The "Return" of Imperialism
Rob Wilkie
18
The Material
Anatomy of Dis/Ability
Julie Torrant
Why Feminism Needs to Abandon its Bourgeois Illusions about the Concrete
Jennifer Cotter
In his first year since returning to the Presidency of the United States, Donald Trump's self-proclaimed "Donroe Doctrine" has seen the United States kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, push Cuba to the brink of collapse, threaten to send troops to "take" Greenland and Canada, and in February 2026, along with the butcher of Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu, launch a war to inflict "regime compliance" on Iran.
The militaristic bluntness of Trump's foreign policy has led many in the bourgeois news media to talk about the "return" of imperialism. Max Boot, for instance, writes in The Washington Post that Trump's foreign policy, "smacks of 19th century imperialism, devoid of any lofty justifications about spreading Christianity and Western civilization" ("Trump was an imperialist all along"); Aamer Madhani writes for the Associated Press, "Trump's rhetoric harkens back to the muscular talk of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when American presidents deployed the military for territorial and resource conquests, including to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic" ("After Maduro capture, Trump's tough talk evokes a return to the days of American imperialism"); and Edward Wong writes in The New York Times, "it is a resurrection of the mission of empire — acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples — that animated European and other well-armed powers up to the 20th century" ("Trump's Foreign Policy: Resurrecting Empire").
The idea that Trump's foreign policy somehow represents a "return" to overtly militaristic forms of U.S. imperialism that had disappeared for more than a century would, of course, come as quite the surprise to the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, where in 2016 alone the United States military dropped 26,172 bombs at the direction of Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.S. President Barack Obama ("How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2016?"). This does not even include the other countries where the United States either inflicted or attempted to inflict regime change in the second half of the 20th century, including Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Grenada, Panama, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Haiti, North Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam,…
The reality is that the "return" to the discourse of imperialism is partly a cynical enterprise which attempts to create the appearance of difference between the two bourgeois parties in the United States—painting Trump as an aberration from an otherwise "peaceful" and "reticent" American foreign policy. That there is in actuality no daylight between the two when it comes to the imperial war machine is reflected in Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer's absurd post on social media two days before the U.S. launched its military invasion of Iran trying to goad Trump into war, titled "If TACO Trump Is Already Folding On Iran, Americans Need To Know" and the Democrats' subsequent decision to withhold a congressional vote on a series of "War Powers" resolutions until well after the war had already begun.
The discourse around the "return" of imperialism also attempts to create the appearance of a difference between the twin forms of capitalist economic coercion: the "imperialism of the dollar," which imposes compliance through the bourgeois "freedom" of the market, and the militaristic "imperialism of the bomb." However, as Marx explains, one is not ever far from the other: "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked" ("The future results of British Rule in India" 221). The so-called "return" of militaristic forms of imperialism is the form that capitalist coercion takes when the "dull compulsion of economic relations" (Marx, Capital 726) fails to achieve its desired ends. What we are witnessing in the so-called "return" of imperialist wars of aggression is an effect of the heightening contradictions between the forces and relations of production explained by Marx in Capital in terms of the increasing productivity of labor leading to the decreasing profitability of capital. This fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production is causing a "re-negotiation" by force amongst the imperialist powers over control of the global economy—an imperialism which, during the period of globalization, bourgeois theory on the left and the right sought to convince everyone no longer existed by distracting them through the playful deconstruction of concepts into pun-cepts ("imperialism is over," replaced by "Empire," "techno-feudalism," "hyper-imperialism,"...).
On the one hand, the more overt apologists of capital argued in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic period from 1990 through 2020 that has come to be known as "globalization" represented the "end of history" (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man) and the beginnings of a "flat world," a global economic system that ended the conflict between capital and labor, bringing with it a new post-nationalist political order in which "the advent and spread of just-in-time global supply chains in the flat world are an even greater restraint on geopolitical adventurism" (Friedman, The World is Flat 420). If "imperialism" existed, it was in the long-distant past. Globalization represented "a new world of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which market information will be plentiful and transaction costs low" (Gates, The Road Ahead 158).
On the other hand, this same capitalist triumphalism was echoed in an "inverted" form by the North Atlantic Left which for decades promoted the theory that in the era of globalized capitalism "Imperialism is over" (Hardt and Negri, Empire xiv) and that capitalism had moved beyond imperialist conflict into a period strikingly similar to the one erroneously described by Karl Kautsky in 1914 as "ultra-imperialism," a time when "the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race" and join together into post-national monopolies ("Ultra-Imperialism"). According to Hardt and Negri, this post-imperialist "Empire" put "an end to colonialism and imperialism" (43) because there was no longer any "outside" to the universality of capitalism that the imperialist powers could take hold of. It was such that the "task" of the left, they argued, was to "be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics" (46) and instead seek out "the potentials for liberation that exist within Empire" (46). As Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism" was demolished by the reality of two World Wars, the bourgeois theory of "globalization" and Hardt and Negri's "post-imperialist" theory of "Empire" are now shown to have been what they always were—an attempt to disarm the working class in their fight against capitalism by preaching that there was no longer any alternative than a pragmatic reformism.
While the neoliberal economic order of globalization was designed to transform sectors of the global work force into investment zones for the advanced sectors of capital to take advantage of "cheap" productive labor in the global South, the "friction-free" economic order of the "flat world" was always maintained by a military system that even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney publicly recognized in 2026 at a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, stating in the language of Plato's "noble lie,"
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
In other words, the free trade of globalization was always dependent upon the might of the U.S. military to enforce capitalism's "rules-based order" on the world.
What is "different" now that is that with the threat to the economic hegemony of the United States that comes from China's economic rise and the subsequent increasing costs to production that come from a rising living standard in the industrial center of the digital economy, it has become necessary for the more overt imperialism of the bomb to return as globalization's imperialism of the dollar has begun to falter. In this, Trump's actions have put an end to the empty illusions promoted by bourgeois pundits and echoed by those on the North Atlantic Left that the fall of the Soviet Union represented the potential for a post-imperialist world order.
Erased in the accounts of the "return" of imperialism on the left and the right is that imperialism isn't simply colonialism and militarism. What Lenin's theory of imperialism explains is that the idea that imperialism is only a "striving for annexations" is "very incomplete" because it focuses solely on the "political" conflicts between nations and to understand imperialism, one must be "interested in the economic aspect of the question" (Imperialism 268). As Lenin outlines, imperialism reflects, "capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed" (266-267). In other words, the fundamental contradiction between capital and labor—which is reflected in the development of contradiction between the forces and relations of production—is the economic foundation which drives capitalism to find ways to overcome the pressures on profitability resulting from its own internal processes of increasing production through technological advances, on the one hand, and a resulting falling rate of profit, on the other, that ultimately lead to economic monopolization at home and eventually to war abroad.
Imperialist war is driven by the same contradiction between capital and labor that drives capitalism in its more "peaceful" moments, and which is reflected in the flows of foreign direct investment from the Global North to the Global South and loans through the IMF and World Bank. As such, foreign conquest and war is one just form that capitalism in its imperialist stage takes, and it becomes particularly pronounced, as in the contemporary moment, when the avenues for the expansion of profitability through increasing productivity are stagnant, and capital must find alternative ways of lowering the costs of production. As Lenin explains, "Finance capital and the trusts do not diminish but increase the differences in the rate of growth of the various parts of the world economy. Once the relation of forces is changed, what other solution of the contradictions can be found under capitalism than that of force?" (274).
For example, the U.S. seizing of Venezuelan oil or its launching a war on Iran are designed to gain control over the cost of labor globally by controlling one of the critical resources of production (energy) at a time when most of the other imperialist economies are stagnating and the United States, despite being one of the few maintaining some level of growth in the post-Covid economic malaise that has hit the other capitalist economies, is nonetheless facing a future in which it risks falling behind the productive forces of China. In addition to the threat from China, U.S. capital also clearly sees this moment as an opportunity to weaken its European competitors, thus Trump's stoking of imperialist rivalry in his belligerence and dismissiveness toward the other imperialist countries that make up NATO and the European Union. As such, just as Lenin explains that "an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony" (269), the bloody imperialist "excursions" launched by Trump are designed to slow China's growing productive capacity and to diminish European capital by disrupting the global supply chains that depend upon the uninterrupted flow of oil and liquid natural gas.
In this way, Trump's imperialist endeavors cannot be reduced to his belligerent personality or the cartoonish buffoonery of his advisors. The reality is that Trump's imperialist bluster reflects the fact that, as Marxist economist Michael Roberts writes, U.S. capitalism is suffering from a stagnating economy whose structural contradictions neither Biden's "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act" and "Chips and Science Act," nor Trump's import tariffs and his "Big Beautiful Bill," all of which have attempted to bolster American industry and productivity gains, can overcome. He writes,
The IMF economists reckon US real GDP will rise just 2.0% this year, down from 2.8% in 2024, and then increase by just 2.1% next year. And that's the best performance expected in the top G7 capitalist economies, with Germany, France, Italy and Japan likely to record less than a 1% increase this year and next. Canada will also slow to well under 2% – only the UK will improve (to a very modest 1.3% this year and next). But even these forecasts are in doubt as the outlook "remains fragile, and risks remain tilted to the downside". The IMF is worried about: 1) a burst in the AI bubble; 2) a productivity slowdown in China; and 3) rising government debt and servicing. ("Depression and Creative Destruction")
In the absence of productive investment that can raise the rate of profit, something which has not yet resulted from the billions invested in the "AI Revolution" ("The AI productivity boom is not here (yet)"), U.S. capital must turn to re-organizing the global market, through force if necessary, even if it ultimately means destroying the global economy in the process. As Lenin again writes, "what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?" (275-276).
In fact, Trump's domestic anti-immigration policy is driven by the same concerns over reducing the costs of production. Immigrants who make it to the United States, despite the depressed and illegal wages they are often paid, nonetheless are more "expensive" to capital than labor which remains in the global South. Trump's anti-immigration policy is really a cost of labor policy—he wants to return immigrant workers to their country of origin to ensure a supply of cheap labor abroad that can be substituted when necessary for increasingly expensive labor in the rising economies of Southeast Asia. The anti-immigration policy is for this reason part and parcel of Trump's imperialist "Greater North America" project, in which, as "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth states, "every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, is not part of the 'Global South.' It is our immediate security perimeter in this great neighborhood that we all live in" ("Remarks").
Similarly, Trump's tariff plan to revitalize American manufacturing is designed to attempt to lower labor costs in two ways—first, by increasing the productivity of U.S. labor by directing investment in technological advances to the productive sectors of the economy, and second, by lowering the living standards of workers in the United States as the tariffs are really more a "flat tax" on consumption that raises living costs rather than an actual industrial policy (Bivens). While Trump is leaving the former entirely to the "invisible hand" of the market absent any national industrial policy, he openly acknowledges the latter when he says, "Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally" (Boak). The "problem," as Engels points out, is that protectionism in a capitalist economy "become[s] an unbearable shackle to any country aspiring, with a chance of success, to hold its own in the world market" (536), that in the "home" market eventually "Wages…must rise in consequence of the rise in all necessaries caused by protection" (532), and as he writes in a note in Capital, Vol. III, the turn to "the protective tariff policy, by which every industrial country shuts itself off from all others" results only in "general chronic overproduction, depressed prices, falling and even wholly disappearing profits" (435). Protectionism, especially in an advanced economy, is a sign, in other words, not of an economy that is strong, but one that is faltering and unable to compete. It indicates that, as Engels puts it, "the old boasted freedom of competition has reached the end of its tether and must itself announce its obvious, scandalous bankruptcy" (435). The bellicose expansion of markets abroad and peaceful market protectionism at home are part of the same global class policy to bolster the declining profitability of US capital by lowering the value of labor power worldwide. This is the unipolar service US capital provides in the midst of multipolar capital rivalry that reveals why "the workers have no country."
And yet, having failed in its attempts to convince workers that imperialism is dead, the North Atlantic left is now trying to convince workers of the even more absurd idea that "capital is dead" and we are in "a postcapitalist mode of production" (Wark, Capital is Dead 79). Jodi Dean, for example, writes in her book, Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, "Capitalist relations and forces of production are undergoing systemic transformation and transitioning into a different mode of production" (5). According to Dean, in the post-productive "servitude" economy "rents and predation are more effective accumulation strategies than commodity production" (9). It is such that she argues the left should turn away from the Marxist theory of class as an objective economic relation to the means of production on the grounds that "the rise of new forms of servitude and exploitation" (65) means that "class no longer functions as a powerful political identity" (16) and instead the left must refocus on "a neofeudal order with new lords and a sector of servants" (10).
Even that supposed critic of "Western Marxism," Domenico Losurdo, takes as his starting point a rejection of capitalism as a mode of production based upon the fundamental division of property between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In his book Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, for example, Losurdo questions the principle that "class struggle refers exclusively to the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie" (4). Asking, "was this Marx and Engels' view?" Losurdo writes, "the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie is but one class struggle among others and the latter, running throughout world history, are by no means a feature exclusively of bourgeois, industrial society" (4). Throughout the book, Losurdo attempts to erase the property relation between owners and workers from Marxism, which he calls "the binary logic into which, notwithstanding their theoretical premises, [Marx and Engels] sometimes lapse" (121). Thus, Losurdo, for all his bluster, is ultimately no different than the "Western Marxists" he rails against. Like many of the "New Left," he turns away from the so-called "reductiveness" of the binary of class and toward the idea that social struggles are "always characterized by a variegated multiplicity of conflicts; and any conflict involves the presence of a multiplicity of social subjects, who express different, opposing interests and ideas" (121).
It is their turn away from class that has led writers like Dean, Losurdo, and others among the North Atlantic Left to support an eclectic mix of reactionary social forces of religious fundamentalism and bourgeois nationalism as the only remaining "alternatives" to imperialism. Dean, for instance, writes that "at this moment we should follow the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas in its role in the Palestinian liberation movement" ("Leadership and Liberation: An Exchange"), and Losurdo argues "Far from being based on a single 'relation of coercion', the world capitalist system is a tangle of multiple and contradictory 'relations of coercion'" (115) and that "Oppressed nations are summoned to be the antagonists of the second great class struggle for emancipation" (15). Žižek, one of the leading theorists dedicated to producing a "Marxism without Marxism," has chimed in to declare the necessity of supporting the theocracy in Iran on the grounds that, "Iran is now de facto fighting not just for its own sovereignty, but for the global principle of sovereignty" ("Iran From Heidegger to Kant"). Even Isabel Ringrose of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.K. defends a "campist" theory of imperialism, writing in defense of Hamas, "We are for the Palestinian resistance always and everywhere, even if it does not accept our views on other matters. Anything less is a collapse into pro-imperialism" ("Free Palestine: Why we say by any means necessary").
"Campism" has reemerged among the North Atlantic Left as little more than a radical-sounding alibi for their abandoning of the class theory of capitalism and the revolutionary force of the proletariat and replacing it with a class-less political theory of a world divided between "imperialists" and "anti-imperialists." As John Molyneux writes,
The term "campism" comes from an outlook that sees the world divided into two basic camps – an imperialist camp headed by the US, and an antiimperialist camp. There are different versions of the campist position, but the tendency is to see the division between imperialism and anti-imperialism as the primary division in the world and as overriding class divisions within countries. There is in this view only one significant imperialist pole, that headed by US imperialism and including NATO and its other allies. It includes the UK and the EU and other countries such as Australia, Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as countries in the Global South headed by governments which side with the US in matters of foreign policy. The anti-imperialist camp is made up of those countries that have placed themselves or found themselves standing in opposition to the imperialist camp. This ranges from Cuba to Russia, China, Syria, Libya (under Ghaddafi), Venezuela, Bolivia (under Morales and his supporters), Nicaragua and maybe others. (16, emphasis added)
To the so-called "anti-imperialist" camp, we can now add the repressive theocracy in Iran, as well as the Islamist movements in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Gaza (Hamas). What this confused hodgepodge shows is that the "campists" have no concerns regarding the consequences for the working class who live under these regimes. It is not capitalism that campists are opposed to, only "American" capitalism. In a sense, campists share a similar economic outlook as Trump's tariff policy but just in an inverted form, one in which, as Marx writes, the message to workers is "It is better to be exploited by one's fellow-countrymen than by foreigners" ("Protectionists" 280). This is because the same abandonment of the proletariat that drives the North Atlantic Left to promote "alternative" forces for social change, such as the theocratic rulers in Iran and the autocratic capitalist regimes like Syria and Russia, "serves only as a preamble to propaganda for peace and unity with the opportunists and the social-chauvinists, precisely for the reason that it evades and obscures the very profound and fundamental contradictions of imperialism" (Lenin, Imperialism 293).
The representation of Hamas, for instance, as "revolutionary" anti-imperialists by campist members of the North Atlantic Left obscures its class interests and ignores the real struggle of Palestinian workers against it as well as against Israeli imperialism. As Omar Hassan explains,
Hamas is a classic bourgeois nationalist party. While many of their founders were impoverished refugees and low ranking clerics, the organisation has since evolved to being an institution with an annual budget measuring in the tens of millions of dollars. Much like the PLO, the party is both pro-capitalist and pro-market. Many of its leaders are filthy rich and possess huge investment portfolios, particularly in Turkey and the Gulf. This wealth was accumulated through real estate, Islamic finance and skimming off the top of international aid destined for Gaza. The party has cultivated relations with a range of capitalists across the Muslim world, using them to bypass sanctions, open diplomatic doors and as a source of donations. ("Hamas: A Marxist Appraisal")
Further, as Hassan writes, "When it comes to class struggle, Hamas have proven totally reactionary. Their hostility to the organising efforts of workers and the poor was exposed early in 2019 when protests across Gaza threatened to spark a general strike under the slogan of 'we want to live'," to which Hamas "responded by subjecting protesters to harsh beatings to drive them off the street" and "then arrested more than 1,000 people – including dozens of journalists and Palestinian human rights observers – whose cases were then referred to military courts." Reactionary political parties like Hamas are, in fact, the outcome of the attempts by different factions of global capital to suppress any worker organizations or even secular nationalist movements which might have threatened the exploitation of labor in the Middle East by funding reactionary social movements, such as the Afghan mujahideen, which use religious fundamentalism to institute brutal regimes of repression. Even The New York Times reported the long-known "secret" that the Netanyahu government was happy to funnel billions to Hamas to "buy quiet" and thus ensure uninterrupted access to inexpensive and highly skilled Palestinian labor by Israeli capital (Bergman and Mazzetti).
None of this, of course, means supporting in any form the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza or the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran (or Syria, or Lebanon, or….). Pointing out the material limits of an "anti-imperialist" struggle led by theocratic, bourgeois nationalists attempting to maintain their control over the workers' labor power against larger imperialist powers while ignoring the interests of the workers who are resisting them is not, as Dean claims, to "reinforce the side of occupation and oppression" ("Leadership and Liberation: An Exchange") or, as the SWP states, to "collapse into pro-imperialism." Neither Hamas nor the theocracy in Iran, which has spent almost fifty years torturing and killing workers, suddenly becomes a progressive historical force by being bombed by the United States and Israel. In fact, just as the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza has meant "public support for Hamas has grown over the past two years, a trend observed in both Palestinian areas but more pronounced in the West Bank" (Poll 96), it's not difficult to see that in the absence of a worker's revolution and the building of a socialist Middle East, the eventual end of the war in Iran will likely leave the same brutal social structures intact, if not even the same representatives of the Iranian ruling class, just with better terms for international capital, since a repressive regime will be necessary as international finance capital rebuilds Iranian infrastructure in their interests while suppressing workers' dissent. Workers, in short, cannot be liberated by the very forces which are exploiting and oppressing them—whether these forces are in Tehran, Washington D.C., or Tel Aviv. To return to "the very profound and fundamental contradictions of imperialism," as Lenin argues, is about educating workers that the only possible transformation to the material conditions which produce the brutal and senseless acts of war as well as the daily violences perpetuated by the capitalist class against workers in all nations is organizing to bring about the end of the capitalist system. What we are witnessing is a renewed period of imperialist wars waged by the representatives of capital which bring nothing but death and destruction to the working classes in each nation. It is, as Marx writes, only "When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain" ("Future Results" 222).
While Trump's imperialist wars of conquest brought back the language of imperialism, the reality is that imperialism never left. As Lenin argues, "Capitalist barbarism is stronger than civilisation. On all sides, at every step one comes across problems which man is quite capable of solving immediately, but capitalism is in the way. It has amassed enormous wealth—and has made men the slaves of this wealth" ("Civilized Barbarism" 389). What Trump's imperialist violence is now unleashing on the workers of the world can only be understood by returning to the fundamental contradiction that is at the heart of capitalism—the exploitation of labor by capital at the point of production—and by organizing the working class to bring about the end to capitalism in order to usher in a future of peace built upon meeting the needs of all.
