Tracing the chain: a Marxist–Leninist analysis of imperialism today

4 An Imperialist World

In this section, we develop a materialist account of imperialism as a global and hierarchical system rooted in capitalist uneven development. We discuss how all capitalist states, regardless of their economic development, are integrated into a shifting hierarchy of mutual dependencies and unequal relationships, combining roles of hegemony and vulnerability in different proportions. By examining China, Venezuela, and Burkina Faso structurally, we show how capitalist states, including those wrapped in ‘socialist’ or ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric, seek to climb this hierarchy at the expense of the working class. We also observe how the very diverse relationships between the US & China, Russia & Ukraine, and Israel & Palestine each express different configurations of inter-imperialist rivalry within the world system. This framework prepares the ground for the subsequent analysis of Britain and its specific position within the imperialist hierarchy.

At the core of imperialism lies the process of uneven development, which does not simply give rise to imperialism but continually reproduces and deepens it. Uneven development is not an accidental imbalance: it is the structural outcome of capital’s expansion, in which profitability varies across states and regions, driving the concentration of investment in some areas while draining others of labour, value and resources. As the capitalist mode of production extends into a world system, uneven development becomes its organising principle, generating a global hierarchy shaped by the movement of capital itself: a hierarchy marked by permanent instability, recurrent crises and shifting centres of accumulation.

This unevenness is not just inherited from an earlier historical phase, but is actively reproduced through what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation’. This was not a one-time process, instead continuing as the ongoing violent separation of working populations from their means of subsistence, the destruction of non-capitalist forms of life, and the forcible integration of territories and peoples into wage-labour and capitalist relations. Wherever capital expands, it must reorganise entire forms of life on its own terms, clearing the ground for profitability through dispossession, coercion, and restructuring. It is also this continuous reproduction of primitive accumulation that ensures unevenness remains a structural and permanent feature of global capitalism.

Within this system, the relation among states are defined by mutual dependencies and unequal relationships, a web of financial, commercial and industrial ties that position states differently – and often contradictorily – within the international division of labour: one state may depend on another for markets, supplies or credit, yet still dominate it economically, politically or militarily. Crafted by unequal development, mutual dependencies and unequal relationships are constantly changing through economic shifts shaped by technological innovations, social and political processes, and, crucially, by warfare. But none of these shifts alter the underlying logic of the system: the drive to counter the domestic tendency of the rate of profit to fall through the export of capital and the continual search for new, more profitable arenas of accumulation.

The Communist Party of Greece, which has played a central role in stripping opportunist distortions from the Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialism, has visualised the hierarchical structure of the imperialist system through the image of a ‘pyramid’. This offers an effective outline of the global order: at the top stand those states with dense outward capital flows, whose monopolies expand beyond national borders to secure political-economic dominance; below them lie the majority of states, occupying different rungs according to the development of their economies and the scale of their capital. Presenting this hierarchy as a pyramid is useful because it illustrates that all states belong to one single imperialist system: an integrated whole marked not by harmony but by deep developmental inequalities between those at the summit and those toward the base.

Yet, this representation should not be fixed into a rigid form, but grasped as a dynamic relation, a snapshot of a continuously shifting totality of global interdependence. The pyramid at any given moment may for instance display two competing vertices, reflecting rival imperialist leaderships; its middle layers may appear wider than the base, as many states cluster in intermediate positions; the overall shape may warp as capital relocates, and new powers rise or decline. To grasp the mutable and volatile character of these systemic relations, one must analyse the concrete economic conditions of key states and observe the financial, political and military conflicts through which their positions within the imperialist hierarchy are continually redefined.

Yet the existence of a coalition does not imply unity. The composition of both blocs is uneven, shaped by contradictory interests and competing fractions within their own bourgeoisies. The Western bloc has the advantage of highly coordinated global institutions such as NATO, or transnational imperialist alliances such as the EU, both the results of long-developed political, financial and military hegemonies. But in both blocs, differing accumulation paths and divergent geopolitical orientations continually pull sections of their national bourgeoisies in competing directions. This is not an anomaly but a structural feature of imperialism, in which capitals integrated into the same bloc nonetheless confront different needs, dependencies and interests.

These tensions are visible within BRICS, where the United Arab Emirates, for example, simultaneously signs the Abraham Accords with Israel while aligning itself with the Eurasian pole for its own economic and geopolitical advantage. Similar contradictions also appear within the NATO powers: in Germany, a bourgeois mainstream tied to the US alliance coexists with currents around Alternative für Deutschland that favour a more conciliatory stance toward the Eurasian bloc, reflecting the interests of different fractions of German capital.

This contradictory tendency within the bourgeoisie is rooted in the fact that all states occupy relations of both dominance and dependence within the imperialist system: no state is purely a plunderer or purely dependent, but combines both roles in different proportions and forms. States like Britain illustrate this particularly well. Britain remains one of the principal centres for the international operations of capital, extracting significant revenues from abroad through its large financial sector, extensive overseas investment networks, and London’s position within the global system of offshore finance. At the same time, it is structurally exposed to the very flows on which it relies: because of its chronically weakened industrial base and persistent external imbalances it is acutely vulnerable to the same global circuits of capital on which its revenues depend, and must continually attract injections of foreign capital – even from parts of the world where British capital extracts value – to sustain its economic position. These contradictions express the dual reality of imperialism, in which even dominant states depend on continuous inflows of global capital whose movement they cannot fully control.

In order to analyse these dynamics concretely, the focus will first turn to three states occupying different positions within the imperialist hierarchy: China, Venezuela and Burkina Faso. The persistent mischaracterisations of these states generate significant confusion and division within the communist movement. Each is held up as a distinct model; China as a successful communist state, Venezuela as ‘21st Century Socialism’, and Burkina Faso as a renewed national liberation project. However, a concrete analysis of their productive sectors, class relations, and international trade reveals that their primary shared characteristic is not socialism but capitalist relations of production. Whether through outward investment, acting as satellites of more dominant powers, or facilitating the accumulation of their own national bourgeoisie, these three capitalist states, like any other, are necessarily driven to create the conditions under which imperialist relations can emerge and reproduce themselves, therefore also participating in the exploitation of the international working class.

A secondary, tactical link connecting these otherwise distinct capitalist formations is their rivalry with traditional Western capital. Venezuela and Burkina Faso, while structurally dependent on Western financial and commodity markets, seek to renegotiate this dependency by forming alliances with competing imperialist powers such as Russia and China. China’s strategy differs in scale but not in character; unburdened by sovereign debt to the West, it actively exports capital and builds institutions to reshape the global system in its favour, challenging US hegemony. These case studies – here comparatively examined through their recent political history, productive capacity, monopolies, trade patterns, capital export, and international alignments – demonstrate that a failure to analyse the actual economic base leads to the error of identifying capitalist construction under a red banner with socialist transition.

