Workers’ State: our summary speech focusing on the nature of China, which featured strongly as a point of contention during the discussion;
Youth, Program & Class: a speech we gave at a separate session on youth movements and the practical intervention of revolutionaries.
When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, he sought to deliver a eulogy for the American empire, whose existence he openly admitted only now as he stood at its deathbed. Rather than simply lauding the post-WWII configuration of the imperial system, however, he acknowledged that it had always been based on a fraud—a “lie” that “middle powers” like Canada, Britain, Germany or France repeated because it served their own interests. Carney tried to persuade his fellow denizens of the dying US-led order to follow him on the path away from an illiberal array of “fortresses.” These words echoed throughout the capitals of Europe, whose leaders are attempting to deal not only with the tariffs imposed on them by their “ally” in Washington but with US President Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland and his attempts to leave Europe to deal with the US/NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
The integration of “middle” imperialist powers into the American empire is deep. They rely on US technology, US markets and US dollars, and are heavily connected to the American military-industrial-intelligence complex through NATO and other institutions (e.g., Five Eyes, AUKUS, Quad). Thus, despite the enormous damage that is being done to their economies, and despite the desire for what Carney called a “rupture” with the US, these states continue to be locked into the structures of American imperial dominance. It is perhaps not surprising that Britain, France, Germany and, yes, Canada all issued statements of (somewhat reluctant) support to the US-Israeli war on Iran, despite the fact that there are significant differences in the material interests of European and American capital over the extent to which it is worth destabilizing the entire Middle East and spiking energy costs in order to promote Israeli regional hegemony and diminish Russian and Chinese influence.
Does that mean we live in a world in which inter-imperialist rivalry has been overcome? In 1914, Karl Kautsky suggested in his “Ultra-Imperialism” that “the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race”:
“Hence from the purely economic standpoint it is not impossible that capitalism may still live through another phase, the translation of cartellization into foreign policy: a phase of ultra-imperialism, which of course we must struggle against as energetically as we do against imperialism, but whose perils lie in another direction, not in that of the arms race and the threat to world peace.”
It is undeniable that the Cold War with the Soviet Union, cemented by anticolonial uprisings and the creation of deformed workers’ states in China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere, did lead to something like “a holy alliance of the imperialists,” as Kautsky put it. Yet while this framework held more or less intact for an astounding eight decades, including after the Soviet counterrevolution of 1991, the concept of ultra-imperialism always failed to understand the nature of imperialism.
The proletarian socialist perspective was most thoroughly and consistently articulated by Lenin and his co-thinkers in the Bolshevik party. Lenin argued that imperialism is not fundamentally a “policy” but a stage of capitalist development on a global scale. It is in the nature of modern capitalism, in its “monopoly” phase, to enmesh the whole world in circuits of capital through economic compulsion and the projection of state violence. Increasing global integration generates, paradoxically, a tendency towards divergence of interests between different imperialist states. The uneven character of capitalist development—evident not merely in the different levels of advancement of the great powers and the subordinated countries, but also between the great powers—periodically destabilizes the global order:
“Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German ‘Marxist,’ Kautsky, ‘inter-imperialist’ or ‘ultra-imperialist’ alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars.”
—Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916
Inter-imperialist rivalry was sharpest in the era of protectionism and overt colonialism, but it persisted in muted form after WWII in the era of a US-centered “free trade” empire. As American corporations outcompeted most of their rivals, its imperial planners eschewed protectionism (always selectively, always hypocritically, as Carney admitted) and formal colonies as US imperialism sought to break into the teetering empires of Britain and France, whose “possessions” were already in revolt. While Washington attempted to quash independence movements it believed were “going communist,” and while the global “free trade” regime was always backed by the threat and occasional exercise of military force, American capital mostly sought a flexible and “liberal” arrangement for brutal exploitation of neocolonies.
This framework could not indefinitely withstand differential (“uneven”) growth and development, and it is now unravelling at a rather remarkable pace. US corporations continue to lead, but we no longer live in an era of unrivalled American dominance. China’s economic rise has granted it a significant role in world affairs, with investments across the globe. It has become an industrial powerhouse and major trading partner. Russia, which re-emerged nearly a quarter century ago as an imperialist state, remains comparatively backward but increasingly significant in the global system. Domestically, US capitalism is hollowed out, a shadow of its former self. Even the US Secretary of State has acknowledged the existence of a “multipolar” world.
Trump’s disregard for the post-WWII institutions of American wealth and power projection is worrying to many US capitalists. But his penchant for “transactional” relations with imperialist allies and subordinate countries is more fitted to the objective realities of a waning US imperialism, which is now seeking to preserve its position with protectionism and more direct domination of the Global South. This strategy will sooner or later fail, but that will not lead to a new “liberal” international order. It will only trigger similar moves towards protectionism and exclusive domination of poor countries on the part of “middle” imperialists, resulting in an intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries and ultimately inter-imperialist war. The ruling classes of the middle imperialist powers may be backing the US in the Iran war but, like the war in Ukraine, they are using it to justify rearmament, which is laying the foundations for a “rupture” with Washington.
Indeed, it is inconceivable that the thrashing about of a decaying US imperialism and a rising China will somehow not provoke a massive rupture and the creation of rival blocs. If the likes of Starmer, Macron or Merz are unable to bite the hand that slaps them, there are other political forces the bourgeoisie is holding in reserve. Amid external pressures of a US-led tariff war and a possible global depression triggered by war in the Middle East, the formation of a bloc with, for instance, China and Russia would require new regimes in the middle imperialist countries, led by far-right parties such as Alternative für Deutschland in Germany or Rassemblement National in France. Other reconfigurations of the global order are possible, but eternal stasis within the imperialist camp is not.
Among liberals, social democrats and even many self-described revolutionary socialists who should know better, “imperialism” since WWII has simply meant “American empire.” This Kautskyist “ultra-imperialist” idea is not simply an impressionistic misreading of the situation or a misunderstanding of imperialism; it is ultimately rooted in an abandonment of the belief that the international working class is capable of carrying out its historic mission of expropriating the capitalists and initiating, through its class dictatorship, the transition to the communist mode of production. So instead of recognizing, for instance, that the Ukraine war is a proxy conflict between Western and Russian imperialism in which workers should be dual defeatist, many socialist organizations seeking to be “anti-imperialist” resort to hoping that a Russian victory will weaken the US. Or, instead of viewing the current global instability as the prelude to the emergence of rival imperialist blocs that will ultimately clash in world war, many socialists see something inherently progressive in the demand that their own imperialist state simply withdraw from US-dominated NATO.
We in the International Bolshevik Tendency seek to act as a catalyst for the regroupment of revolutionary forces around a hard communist program. The international elements of such a program must be rooted in consistent opposition to imperialism and include: