There are today many sectors of the Western “left” – from Trotskyites, to Western “Marxists,” to Dogmatic Marxist-Leninists – who classify Russia and China as imperialist based on criteria they abstract from Lenin’s famous 1917 text, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. At the root of this classification – which I consider to be not only erroneous, but topsy-turvy – is a dogmatic understanding of Lenin’s views on imperialism, as I will explore below.

The way the title itself has been translated is misleading, for it suggests a teleological tone which depicts the stage of capitalism Lenin is writing about as the final form the mode of life will take. However, the original Russian, Новейший, suggests instead of the final or last stage, the latest stage, as in, the most advanced stage – so far – of capitalism. While Lenin understood imperialism to be moribund capitalism and corresponded to the age of working class and anti-colonial revolution, there is nothing in his work suggesting that imperialism itself is not capable of evolving.

In Lenin’s time imperialism was characterized as monopoly capitalism, where the dominance of finance capital emerges, where export of capital – instead of commodities (as with the British Empire) – becomes primary, and where the world is partitioned amongst great imperialist powers struggling to expand their spheres of influence. This predicament produced fertile ground for inter-imperialist conflicts, where different great powers would clash with each other over how their imperial spoils – i.e., their colonization of the global south – would be divided. The carnage of the First World War was the immediate example Lenin had before him, as bullets were still flying at the time of his writing of Imperialism.

For his time, Lenin could not have been more correct. Imperialism was not simply a political policy (as the Kautskyites held), but an integral development of the capitalist mode of life itself. It was not leading towards peace between an international cartel of great imperialist powers, neatly collaborating as they dominated and looted the whole world. Spoils were still up for grabs, and while capitalism had entered its monopoly stage, in its most embryonic form it still contained within it the remnants of competition, that is, the competition of great powers over the partition of the world.

War, therefore, was not only a possibility but a necessary outcome of this deadlock. It took two forms: 1) wars of national liberation, which would include wars of colonized peoples against imperialism, but also, after the Bolshevik Revolution, wars between the Socialist and Capitalist blocs, and 2) wars between great imperialist powers, given that the “winner” in the global partition of the colonized world had not yet been settled. When Lenin speaks of inter-imperialist conflicts and of the corresponding positions workers should take in the face of these, he is speaking within a specific context that cannot be forgotten.

As with all things in Marxism, the Marxist analysis of imperialism has its life sucked out of it if it is reduced to the conclusions Lenin arrived at in his specific context. The heart and soul of Marxism are not these conclusions, but the method, the worldview, through which all affairs come to be understood. For Marxism, the world is in a constant state of change propelled by immanent contradictions. All things in that world are interconnected and interdependent to all other things. Nothing, for Marxism, could be accurately understood if abstracted from its context, from the dynamic environment it is embedded in, and from how that environment changes and is changed by the intercourse of the contradictions that make up entities-in-processes and those that situate their setting.

In other words, dogmatism is, by its very essence, contrary to Marxism. To hold as sacrosanct contextual statements made by Marx, Engels, or Lenin, and then to foist those onto contexts which are sustained by new, more refined contradictions and relations, is to participate in the most un-Marxist form of thinking – it is to think through what I have called the purity fetish, i.e., through the idealization of an abstract pure ideal which you disconnect from the context it was developed in and hold superior to reality itself.

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This is precisely what the Western “leftists” do when they classify contemporary Russia or China as “imperialist.” Hence, something like the special military operation – which in reality is anti-imperialist through and through – comes to be considered as an “inter-imperialist” conflict. How is such an inversion of the world accomplished? Through dogmatism, that is, through abstracting the famous five “characteristics” that Lenin articulated about the imperialism of his time, and foisting these onto Russia or China. This is fetishistic thinking through and through, since it treats these characteristics in a reified manner which gives them qualities of their own suspended from the relations they are premised on, and the larger system that establishes these relations. Lenin was not “defining” imperialism through these characteristics, but analyzing – through an ascension from the abstract to the concrete – the imperialist system which constituted the latest stage of capitalism he was able to observe, and wherein these characteristics obtained specific functions to reproduce the system as a whole. It is not those five characteristics which constitute what imperialism is, it is the system as a whole which constitutes the meaning those characteristics will have for its reproduction.

When Western “Leftists” try to checklist characteristics in Russia or China’s international relations to map it onto Lenin’s five characteristics, the relation of effectivity, or the indices of effectivity (as Althusser called it), which Lenin operated with is inversed. Instead of the system as a whole having primacy over certain characteristics it comes to employ for its reproduction, the characteristics themselves are considered as primary, that is, as that which comes to determine what the system is. This is the same problem of abstract universal thinking which individuals who consider markets to be the same as capitalism perform. Instead of seeing markets as a universal institutional form that functions differently in accordance with the particular social system it is embedded in (i.e., an understanding of them as concrete or rooted universal), it abstracts an institutional form from a larger social system, and then sophistically turns the one into the other. This is little different than saying a monastery is a nightclub just because it has music.

The real question which is never posed by the dogmatist of the Western “Left” is the question every actual Marxist-Leninist must continuously ask themselves: how has the world evolved, and therefore, how must our theoretical apparatus for understanding it correspondingly develop.

It appears to me that the imperialist stage Lenin correctly assessed in 1917 undergoes a partially qualitative development in the post-war years with the development of the Bretton Woods system. This does not make Lenin “wrong,” it simply means that his object of study – which he correctly assessed at his time of writing – has undertaken developments which force any person committed to the same Marxist worldview to correspondingly refine their understanding of imperialism. Bretton Woods transforms imperialism from an international to a global phenomenon, embodied no longer through imperialist great powers, but through global financial institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) controlled by the U.S. and structured with dollar hegemony at its core.

With Bretton Woods, and then with Nixon’s 1971 move away from the gold-standard, imperialism becomes synonymous with U.S. unipolarity and hegemonism. This means that the dominance of finance which Lenin wrote about, had intensified into a U.S. dominated global financial system. Whether we want to call this transition super imperialism – as Michael Hudson does – or something else is largely irrelevant. What matters is that capitalism has developed into a higher stage, that the imperialism Lenin wrote of is no longer the “latest” stage of capitalism, that it has given way – through its immanent dialectical development – to a new form marked by a deepening of its characteristic foundation in finance capital. We are finally in the era of capitalist-imperialism Marx predicted in Volume Three of Capital, where the dominant logic of accumulation has fully transformed from M-C-M’ to M-M’, that is, from productive capital to interest-bearing, parasitic finance capital.

Today, the lion’s share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest. The U.S. can run perpetual deficits without the normal constraints other nations face, effectively getting the rest of the world to finance its military spending and overseas investments. Instead of weakening the U.S., the deficits tie other countries’ financial systems to the dollar, reinforcing its geopolitical and economic dominance. The U.S. could print in less than a second more money than any country could produce in a span of years of real investment in labor, resources, and time. This is what imperialism is today. Its skeletal body are the global financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, institutions that only the U.S. has – in the last instance – control over. Neither China nor Russia could leverage these global financial apparatuses to enforce their so-called “imperial” interests. On the contrary, these institutions are often utilized by the U.S. as a weapon against them and their allies.

With such an understanding of how capitalism has developed into a higher stage of super imperialism, and consequently, of what imperialism actually looks like today, it is absurd to speak about Russian, Chinese, or any other type of imperialism that is not U.S. imperialism (which includes, of course, its puppets in Europe and the Zionist entity). Imperialism today is nothing more than U.S. hegemonism and unipolar power. There is no longer any possibility of “inter-imperialist” conflict. War today is between the U.S. empire and its lackeys, and the anti-imperialist bloc – which is ideologically, politically, and economically heterogeneous.

The U.S. dominated capitalist-imperialist global system situates Russia and China not as imperialist powers, but as anti-imperialist great powers (a category Hugo Chavez long ago developed). The Russian SMO, China’s unwillingness to fold under U.S. imperial pressure, the axis of resistance in West Asia, all of these (and many more) are coordinate points where the contradictions in the world – between the U.S. imperial bloc and the heterogeneous anti-imperialist states of the global south – work themselves out. Today the planet as a whole develops on the basis of the unfolding of the contradictions present in the struggle between U.S. imperialism and global anti-imperialism.

Therefore, far from Russia and China being imperialist, they are, on the contrary, the cutting edge of anti-imperialist struggles. Just as we cannot stay neutral to the form the class struggle takes within the nation between capitalists and workers, that is, just as we must all reckon with Florence Reece’s question (popularized by Pete Seeger): “which side are you on?” – globally we are faced with the same question, “which side are you on… are you with U.S. imperialism, or with the heterogenous and impure collection of states struggling against it?” There is no third alternative, just as the petty-bourgeois position of rejecting the class struggle between the workers and capitalists is an indirect way of supporting the principal aspect of that contradiction, i.e., the capitalists. Today the Western “Leftist” discourse of Russian and Chinese imperialism is simply another form of objectively supporting the greatest evil on this planet, the dominant world system – U.S. hegemonic imperialism.