The analysis will then turn to conflicts among states, whether expressed in direct military confrontation, as in the war between Russia and Ukraine; in economic rivalries, such as those between China and the US; or in cases where ongoing colonial domination persists – as in the case of Israel. In all their differences, these conflicts are not exceptions but direct products of the inevitable clashes between competing spheres of finance capital in their relentless drive to accumulate and dominate. The price of this rivalry is always paid by the working class, who suffer death, displacement and impoverishment for the profits of their exploiters.

The class nature of China’s economic system since 1949 has long been a central point of contention within the international communist movement. While many still view the 1949 People’s Revolution as an intact socialist achievement, the actual structure of China’s economy today reveals a counter-revolution that began in the late 1970s. In the decades following liberation, China nationalised its major industries, abolished private capital, and collectivised agriculture into communes, laying the basis for a planned socialist economy. These transformations eliminated the domestic bourgeoisie and subordinated production to social needs rather than profit. The turn away from this path began to manifest through the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s and China’s rapprochement with the US in the early 1970s. Presented as a dispute over the ‘correct line’, the break with the USSR in practice signalled a growing nationalist and state-centric orientation within the Chinese Communist Party, one that increasingly subordinated proletarian internationalism to geopolitical strategy. By treating the USSR, and not US imperialism, as its main enemy, China welcomed cooperation with Western capital and technology.

At the 1978 Third Plenum, the right-revisionist faction of the Party consolidated power and launched the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ program, enormously expanding the space in which the law of value operated and ultimately re-establishing the centrality of capitalist relations of production. In particular the creation of Special Economic Zones, designed as conduits for the influx of foreign capital, alongside the marketisation of relevant state enterprises transformed China into a state-directed capitalist economy while preserving socialist rhetoric. By the 1990s and 2000s a strong bourgeoisie composed of private entrepreneurs, foreign investors, and a bureaucratic elite had emerged, integrating China into the global imperialist system not as a socialist alternative but as a rising capitalist power. For Marxist-Leninists, China’s trajectory since 1978 represents a dramatic counter-revolution dynamic, carried out within the Party itself, replacing socialist construction with capitalist accumulation under a red flag.

Economy. Since the ‘Reform and Opening up’ program, China has transformed into the world’s second-largest economy, with a GDP of £13.98tn in 2024. While state-owned enterprises remain active, approximately 97% of its productive sector is now privately owned. This transformation has created a distinct bourgeois class, home to 516 billionaires, second only to the US.

This growth reflects a profound structural shift: at the time of the revolution, China was mainly a peasant-based agrarian economy; in 2024, agriculture constituted only 7% of GDP, underscoring decades of intense industrialisation since the mid-1960s. However, despite its small GDP share, agriculture remains critically important not only for feeding a population exceeding 1.4 billion people, but also for being the global main producer of key food commodities such as grains, fruit and vegetables. From this output, China feeds nearly one-fifth of the global population while only using 7-10% of the world’s arable land.

Industrialisation has made China the world’s foremost manufacturing state for 15 consecutive years. Also fueled by rapid urbanisation and continuous construction, in the first three quarters of 2025 the manufacturing sector has contributed 39% to GDP and continues to attract substantial global investment, absorbing nearly 27% of China’s total foreign direct investment in 2024. This capital inflow supports its dominance in key areas: consumer electronics, home appliances, electric vehicles, and, crucially, semiconductors. As a cornerstone in the global chip supply chain, China’s manufacturing creates deep yet strategically vulnerable dependencies within global technology networks.

Far from being a purely industrial state, the service sector forms the core of the modern Chinese economy. It accounts for 56% of GDP and employs nearly half of the national workforce, completing the transition from an agrarian base to a modern economic structure. Its rise, encompassing logistics, finance, research and development, and public services, was a necessary development to manage the immense productive capacity built by the industrial base and to reinforce domestic economic sovereignty.

Monopolies. Following the logic of capital accumulation within its productive sector, the Chinese economic landscape too has advanced to a stage characterised by the fusion of industrial and banking capital, as the finance sector is dominated by a group of banks coined the ‘Big Four’. These four banks – of which include the world’s largest bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China – manage the flows of capital in the interests of the bourgeois state, in particular handling investments abroad to increase the possibility of profitable accumulation.

Another sector crucially hegemonised by monopolistic development is the energy industry. While the electronic sector overlaps with the rise of CleanTech – renewable and energy-efficiency technologies – oil and gas reserves and their utilisation still dominate the foundational energy supply. The state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation, primarily through its publicly listed subsidiary PetroChina, constitutes a classic state monopoly. By controlling the majority of domestic energy flows it uses its holdings to both secure the strategic inputs for the capitalist industrial base and to expand China’s international energy footprint through overseas investments.

China’s technology sector, a global driver of capital accumulation, has given rise to its own distinct monopolies: two giants, Tencent and Alibaba, dominate the digital economy, controlling the new strategic means of circulation, productivity, and data. Tencent, reporting approximately £20.25bn in profit in 2024, originated as an entertainment and gaming powerhouse, and has rapidly expanded to command cloud services, enterprise software, financial technology, and artificial intelligence; Alibaba, reporting a net profit of approximately £13.4bn in 2025, emerged as the dominant force in domestic and global e-commerce, and has similarly entrenched its power through parallel expansions into financial technology and cloud computing. These two companies rank only relatively high within the global hierarchy of digital monopoly capital, remaining below the dominant US-based corporations that continue to occupy the apex of the sector. However, Alibaba Cloud holds roughly 36 % of China’s AI cloud services market, more than the combined share of its three closest competitors, and Tencent Cloud, with a smaller share of about 7 %, further illustrates how their parallel vertical and horizontal integration consolidates monopolistic control over the digital infrastructure essential for the modern economy.

Trade. China is one of the world’s leading exporters of electronics and advanced manufactured goods, including computers, machinery, vehicles, and rapidly expanding clean-energy products such as batteries, electric vehicles, and solar equipment. Mechanical and electrical products consistently make up around 60% of China’s total exports. China’s CleanTech exports have grown sharply: solar modules, EVs, and lithium-ion batteries have become major export drivers in recent years, with China maintaining a dominant global share in all three – producing roughly 86 % of solar modules, about 68 % of EV output, and around 74 % of lithium‑ion batteries worldwide. To sustain this large industrial base, China imports significant quantities of raw materials and high-tech components, including crude oil and, most importantly, integrated circuits that are essential parts to building advanced technology.

At the same time, China’s export profile is not limited to high-value goods. A significant share of exports still consists of high-volume, lower-unit-value manufactured products, which helps sustain large trade surpluses through scale rather than high average prices, and keeps export unit values comparatively low. The combination of exports and imports produces a substantial trade surplus in the trade of goods: in 2024, China recorded a surplus of about £777.0bn, with exports of approximately £2.8tn and imports of around £2.0tn. By November 2025, the surplus had surpassed £759.0bn, driven by robust exports of high-value manufactured goods. Reflecting the contradictions of overaccumulation, this surplus cannot find equally profitable outlets within the domestic economy, and compels Chinese capital to expand abroad through the export of capital.

Export of capital. Having exported £131.5bn of capital in 2024 alone, China ranks third globally for outward foreign direct investment, after the US and Japan, underscoring the imperialist character of its economy. The scale of this outward capital flow is channeled primarily through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a state-backed strategy to invest capital profitably while increasing their economic influence and political control over global supply chains. Since its launch in 2013, cumulative BRI engagement has surpassed £920.0bn and is distributed across more than 150 partner states, with a strategic focus on infrastructure, energy, and resource acquisition. In 2023, however, the BRI moved away from relying mainly on construction contracts: 52% of its activity was now in equity investment, where Chinese capital buys direct stakes in ports, energy facilities or infrastructure abroad. This shift marked that Chinese capital had moved beyond financing projects and began taking direct ownership and control over assets abroad, with Southeast Asia and the Middle East as primary regions. This initiative directly facilitates China’s efforts to diversify its export markets and secure the raw materials required for its advanced industrial base, particularly for its green energy and technology sectors.

Blocs. The final pillar of China’s external economic strategy is institutional, pursued through its leadership in political and economic blocs such as BRICS and The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Far from a mere diplomatic forum, BRICS serves as a primary vehicle for China to secure its position within the global imperialist system. With China constituting the overwhelming majority of the bloc’s economic weight, the expanded BRICS functions as an interdependent network for pursuing the interests of capital to counter its rival NATO bloc. In particular, ally states such as Saudi Arabia and full members such as Iran are largely beneficial to China’s economic plans as both play a crucial role in fueling Chinese manufacturing.

In contrast to the geopolitical and developmental focus of BRICS, China concurrently deepens its regional economic power though the RCEP. This agreement is the world’s largest free trade bloc by GDP, encompassing approximately 30% of global GDP, formally locks China at the centre of Asia’s supply chains as the primary market and manufacturing hub for key partners such as Japan, South Korea and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). This creates a shared set of trade rules that make it easier for Chinese industry to move goods, components and investment across the region, enabling Chinese capital to coordinate production and circulation across the region on favourable terms.

Despite coup attempts and political instability, a period of bourgeois democracy deepened Venezuela’s integration into the imperialist world order, with the decades between the 1950s and 1980s considered as the ‘Golden Years’, when high oil prices fuelled rapid economic growth and the working class were granted concessions such as heavily subsidised healthcare. However, this boom entrenched the bourgeoisie and the state in an illusion of permanent wealth, leading to borrowing so heavy that, when oil prices crashed in the 1980s, it triggered a profound economic crisis, leading to IMF-imposed austerity, social unrest, and hyperinflation.

In this context, Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, promising a ‘Bolivarian Revolution’. The Chávez presidency, lasting between 1999 and 2013, represented a national-bourgeois project that ultimately left capitalist property relations intact. Funded by high oil prices, the ‘revolution’ implemented social missions that significantly reduced poverty in the short term. However, this model not only failed to diversify the economy and reduce the dependency on oil exports, but more importantly kept the capitalist mode of production fully in place. The contradictory trajectory of this strategy is captured in two powerful images of Chávez: on the one hand, ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 was a symbolic reassurance for investors to signal that Venezuela remained open to foreign capital; on the other, expropriating US oil companies in 2007 in a move framed as defence of national sovereignty, but with no intention to end the exploitation of the Venezuelan working class.

Following Chávez’s death in 2013, his appointed successor, Nicolás Maduro, assumed power. Maduro’s presidency has been defined by a profound economic collapse, with GDP contracting by over 75% since 2013 exacerbated by the 2014 oil price crash, when Venezuela entered a deep fiscal crisis driven by its extreme dependence on oil exports. Maduro’s response was to double down on the existing economic model, strengthening the national bourgeoisie and courting renewed international investment, while adopting a range of neoliberal-inspired policies that further eroded workers’ conditions.

Economy. The Venezuelan productive sector demonstrates the terminal contradictions of a rentier capitalist state, one in which the reproduction and accumulation of capital depend primarily on revenues derived from non-produced commodities, such as land and subsoil resources. In Venezuela’s case, the central mechanism of accumulation is the state’s control over oil, a strategic natural resource that enables the extraction and appropriation of rents rather than the expansion of productive capital. Yet, while holding the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela’s GDP has collapsed from a peak of over £237.0bn in 2013 to an estimated £85.0bn in 2024. This sharp decline – triggered by the 2014 oil price crash and the subsequent cycle of fiscal deficits, hyperinflation, heightened vulnerability to US sanctions, and further economic contraction – exposed the extreme dependency on its state-owned oil monopoly. Oil continues to structurally dominate, contributing approximately 58% of state revenues and gaining Venezuela the name of ‘petrostate’, while employing fewer than 2% of the population. Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the state oil company, has seen production plummet to a fraction of its historic capacity and now relies heavily on joint ventures with foreign partners, highlighting ongoing dependence on external capital and technology to extract domestic resources.

Mining, particularly gold, constitutes a secondary industry, with illicit activities estimated to account for a significant share of output; iron ore and bauxite remain smaller but strategic contributors. Agriculture, once a cornerstone of the economy, now produces only about 5% of GDP yet employs close to 11%, focusing on maize, rice, sugarcane, cocoa, and livestock, though it still cannot meet domestic food needs. Manufacturing, while a key industry in Venezuela’s economy, is dominated by oil-linked sectors such as refining, steel, and aluminum. The non-oil manufacturing sector is severely hampered by power shortages and reliance on imported inputs deepening the state’s economic struggles.

The service sector, comprising activities such as banking, finance, real estate, hospitality, and education, accounts for nearly 52% of Venezuela’s GDP and employs almost 71% of the population. While this sector provides essential functions for the key industries mentioned, it is also a symptom of the broader single-commodity export economy structure based on rentier income that has left Venezuela’s economy profoundly vulnerable and dependent, a reality that directly shapes its patterns of trade and external alliances.

