This essay is based on the lecture delivered by Bikrum Gill for the second Unit of the People’s Academy curriculum. You can receive the full program — including the recorded lecture — by signing up for The People’s Academy.

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Introduction

What is imperialism? What does it mean to think about it as the primary contradiction? These questions have great significance for understanding our present conjuncture — the genocide in Palestine, the expansion of imperialist war against Iran — and for situating these conflicts in a broader historical struggle.

It is important that we think about imperialism specifically in its capitalist form, as theorised by Vladimir Lenin. But we must also understand it within the framework that Samir Amin called class struggle on a world scale. Why is this important? Because we cannot understand imperialism only as a self-propelling system. This may be one place where we hit a limit in Lenin, or where we need to broaden his approach.

Reading Lenin, it might appear that imperialism emerges out of an internal propulsion of capital in the core, transforms into imperialism, and then moves further afield. But what would it mean to think about imperialism as located within a class struggle on a world scale — as responding to anti-imperialism, caught up in a contest over ownership of the means of production globally, a conflict between the oppressing or core nations and the dependent nations?

Colonialism, Imperialism, and the Denial of Sovereignty

How do we understand the concept of imperialism, and how do we distinguish it from colonialism? Both are based on the denial of sovereignty to subjugated peoples. This is a key premise: core nations, imperialist nations, colonial nations are all premised upon a denial of sovereignty. Through this denial, they reorient subjugated peoples and their lands and territories — what Lenin calls economic territory — towards servicing the interests of the usurping entity.

Colonialism can be conceived as a one-to-one relationship between coloniser and colonised: French colonialism in Algeria, for example, or British colonialism in India. Imperialism, by contrast, operates on a world-systemic scale, or at least a broader regional and multi-unit scale beyond a one-to-one relation. Imperialism does not even need to involve direct territorial control. As Kwame Nkrumah argues, regions can have formal sovereignty — they are not directly under territorial rule — yet remain ensnared within a broader world system of imperialism through which they are effectively denied sovereignty and their resources are oriented towards the core.

This distinction matters because one can decolonise while remaining within an imperialist system that constrains sovereignty. A country may win independence and yet possess uranium in its territory with no means of processing it — no means of transforming its resources into finished or industrial goods through which it could build the hard power necessary to maintain sovereignty. The great war of the twentieth century was not necessarily the war between European powers in the two world wars, but the longer struggle for national liberation in the colonies. Victory may have been achieved by colonised peoples against the one-to-one relationship of colonialism, but the broader world-systemic structure remains in place.

Lenin on Monopoly Capitalism

For Lenin, imperialism is capitalism in its monopoly stage. He examines the way in which capitalism develops contradictorily: at one stage in the early nineteenth century it is a system of free-market competition, with capitalist firms competing with one another, developing the productive forces, and exploiting labour. But through this inter-firm competition, free-market competition eventually turns into its opposite: monopoly. The destiny of capitalism is monopoly capitalism. It is not free-market competition constantly leading to innovation and a progressive movement of society, however exploitative. Over the course of the nineteenth century, production comes to be controlled by cartels and trusts.

One can take as an example a market in which ten firms compete in the production of a particular good: after successive rounds of competition, two remain. More production is now concentrated in a single firm than before, and the surviving firms absorb into themselves ever more branches of production — a textile concern, for instance, may come to produce not only clothing but some of the inputs that go into the making of clothing.

Lenin’s point is not simply that capitalism transforms into a monopoly system of industrialists who concentrate production in larger firms. It specifically becomes what he calls finance monopoly capitalism. The monopoly ownership is held not by the industrial capitalists but by bank capital, by finance capital — those issuing capital and loans to the industrial capitalists. The financial capitalists do not seek to generate profits out of real production; they seek to generate profits from the loans they issue, from interest payments — what Lenin calls “clipping the coupons.”

There is something simultaneously parasitic about this process but also something potentially progressive, in the sense that it further socialises production. By concentrating greater amounts of labour into single firms, production is socialised. The conditions are there for a transition to socialism: one need only take these large firms and transform their concentrated ownership from private to socialist. But this does not happen — because of imperialism.

At the stage of financial monopoly capitalism, capital experiences a crisis of profitability or overaccumulation. Because of monopoly ownership, profits are concentrated in fewer hands. Surplus capital accumulates, but the monopoly firm cannot find new areas for profitable reinvestment, because other sectors are controlled by monopolies that cannot be competed with. If there is an excess of surplus capital, it could in principle be put to social purposes: building infrastructure, investing in education, healthcare, transport, raising wages, uplifting living standards. But capital’s objective is not only profits but the maintenance of power over the working class, and such measures would diminish that power.