Works Cited
Bergman, Ronen, and Mark Mazzetti. "'Buying Quiet': Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas." The New York Times, 10 Dec. 2023, https://bit.ly/4sWs6O3.
Bivens, Josh. "The Trump Administration's Macroeconomic Agenda Harms Affordability and Raises Inequality." Economic Policy Institute, 13 Mar. 2025, https://bit.ly/4dHCg02.
Boak, Josh. "Trump Says US Kids May Get '2 Dolls Instead of 30,' but China Will Suffer More in a Trade War." AP News, Associated Press, 30 Apr. 2025, https://bit.ly/4d4Nqfb.
Boot, Max. "Trump Was an Imperialist All Along." Washington Post, 12 Jan. 2026, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/12/trump-venezuela-greenland-imperialism/.
Carney, Mark. "Principled and Pragmatic: Canada's Path." Prime Minister of Canada, 20 Jan. 2026, https://bit.ly/4bt1jCE.
Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso, 2025.
Dean, Jodi, and Ayça Çubukçu. "Leadership and Liberation: An Exchange." Boston Review, 14 June 2025, www.bostonreview.net/articles/leadership-and-liberation-an-exchange/.
Engels, Frederick. "Protection and Free Trade: Preface to the Pamphlet: Karl Marx, Speech on the Question of Free Trade." Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 26, Progress Publishers, 1990, pp. 521–536.
Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992.
Gates, Bill, et al. The Road Ahead. Viking, 1995.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hassan, Omar. "Hamas: A Marxist Appraisal." Marxist Left Review, no. 27, 13 June 2024, marxistleftreview.org/articles/hamas-from-resistance-to-containment/.
Hegseth, Pete. "Remarks by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference (As Delivered)." U.S. Department of War, 5 Mar. 2026, https://bit.ly/47Ulo2p.
Kautsky, Karl. "Ultra-Imperialism." Die Neue Zeit, 11 Sept. 1914. Marxists' Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/09/ultra-imp.htm.
Lenin, V.I. "Civilised Barbarism." Collected Works, vol. 19, Progress Publishers, 1977, pp. 388–89.
---. "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." Collected Works, vol. 22, Progress Publishers, 1964, pp. 185–304.
Losurdo, Domenico. Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History. Translated by Gregory Elliott, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Madhani, Aamer. "After Maduro Capture, Trump's Tough Talk Evokes a Return to the Days of American Imperialism." Associated Press, 5 Jan. 2026, https://bit.ly/4rWF4dc.
Marx, Karl. "The Protectionists, the Free Traders and the Working Class." Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, International Publishers, 1976, p. 279.
---. "The Future Results of British Rule in India." Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 12, International Publishers, 1979, pp. 217-222.
---. Capital, Vol. I. Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 35, Progress Publishers, 1983.
---. Capital, Vol. III. Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 37, Progress Publishers, 1983.
Molyneux, John. "Ukraine: Debates on the Left." Irish Marxist Review, vol. 11, no. 33, June 2022, pp. 15–28.
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Public Opinion Poll No. 96: A Dual Crisis — Palestinian Public Opinion Amidst Occupation and a Leadership Vacuum. PCPSR Survey Research Unit, 28 Oct. 2025, https://bit.ly/47kMoYG.
Ringrose, Isabel. "Free Palestine: Why We Say by Any Means Necessary." Socialist Worker, 14 Oct. 2023, www.socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/free-palestine-why-we-say-by-any-means-necessary/.
Roberts, Michael. "Depression and Creative Destruction." The Next Recession, 24 Oct. 2025, www.thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/10/24/depression-and-creative-destruction/.
"The AI Productivity Boom Is Not Here (Yet)." The Economist, 22 Feb. 2026, www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/02/22/the-ai-productivity-boom-is-not-here-yet.
Wark, McKenzie. Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso, 2019.
Wong, Edward. "Trump's Foreign Policy: Resurrecting Empire." The New York Times, 27 Feb. 2026, https://bit.ly/4uK7iuh.
Zenko, Micah, and Jennifer Wilson. "How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2016?" Council on Foreign Relations, 5 Jan. 2017, www.cfr.org/articles/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-drop-2016.
Žižek, Slavoj. "Iran From Heidegger to Kant." Slavoj Žižek, 18 Mar. 2026, slavoj.substack.com/p/iran-from-heidegger-to-kant.