Monopolies. The definitive case of Venezuelan monopoly is the state oil company, PDVSA: formed as a national monopoly in 1976, its trajectory exemplifies how state ownership within a capitalist economy becomes a form of state-monopoly capital, concentrating control over a strategic sector while mediating and integrating the interests of both domestic and foreign capital.

PDVSA exercises administrative control over rents, contracts, and foreign currency without full ownership of the oil fields, which are usually operated through joint ventures under a 60/40 ownership split, such as those with the US company Chevron. This legal framework ensures nominal state majority ownership while granting a substantial stake to private and foreign capital, allowing the Venezuelan bourgeoisie to claim sovereignty over resources that, in practice, depend on external finance, infrastructure and expertise to exploit.

The nationalisation of oil does not represent a step toward socialist control of production, but rather a mechanism through which the state manages and allocates rents within a capitalist economy, acting as a collective capitalist that guarantees the conditions for accumulation while enabling selective participation of foreign firms. In Venezuela’s case, capital accumulated through this model has been instrumental for the maintenance of lucrative circuits of appropriation, which have been fundamental for consolidating and reproducing power in the hands of the same bourgeois stratum, represented first by Chávez and today by Maduro.

Beyond oil, monopolies dominate other sectors. The offshore gas sector has been exempt from state control since 1999, opening it fully to private investment. Other enterprises such as the Corporación Eléctrica Nacional (CORPOELEC) controls electricity, the Compañía Anónima Nacional de Teléfonos de Venezuela (CANTV) dominates telecommunications, and state-linked firms like Sidor hold near-monopolistic positions in steel and cement. Private monopolies, such as Movilnet in mobile services, and state-owned banks like Banco de Venezuela reinforce concentrated control over digital access, retail, and credit.

This growing centrality is not an accident: on the one hand, it represents the intended engine of capital accumulation for a reconstituted national bourgeoisie; on the other, it displays the consequence of retreating foreign direct investment in Venezuela following the 2014 oil price crash.

Furthermore, despite the state’s ‘socialist’ rhetoric, the means of production remain concentrated in private hands. Estimates from 2010 suggested this capitalist class controlled 71% of national GDP, a striking figure given that a large part of the state’s wealth flows through the state-owned enterprises like PDVSA. There are no recent sources available for evaluating the economic relevance of ‘Communas’, the example of cooperative enterprises often stressed by Venezuelan supporters as harbingers of its socialist transformation. However, in 2008, in a period in which they had a far stronger presence than today, the impact of the whole ‘social economy’ was estimated at 1.7% of GDP, expressing the extremely marginal position of the communal sector within a national economy structurally dominated by state and private monopolies.

Trade. Venezuela’s integration into the global imperialist system is shaped by a sharply asymmetric trade structure. Demonstrative of its position as a rentier state, its economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on crude oil exports, which accounted for over half of total export value in 2023. Petroleum coke, another oil-derived product, is the second-largest export but represents only about 5-10% of export earnings. This extreme concentration leaves the state reliant on oil revenues to finance essential imports across food, machinery, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, but significantly also refined fuels – goods that the domestic productive sector can no longer supply.

Despite possessing the world’s largest proven crude reserves, Venezuela also imports refined petroleum products, illustrating the deep deterioration of its refining capacity: refining operations have been largely halted since 2019, with only one unit expected to restart in 2025. This means that Venezuela must export crude and re-import refined fuels to maintain domestic supply and to blend heavy oil for export – an asymmetry in which Venezuela pays world-market prices for imported fuels while exporting its own crude at a discount, reinforcing a structural dependency in global trade.

Following the 2014 oil-price collapse and the higher vulnerability to US sanctions, Venezuela’s trade dependency has shifted from NATO-bloc centred enterprises toward alternatives: China has become a crucial import partner, supplying imported goods for over £3.7bn in 2024. The bulk of these imports are electrical machinery, computing equipment, industrial inputs, and manufactured goods, reflecting the collapse of domestic industry. This structure produces a dual dependency; Venezuela depends on fluctuating oil prices for foreign income and relies on strategic import partners for essential goods. The result is an unequal integration into the global system in which foreign capital, whether US, Chinese, or regional, captures value from both ends of the trade relation, export extraction and import provision, while Venezuela’s productive base remains structurally underdeveloped.

Export of capital. Venezuela’s role in exporting capital has undergone a dramatic inversion: during the ‘Golden Years’ of high oil rents, the Venezuelan state, via PDVSA, owned external assets such as Citgo, a US-refining subsidiary. These assets exemplified the outward accumulation of rentier capital seeking safe yields abroad.

However, in recent years, Venezuela has shifted from capital exporter to capital drain. Citgo, once its top foreign holding, is being liquidated under a US court order intended to satisfy creditor claims amounting to billions. As a result, Venezuela stands to lose what may be its last significant overseas asset, while instead becoming increasingly dependent on foreign credit, conditional financing, and joint-venture deals with foreign corporations for any access to capital – marking a clear sign of subordinated integration into the global imperialist system.

This pattern of retreat and dependency extends beyond Citgo. For instance, several Venezuelan enterprises did once hold regional and even international influence, particularly in the energy and telecommunications sectors. However, the state’s economic isolation and declining FDI since 2014 has sharply diminished Venezuela’s presence in international markets. As a result, previously active companies abroad such as CANTV and PDVSA have scaled back their international operations, and many joint ventures with foreign enterprises have been suspended or dissolved.

A similar trajectory from regional ambition to domestic retrenchment is evident also in finance. The state acquisition of Banco de Venezuela from the Spanish banking conglomerate Santander Group in 2009 initially strengthened Venezuela’s position in Latin America, giving it regional control. However, most of the bank’s activities stayed focused on the domestic market as the state’s political and economic landscape shifted to protect the interests of the domestic bourgeoisie and its local industries. Constrained by this loss of external leverage, Venezuela now seeks to strengthen its position within the imperialist world system by reorganising its trade relations through new economic alliances.

Blocs. Venezuela has long attempted to anchor itself in a mixture of regional and global blocs alternative to the US, a strategic reflection of the limitations of its oil-rentier economy, which however has been conveniently wrapped into a more palatable ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric.

Venezuela was a founding member of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), launched in 2004 to create a so-called ‘South-South alternative’ to the hegemony of US-led NATO states, combining preferred energy-for-goods trade, social cooperation and solidarity among Latin American and Caribbean states. At the same time, as one of the founding members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Venezuela remains embedded in the global cartel of oil-exporting states. Through OPEC, Venezuela continues to tether its economy directly to the global oil market, reinforcing its role as a rentier state whose wealth and foreign‑exchange capacity depend on fossil‑fuel extraction.