This is where Lenin argues that monopoly finance capital leads to the search for new fields of profitable reinvestment, which leads to the export of capital to the colonies. What might otherwise have led to socialism — workers in concentrated monopoly firms fighting for a greater share of accumulated surplus — is deferred, because that surplus is directed outward towards what Lenin calls “backward nations.” That surplus builds railroads in the colonies that drain out resources, gains access to cheaper labour, and, by imposing conditions of dependency, forces the dependent countries to offer cheap labour and cheap resources to the core. This export of capital and finance from core to periphery heightens relations of dependency, forcing those countries that receive exported capital to reorient their economies to service the core. This generates super-profits for overaccumulated capital, underdevelops the periphery, and buys off sections of the working class in the core through modest improvements in living standards.

Nkrumah extends Lenin’s argument. When Lenin was writing, the export of capital occurred through the establishment of direct territorial control — the scramble for Africa, formalised at the Berlin conference, where the European powers assumed sovereign control over the African continent, and the colonisation of Asia in the nineteenth century, above all the colonisation of India. Nkrumah argues that even when countries reclaim formal sovereignty, the necessity of capitalism to maintain its imperialist outlet reproduces itself without direct territorial control. Countries may be formally sovereign, but their access to credit and capital remains under the control of the imperialist powers, and if they wish to develop, they must agree to terms of trade that continue to enable the drain of super-profits from periphery to core. This is where we see Nkrumah talk about neo-colonialism as a form of economic dependency.

Imperialism as the Primary Contradiction

What does this mean for our understanding of imperialism as the primary contradiction? Both Lenin and Nkrumah seem to suggest that the contradictions in the capital-labour relation in the core — in inter-firm competition — generate imperialism. This would appear to make imperialism a secondary contradiction. (The concept of primary and secondary contradictions comes from Mao, who in On Contradiction argues that at a given moment in China, imperialism is the primary contradiction — meaning it is the contradiction that bears upon all other contradictions.) The question is whether imperialism is the contradiction that directs the capital-labour contradiction, or whether it is the other way around.

If Lenin is arguing that imperialism arises out of contradictions in the core, it is not necessarily primary; what needs to be addressed is ownership relations in the core. If workers were the owning class in the stage of monopoly finance capitalism, there would be no recycling of overaccumulated capital into the colonies, no export of capital. Workers would take that surplus and recycle it into their own societies. But at the same time, Lenin argues that revolution in the core will not happen while imperialism persists. Only when dependent nations overcome imperialism — overcome the drain of wealth imposed by the export of capital — will the class contradictions in the core be sharpened and revolution become possible.

This poses a strategic question for organisers in the core. Does the struggle there need to target, through class struggle, the monopoly firms of the United States — the weapons companies, the pharmaceutical companies? Would the weakening of that power create space for peripheral nations to contest imperialism more effectively? And does resistance from the periphery — Iran's capacity to withstand imperialist war, the capacity of other nations to refuse US demands — in turn sharpen the contradictions in the core? These are the questions the framework of primary and secondary contradiction forces upon any strategy that claims to act in solidarity with the periphery.

Here we must turn to Samir Amin, the Patnaiks, and the world-systems tradition, which add something crucial. Amin argues that imperialism has always been a component of capitalism — there has never been a capitalism without imperialism. This helps us think about the primary contradiction in different terms. If we read Amin and the body of world-systems scholarship carefully, capitalism could never have emerged and stabilised without an imperialist base. From the long sixteenth century through to the nineteenth century, its very emergence was always contingent on imperialism.

Why? The Patnaiks argue in Capital and Imperialism that capitalism cannot exist at any point without imperialism, because without it the system can only engage in simple reproduction — it cannot engage in expanded accumulation, in endless accumulation. The capital-labour relation entirely dispossesses labour: the capitalist class generates surplus out of a dispossessed working class, but this working class can only reproduce itself through the market. Capital seeks to drive down wages, but workers must also be consumers. This is where Lenin picks up a component of what Marx called the law of value: competition drives down the wages of workers and the costs of goods, yet the workers must still be able to operate as consumers to reproduce their own lives. How can wages be suppressed and the market grow at once? There is a paralysing contradiction between profits, the suppression of wages, and the need for a consuming class. This is what generates, time and again, problems of overaccumulation, overproduction, and what the Patnaiks call a threat to the value of money.

