Capitalism and imperialism
imagine, we would in similar situations. Food riots broke out, as a debt over 225% of the GDP, alongside forced structural adjustment, drove a country with schools, hospitals, education infrastructure, and a copper mining industry into serious poverty.
Debts to the IMF funnel off taxpayer money to the hands of the bourgeois, prevent nations from funding their infrastructure, and force them to be politically and economically compliant. The IMF not only makes profit, but forms spheres of influence by which the USA can keep its world power and dictate to countries, so that they may help the USA make as much profit as possible off the backs of the working class. When the poverty and corruption in these nations engendered by the debt leads to uprisings or political crises, there is always a friendly American face to insert its troops, extract resources, and inject its money and corporations in the aftermath, securing economic power over the infrastructure of the nation in crisis. As Immortal Technique, the American rapper, says, ‘imperialism is sponsored by corporations – that’s why Halliburton gets paid to rebuild nations’. We can easily forget exactly how brutal capitalism is, here in the west: although poverty rates continue to rise and the suffering of western proletarians keeps compounding, the conditions we are subjected to are less brutal, and there’s a significantly larger ‘middle class’ here, composed of those workers compensated enough by their exploiters to provide themselves with housing, food, and a degree of leisure – even if their existence, just like anyone else’s, is dependent on their continued labour and participation in bourgeois economies. To evaluate how ‘successful’ capitalism is in providing for the people, it is worth looking, instead, at Africa, at Asia, at Latin America, where free market policies have been forced on the people. I have noted how important it is to have a fluid understanding of imperialism, and this is especially crucial here. Imperialism can be seen not in abstract terms, but in concrete reality through the IMF and its practices. This same underlying process occurred in Iraq, Vietnam, the Congo, and it is no less brutal in hitting the people just because there aren’t boots on the ground. Just as war is the continuation of politics by other means, as Clausewitz highlights, imperialism is not just military force, and not just the export of cultural values and institutions; it is, equally, imposed financial policies, intimidation, loans, investment from foreign banks. The imperialism of WWI, of Ukraine, even, is becoming out of date, and to meaningfully challenge imperialism, we have to understand that this is the primary way that it is applied today.
Why only Marxism can slay imperialism
So, why is it that only Marxism can slay imperialism? Because, as I hope to have shown, the natural conclusion of free markets is oligopoly, globalization, the export of capital to foreign nations and the protection of capital’s interests with coercion, wi th loans, and with military force, by protecting spheres of influence, through the state. The idea, then, that we can end imperialism with ‘democracy’, in a democratic system that works to protect bourgeois interests, business interests, or the idea that we can end it with ‘free, equal international competition in the market’, given that market economies inevitably lead to the death of free competition and to inequality, is misguided and plain wrong. Imperialism is not merely a policy we can stop doing within a capitalist system. Some have already tried to make capitalism greener, nicer, and less imperialist; that has not worked, because imperialism, like climate change, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, homelessness, poverty, privatization, and all the ills of our modern capitalist society are either inevitable consequences or essential tools of
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