More recently, under Maduro, Venezuela has pursued inclusion in BRICS, seeking to expand financial and trade ties beyond traditional Western institutions. At the 2024 BRICS Summit, Maduro called for the consolidation of the bloc’s development institutions and a new ‘international financing system’ including proposals for alternate payment mechanisms and a ‘basket of currencies’, explicitly positioning BRICS as a counterweight to dollar-based, Western-dominated finance.

These alliances and ambitions confirm the worsening dependencies of Venezuela rentier economy: OPEC binds its export strategy to external quotas and collective price management; ALBA’s energy-for-goods mechanisms were undermined by falling oil rents; and the persistent BRICS bid remains blocked by internal vetoes and the constraints of different interests of capitals. Nonetheless, Venezuela’s persistence in this geopolitical strategy is shaped by a dual logic: the pursuit of alternative commercial and financial alliances to sustain the oil-based accumulation on which its reproduction depends, and the attempt to ascend within the imperialist hierarchy in order to increase its access to profits, markets and goods.

Formal independence in 1960 did not suddenly change those structural conditions: the post‑colonial state was weak and fragmented, subjected to repeated military coups and regime changes. This reflected the dominance of a comprador fraction of the bourgeoisie, whose reproduction was still tied to mediating the interests of French capital and whose slow accumulation precluded the emergence of a more stable national bourgeois class. This political insecurity hindered the formation of a state and therefore a stable national bourgeoisie, and prevented sustained investment in agricultural or industrial transformation, while French enterprises continued to extract profitable rents.

In 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara seized state power, renaming the country Burkina Faso – namely ‘Land of Upright People’ – and, with a strong ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘pan-Africanist’ language, started a radical process of transformation of the national economy. Publicly rejecting foreign debt and aid, Sankara launched a programme of food self‑sufficiency and local manufacture, seeking to reduce dependency by strengthening a petty-peasant agricultural economy. In 1984, land was nationalised but not collectivised; instead, access to land was redistributed to individual peasant families, who were encouraged to organise village-level cooperatives for storage, manufacture and marketing.

Nevertheless, these efforts ran up against deep structural constraints: limited infrastructure, fragile peasant‑based agriculture, and continuous interference by France and Western capital. Once Sankara was assassinated in 1987 power was handed to his former associate Blaise Compaoré, who realigned Burkina Faso with the interests of the French bourgeoisie, slowing key elements of the agrarian programme and accelerating the renewed penetration of foreign capital. His overthrow in a 2014 popular uprising led to a period of instability, culminating in two military coups in 2022.

The current junta, led by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, employs anti-imperialist and pan-Africanist rhetoric that deliberately echoes Sankara’s, positioning itself against the former colonial power France whilst seeking new alliances with imperialist powers like Russia. In 2024, Traoré’s government asserted state control over key segments of the country’s most productive sector, gold mining, signalling a reconfiguration within Burkina Faso’s capitalist integration into the imperialist system. This move in fact aligns not only with the interests of the emerging Eurasian bloc – seeking profits, resources, and strategic leverage in regions historically dominated by French and Western imperialism – but also expresses the maturation of sections of the domestic bourgeoisie. No longer confined to a strictly comprador function, these fractions increasingly seek to reorganise accumulation through state mediation, loosening their dependence on Western capital and tightening capitalist property relations.

Economy. Burkina Faso’s productive sector today reflects a highly underdeveloped economic structure: agriculture and mining dominate, while manufacturing remains marginal. With a nominal GDP of £18.56bn in 2025, Burkina Faso remains one of the world’s least developed economies, ranking in the bottom 5% globally. However, growth has increased from 0.7% in 2022 to 2.5% in 2023, with projections of 3.5% in 2025, indicating a recent increase in headline growth figures under the junta.

Agriculture continues to employ a large share of the population: as recently as 2023 around 31% of employed persons were in agriculture. Rural agriculture remains vulnerable to drought, climatic instability and internal armed conflict – conditions that disproportionately affect peasant families and small producers and facilitate the concentration of land in fewer, larger holdings. The sector’s contribution to the economy has fluctuated over the years and currently makes up 20% of Burkina Faso’s GDP, with an upward trend. Whilst increased mining and gradual industrialisation have reduced the agrarian sector’s historical share, the Agriculture Offensive Programme, launched in 2023 in an effort to gain food self-sufficiency, represents an attempt to stimulate both agricultural productivity and the development of secondary industries, such as the processing of rice, tomatoes, and cotton.

The state has mobilised public resources and sought foreign financial and technical support, with notable contributions from China including £106.0m worth of machinery, as well as loans from the African Development Bank. This structure underscores Traoré’s aim to increase the influence of rival capital, shifting away from the historically dominant NATO-led capitalist powers toward new economic alliances. In total, the Agriculture Offensive Programme has secured £785.0m in investment, with 54% of this coming from private sector interests. This highlights the programme’s dual aim: while seeking to strengthen domestic development, it also deepens the rule of private property and increases reliance on foreign investment, despite its claim to challenge these very structures.

Whilst the manufacturing sector contributes only around 10% to Burkina Faso’s GDP and 7% of employment, industries are limited, constituting basic agro-processing, small-scale textiles or light manufacturing. Further, the service sector plays a relatively large role in output, but this often reflects informal retail, or public administration rather than functions associated with the organisation and expansion of productive activity. Over the same period, mining, especially gold, has grown sharply to dominate exports and state revenue. In 2023, gold and extractive products made up roughly 77% of exports, and the sector represented around 16% of GDP and a substantial share of government revenues.

Monopolies. Despite the fragility of its economic development, some structures of Burkina Faso’s productive sector are already organised through a set of concentrated monopolies, both state-linked and private. These enterprises function as direct instruments of capitalist class rule, organising the transfer of value generated by peasants and miners toward foreign capital and domestic bourgeois fractions.

In 2024, Traoré’s government nationalised key assets of its most productive sector, gold-mining. Through the creation of a state-controlled society, it transferred to the state the ownership of five major gold-mining assets: two operating mines and three exploration licences, formerly held by British firms such as Endeavour Mining and Lilium Mining. This move had a direct fiscal logic: the expropriation of the gold mines was designed to accumulate sufficient revenue to fully repay the state’s £3.7bn external debt to the IMF, World Bank, and other creditors. By selling this nationalised gold on the world market, where prices are currently inflated by geopolitical tensions and inflationary pressures, the junta aims to loosen the financial dependency which is particularly burdening the economy’s growth prospects.

A mixed-ownership monopoly is seen in the cotton industry, which has long been dominated by private companies whose origins trace back to Compagnie Française pour le Développement des Fibres Textiles, partially nationalised in 1979. Despite successive anti‑monopoly measures, Société Burkinabè des Fibres Textiles (SOFITEX) remains the state’s largest cotton company, controlling 70–80% of Burkina Faso’s national cotton production. It controls pricing and both domestic and international distribution channels, and in 2025 it secured a £22.1m trade‑finance facility to stabilise seasonal purchases and payments to farmers, allowing it to move into direct cultivation through the acquisition of 1,000 hectares for its own production. It now integrates production, processing, marketing and export functions while employing hundreds of farmworkers – expanding its monopoly in the sector.

As part of the Agriculture Offensive programme and its push to develop domestic secondary production, two tomato processing plants – Société Burkinabè de Tomates (SOBTO) and Société Faso Tomate (SOFATO) – together with a rice hulling owned by Groupe-Velegda, have been established as de facto monopolies. This status reflects the fact that they are the first vertically integrated manufacturing operations of their kind in Burkina Faso. Despite state involvement through the programme both tomato plants have significant private investment: SOBTO is 80% privately owned and SOFATO is fully private enterprise valued at over £7.0m.

In 2025, Coris Invest Group, which was previously active in banking, insurance and finance, finalised the acquisition of TotalEnergies’ downstream petroleum operations in Burkina Faso, including its network of fuel stations, distribution infrastructure and national logistics. With this move, Coris became the dominant player in a strategic sector long dominated by multinational capital. What is presented publicly as a step toward ‘economic sovereignty’, and the replacement of French multinationals with a Burkinabè-owned firm, in effect, marks a consolidation and centralisation of private capital within the state. The shift replaces foreign monopoly with a domestic one, without altering the underlying social-property relations or challenging the logic of capitalist accumulation.

While official rhetoric emphasises national control and local ownership, the underlying class dynamics remain unchanged. Although this pattern is still uneven across Burkina Faso’s industrial sector, where capital concentration remains relatively limited and extremely underdeveloped by global standards, it nevertheless indicates the only possible trajectory of capitalist development. This consists of the gradual consolidation of a national bourgeoisie asserting itself against foreign capital through state mediation and, at the same time, the building of the proletarian class. This process does not replace capitalism with any form of socialised control, but substitutes foreign monopoly with domestic monopoly, a shift that leaves the position of the working class fundamentally unaltered.

Trade. Burkina Faso’s trade pattern is a direct function of its insertion into the global capitalist system as a supplier of raw materials and a market for finished commodities, reflecting the international division of labour imposed by imperialism. In 2024, exports totalled £4.46bn, of which gold and other precious metals accounted for roughly £3.67bn, with the majority destined for Switzerland. Cotton, the next largest export at £265.0m, flows primarily to regional neighbours and Asian textile producers. This export profile indicates the state’s low position within the imperialist hierarchy, as economic activity remains centred on low value-added extractive activities, oriented less toward domestic manufacturing than toward supporting the industrial and financial sectors of foreign economies.

Conversely, imports in 2024 were valued at £5.08bn, creating a trade deficit of approximately £621.0m. The leading import categories – mineral fuels, machinery, electronics, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and food – are sourced from a mix of traditional and emerging partners. China is a dominant supplier, followed by Côte d’Ivoire, and increasingly, other states like Russia and Turkey as the junta seeks to reorient its alliances away from Western capital. Trade with Russia, a key new partner, reached £595.0m in 2024, with planned cooperation extending into security, energy, and even civilian nuclear projects. In comparison, however, the old colonial power France has fallen only to become the sixth largest source of imports. Mutual dependencies can be seen with other West African states, where Burkina Faso functions both as an importer and as a substantial supplier of goods. Burkina Faso is a top 10 supplier to Mali, ranks within the top 30 suppliers to Ghana, and is also a significant supplier of cotton to Côte d’Ivoire.

This trade circuit is reinforced by the state’s integration into imperialist financial structures. Since 2023, the state has operated under a new IMF Extended Credit Facility program that, combined with a number of other external loans to support its structural reforms and internal development activities, has built up a total public debt reaching 58.6% of GDP by the end of 2024. These arrangements tie fiscal policy to external constraints that tend to reproduce existing commercial and financial patterns and the class relations underpinning them.

Export of capital. Burkina Faso’s outward foreign direct investment (FDI) remains extremely modest. In 2024, outward FDI flows amounted to only  £2.37m, a tiny figure compared to  £65m inward flows.

The Sahel state’s ongoing reliance on external financial arrangements to cover budgetary needs, public expenditures, and balance‑of‑payment pressures despite the nationalisation of key economic sectors underlines that the capital‑flow dynamics for Burkina Faso continue to be about capital import rather than outward capital transfer or investment abroad. This dynamic reflects not only an ongoing and still incomplete process of capital centralisation, which has yet to reach the scale necessary for a sustained export of capital, but also the continued availability of profitable conditions for domestic accumulation. In an economy where industrialisation remains uneven and the organic composition of capital is relatively low, capital is able to secure comparatively high rates of surplus value, reducing the immediate pressure to seek outlets abroad. In this sense, accumulation remains predominantly inward-looking, reflecting both the recent consolidation of Burkina Faso’s national bourgeoisie and its consequent low position within the imperialist hierarchy.

Blocs. Burkina Faso’s external alliances and bloc‑memberships have recently undergone a dramatic transformation. Up to early 2025 the state was formally part of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional organisation whose economic and political aims have long been shaped by French and broader Western imperialist influence. However, Burkina Faso, along with Mali and Niger, formally withdrew from ECOWAS as of 29 January 2025, signalling a sharp break with its external alignments.

In place of ECOWAS membership, Burkina Faso, together with Mali and Niger, committed in 2024 to a new regional bloc: the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). Originating from a mutual defence pact signed in 2023, the AES has articulated aims that include coordination of security policy, economic cooperation, infrastructure development, and regional trade, alongside proposals for closer economic and monetary coordination modelled loosely on the EU.

This realignment reflects a broader political shift. In accordance with the ‘anti-imperialist’ efforts led by Traoré, AES members seek to cultivate closer ties with states competing with Western capitals – particularly Russia – while simultaneously signalling interest in alternative economic alignments, for instance through public endorsements of BRICS. However, Burkina Faso has not been accepted as a member of this powerful alliance, a position underscored by its significant trade deficits and structural weakness within the global imperialist system.

This pursuit of more favourable alliances does not constitute an anti-imperialist rupture, but rather an acceleration of imperialist dynamics, as emerging bourgeois fractions consolidate and existing alignments are loosened and recomposed through intensifying frictions with competing blocs. Such shifts tend to sharpen inter-imperialist rivalries, expressed in recurring economic crises, mounting geopolitical tensions, and the persistent tendency toward war. Burkina Faso’s dynamic should therefore be understood neither as a question of the good or bad will of Traoré’s government, but as an expression of the constrained trajectory available to states occupying a subordinate position within the imperialist hierarchy: leveraging competition among dominant blocs in order to secure conditions for domestic capital accumulation and to advance the interests of a national bourgeoisie.

The roots of this war extend back to the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union in 1991, when emerging Ukrainian and Russian capitalists actively seized Soviet-built infrastructure and launched their own process of primitive accumulation. Different bourgeois fractions competed to consolidate control over these resources, and in doing so tied themselves to rival blocs of international capital that aligned with their economic interests.

Ukraine’s economy and strategic position make the geopolitical contest between Western and Eurasian powers even more clear. Its value lies not only in its natural resources and labour force but also in its critical role as an energy transit corridor and its access to the Black Sea. Domestically, the state’s economy is characterised by a bourgeoisie with relatively predominant comprador traits, namely emerging capitalists of the 1990s. This has created a regional economic divide, with the western agricultural areas linked to the EU, and the industrialised southeast, now devastated by occupation, historically connected to Russia.

For Russian monopoly capital, control over Ukraine is essential to secure its dominance over Ukraine’s industrial and mineral wealth, control key energy infrastructure to maintain its leverage over Europe, and block the further encroachment of NATO and Western capital into what it views as its exclusive sphere of influence. For Western monopoly capital, Ukraine represents a crucial frontier for expansion. Institutions of Western finance capital saw the opportunity to draw a vast market and its resource base into their orbit: the EU through its Association Agreement, the IMF through loan-driven neoliberal restructuring, and the US through deals securing privileged access to strategic raw materials, such as the 2025 mineral-resource agreement. Also the promised post-war reconstruction, shaped above all by the EU and IMF and reinforced by US investment agreements, is designed to finalise the transfer of Ukraine’s remaining assets to Western monopolies and lock the state into a subordinate role, completing the project of economic capture initiated during Euromaidan.

The 2014 Euromaidan uprising was the explosive manifestation of these competing pressures. While portrayed as a popular democratic revolution, it was ultimately a bourgeois revolution co-opted by pro-Western capitalist factions, backed by far-right forces, serving to violently break Ukraine from Russia’s economic orbit and reorient it toward the West. This ‘revolution’ spilled the blood of working-class Ukrainians to advance the interests of Western capital. In retaliation, Russia’s annexation of Crimea secured its Black Sea naval base and marked a decisive escalation, setting the stage for the brutal full-scale war that followed.

This war in stalemate continues to show how the economic coercion of imperialism is routinely concealed beneath the veil of military aggression and ideological manipulation. The Western capital sells this war project as a liberation struggle between good and evil, whilst parasitically creating a dependency of the Ukrainian economy on its will in exchange for military and economic support, itself a profitable development for its arms-based monopolies.

Russian state propaganda, in turn, cloaks the invasion as an anti-fascist struggle or a quest for historical lands revising Soviet history, obscuring its true purpose to serve the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie in dominating energy flows between Europe and Asia, as well as expanding Russian capital further into Europe.

The war has also fundamentally reshaped the role of the Russian and Ukrainian capitalists. For the former, international sanctions from the Western bloc have curtailed a significant part of their outward and inward investment relationships; for the latter, the destruction of their industrial assets in the war-affected territories has eroded their traditional economic base, both in primary and secondary sectors. Yet the consolidation of a wartime state has meant that, for both sides, new opportunities for profit have emerged – from production and circulation of military supplies, and the impending ‘reconstruction’ projects.

The true casualties of this imperialist conflict are the working classes, betrayed by the ruling classes of both states. Both states terrorise their own population not only through severe restrictions on political freedoms and the hunting of draft-dodgers, but also by imposing a brutal wartime agenda: stripping worker rights, implementing austerity measures, and cutting essential services to fund the war. While sanctions have further impoverished the Russian working class, workers on both sides are coerced into a mobilisation serving imperialist expansion, with any opposition to the war punished through harsh repression and long prison sentences.

Primarily for the US and its allies, China represents the most formidable and disruptive challenger to their global predominance within the imperialist system, with each side deploying different methods to defend their interests amid a global crisis of overaccumulation. This rivalry is not particularly new: following Mao’s break with the Soviet Union, China pursued a policy of rapprochement with the US since the 1970s. Deng Xiaoping’s subsequent reforms dismantled the remaining socialist economic structures and inaugurated a new phase of capitalist accumulation, marking China’s definitive return to capitalism in 1978 and giving rise to what would become the US’s most substantial imperialist competitor.

Today the US is at the apex of the imperialist hierarchy, sustained by its unparalleled financial power on the world market. Its dominance rests above all on the centrality of the US dollar, which functions as the primary global reserve currency and the backbone of international trade, capital flows and debt issuance. This monetary hegemony gives US finance capital a decisive advantage: it can extract rents from the rest of the world through dollar-denominated assets, global payment systems and its command over institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. The US also hosts a disproportionate share of the world’s most powerful monopolies, especially in technology, pharmaceuticals, finance and defence, illustrating the scale of its concentration of capital. These sectors generate extraordinary monopoly profits, enabling the US ruling class to maintain an international position unmatched by any other state.

Both technologically and militarily, the US remains the most advanced imperialist power, though confronted by new constraints. Its corporations dominate key digital infrastructures, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and high-end semiconductor design, allowing it to shape global standards and supply chains. The US military – supported by a far-reaching network of bases and alliances – underpins these economic interests by enforcing access to markets, sea lanes and strategic resources. Yet this dominance is increasingly burdened by structural pressures: chronic overextension of its military commitments, deepening internal political polarisation, a long-term decline in productive manufacturing capacity and growing reliance on financial speculation. These contradictions do not immediately overturn US supremacy, but they expose the fragilities of an imperialist order built on debt, militarism and the extraction of rentier income, setting the conditions under which new challengers press for greater influence within the global hierarchy.

Among them, China currently holds the second position within the imperialist system, with its growth in some key sectors already surpassing, or projected to surpass, that of the US in the near future. Although less consolidated as a global financial power than the US equivalent, China’s banking sector is now vastly larger than that of its rival, reflecting the immense concentration and centralisation of Chinese finance capital. This financial expansion is reinforced by the rapid rise of outward capital flows, as China has transformed from a relatively minor exporter of capital in the early twenty-first century into one of the leading global sources of overseas investment. Chinese monopolies have become particularly prominent in this expansion: several of the world’s largest corporations by revenue and asset holdings are now Chinese, especially in energy, construction, telecommunications and banking, illustrating China’s increasingly central role in contemporary imperialism.

China’s financial strength is mirrored by its technological edge in areas such as 5G, mobile networks, semiconductors and base-station deployment, signalling a broader shift in the global balance of advanced productive forces. Its current strategy is straightforward: reduce reliance on the US dollar by internationalising the renminbi; secure trade-settlement agreements with major oil exporters that allow payment in its own currency; and compete directly with the US across the most profitable industrial and technological sectors. This strengthens the domestic profit base of Chinese monopolies and provides a stable foundation for expanded capital export abroad. In essence, extending control over key global energy assets would significantly enhance China’s position within the imperialist hierarchy, even if such dominance remains conditional and contingent.

The US is fully aware of this danger and has consistently implemented methods to challenge China’s rise. In April 2025, one avenue the Trump administration pursued was the re-imposition of tariffs on China at an even more intensified rate than in previous years. This move both expresses and intensifies the contradictions between competing sections of national and international capital within the US, as they seek to reinforce US imperialist hegemony while temporarily masking the deeper structural crisis of US capitalism. The rise of China as an imperialist power has, in fact, sharpened these pre-existing internal tensions, pushing the US bourgeoisie into a partial retreat from decades of free-market orthodoxy. Once hailing open competition, large sections of the US bourgeoisie now view these principles less as universal truths and more as tools to manage internal crises. US manufacturing has steadily declined over the postwar decades, falling from a position of industrial leadership to a far smaller share of national output, while financial capital and foreign investment have become the main levers of its global dominance. However, this dominance is showing signs of strain: over the last few years, for instance, US foreign direct investment inflows have weakened, while since the early 2000s China’s outward investment has expanded markedly over the last few decades, reflecting the rapid growth of its global economic influence.

As Chinese capital grows more competitive and US reinvestment in domestic industry falters, the foundations of US hegemony appear increasingly unstable. In this context, tariffs reflect deeper structural contradictions, with sections of the US bourgeoisie seeking to shield their interests amid rising pressure from rival powers like China and a stagnating global rate of profit. While some commentators on the left interpret this process as a welcome rebalancing of the world order toward a supposedly more benign multipolarity, the fact that rivals are now challenging the US on a comparable level points to something very different: the sharpening of imperialist contradictions. The increasingly violent shocks to the world system that accompany this telluric movement have two main consequences: on the one hand, different sections of the bourgeoisie, inside and across countries, shift their positions, with some fractions gaining and others losing; on the other hand, the working class as a whole loses, destined across the world to greater exploitation and oppression in the workplace, and more deaths on the battlefield.

While the Palestinian people retain the right to exploit this confrontation in pursuit of national liberation, and communists everywhere must fully support them in their efforts, it is crucial to recognise how their struggle unfolds within the wider divisions of the imperialist world order. The US, irrespective of administration, provides the backbone of Israel’s genocidal campaign, with Britain, Germany, France, and the majority of the EU forming its loyal support. Though dissenting or mitigating notes are occasionally struck, the whole NATO bloc is firmly on the side of Zionism. Opposite this bloc, Russia and China extend cautious diplomatic support while carefully avoiding any steps that would endanger their own accumulation strategies, for instance, through state-controlled companies that continue to profit from arms shipments to Israel or from technologies used in the surveillance of Palestinians. Regional powers such as Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia shift between rapprochement with the US-Israel bloc and tactical gestures toward broader Arab solidarity, reflecting the contradictory interests of their bourgeoisies. A final camp, consisting of other bourgeois states such as Iran, provides concrete backing to the resistance through financial aid, arms supplies, and diplomatic support. This assistance does not stem from solidarity with the Palestinian people, but from the pursuit of bourgeois class interests, seeking profit and advancing its imperialist aim of countering US-Israeli pressure. 

Two mistaken interpretations obscure this reality. On the one hand, the assertion that states such as Russia, China, or Iran form an ‘anti-imperialist axis’ collapses under scrutiny: these are capitalist powers pursuing their own monopolistic interests, not forces advancing proletarian liberation; on the other hand, the claim that ‘all wars are imperialist’ leads to the absurd conclusion that the Palestinian struggle is itself imperialist. Both views dissolve the specific contradictions at play.

Although the blocs led respectively by the US and China do not bear equal weight – with the US and NATO powers playing an overwhelming part in sustaining Zionism and its genocidal project – each state involved in the war pursues its own monopoly interests within the accelerating realignments of international capitalism. Iran’s entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the expansion of BRICS to include major Middle Eastern powers, and the Abraham Accords binding Israel to Gulf capital are not contradictory phenomena but two sides of the same coin: attempts by ruling classes to enlarge their spheres of profit, and secure the conditions for doing so. Palestine becomes the testing ground where these deals reveal their limits: Saudi–Israeli normalisation, central to Washington’s strategy, was among the targets that Hamas’s October attack sought to obstruct.

At the core of these manoeuvres lies the economy of imperialism. Structural over-accumulation and declining profitability drive monopolies into an ever more aggressive pursuit of resources, investments, and trade routes. This dynamic cannot but result in dramatic militarisation and the consequent deepening of regional conflicts. The Middle East, with nearly half of the world’s oil and gas reserves and critical choke points for global shipping, is indispensable to both blocs. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, running from UAE, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel, with links to Mediterranean ports in Greece, Italy, and France, is championed by Washington as a cheaper alternative to the Suez Canal. This directly rivals Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to link China to Europe and Africa via massive infrastructure and trade corridors. 

Israel, likewise, seeks to carve out its place within this inter-imperialist competition through projects that fuse economic ambition with territorial expansion. In earlier years, this tendency found expression in proposals such as the Ben Gurion Canal – a vast infrastructural scheme meant to link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean as an alternative to the Suez Canal. Though largely speculative, the project revealed the underlying logic of Israeli state planning: the pursuit of regional integration through control of land and displacement of its population. Today, this same logic re-emerges in the US–Israeli plan for Gaza, presented as a blueprint for ‘reconstruction’ and ‘stabilisation’. Behind its technocratic language lies the continuation of the same project of domination: to turn Gaza’s devastation into a precondition for economic incorporation, to re-engineer its territory under Israeli and Western supervision, and to permanently erase the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty.

The Palestinian struggle thus embodies more than a local or regional conflict. It concentrates the antagonisms of the imperialist global system: the accumulation of capitals, the partition of resources, and the sharpening clash between the most powerful blocs of monopoly capital – all sustained by the exploitation of the workers and the ever-increasing oppression of the Palestinian people.

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