This contradiction is historically resolved through imperialism — not as the highest stage, but as the very foundation of capitalism. The capital-labour relation would never have consolidated without an imperialist base. What enables workers to be both exploited and to function as consumers is the ability to draw in cheap inputs from the colonies and the imperialist peripheries. In addition to capital and labour, there are categories of labour and resources outside the core that can be appropriated without accounting for their reproductive conditions. Prices are imposed on peasants in the colonies because they have lost sovereignty — what the Patnaiks call a “price-taking” category of labour. This is not workers and trade unions bargaining for wages; it is the imposition of prices through the denial of sovereignty.

When Lenin speaks of “backward nations” that receive the export of capital, a question arises: why are these nations backward? How did they fall behind the European capitalist nations? The answer lies in the already existing relations of colonialist imperialism from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries — relations that rendered peripheral states dependent and subjected them to a drain of wealth since capitalism’s inception. So imperialism has always been the foundation of capitalism. You cannot have a capital-labour relation that exists at any point without an imperialist base. Therefore, imperialism is the primary contradiction. The denial of sovereignty to peoples, through which prices are imposed, price-setting power is exercised, and price-taking is forced upon the peripheries, enables the transfer of cheap inputs into the industry of the core and cheap goods for workers to consume. Under capitalism, imperialism is defined at its most primary level as sovereign power over the flow of economic capital across space.

The Two Legs of Imperialism

How is imperialism established? Amin provides a crucial framework. He says that imperialism walks on two legs — a military leg and an economic leg. From the sixteenth century onwards, the imperialist foundation of capitalism is established through the application of military force and violence against the peripheries. It is through force that sovereignty is denied, and it is through that denial that economic wealth is drained from the periphery to the core, generating the conditions for the second leg. Peripheral states come to depend on the core for access to capital, and dependency is maintained not only through military force but through economic force. This is why the Western imperialist order seeks to maintain monopoly control even over military violence — through NATO and other instruments — constraining the sovereignty of the peripheries.

The opium wars of the nineteenth century illustrate this concretely. China had been for millennia at the forefront of the world economy, and Europe often had a dependency on China. This relation was transformed through military force. An alliance of European powers went to war against China, subjugated it, and constrained its sovereignty. By seizing Hong Kong and other ports, they controlled the prices imposed on the movement of goods into and out of China. If Britain was being outcompeted by Germany and the United States, it could offset that deficit by forcing China to buy its declining industrial goods. Wealth was drained, and after a century China had a total deficit of economic capital. By imposing military force, imperialism created economic dependency.

Amin makes a crucial point: if imperialism walks on two legs of military and economic power, anti-imperialism must also walk on two legs. This is key to understanding our current moment. Different anti-imperialist forces in the latter part of the twentieth century and into today have walked on one leg or the other. But how might we conceive of these legs walking together?

When we think about imperialism on a world scale in terms of class struggle, we are thinking about how peoples in the periphery seek to reclaim sovereignty by challenging the military and economic bases of imperial power. When one leg is challenged, imperialism employs the other to contain the challenge. The Haitian Revolution is a clear example from the nineteenth century: Haiti defeated the military basis of imperialism, but could not resist the economic assault. A blockade was imposed, a capital strike was imposed. There can be an export of capital, but there can also be a threat of a strike of capital — denial of access to capital markets — which forces the subjugated country either into a condition of constant siege or into relenting and accepting the conditions imposed by the imperialist power.

This pattern plays out across the twentieth century. Peoples on the periphery struggle to reclaim sovereignty, to reorient their resources and labour towards national development, to build the infrastructure and industrial programmes through which they can become masters of their own destiny. But each time there is an attempt to reclaim sovereignty — whether through force or through an economic programme of nationalisation and development — there is always a counterrevolutionary move by imperialism to contain it. Iran is a concrete example: in 1953, Iran tried to nationalise its oil to create the conditions for overcoming dependency. A coup was imposed. The 1979 revolution was an attempt to reclaim control over the country’s national resources. When the military option — the proxy war that Iraq waged against Iran — did not succeed in reimposing military force, the US turned to sanctions, seeking to control the periphery through economic means.

The point is that imperialism is not only self-propelling; it is also responding to class struggle on a world scale. Sanctions are introduced not for their own sake, but to contain liberation struggles and the attempt to reclaim substantive sovereignty over resources. If states like Iran or Cuba accept a neocolonial status, they will not be subjected to constant war and sanctions — but they will not be sovereign either.

The Class Basis of Sovereignty

There is a second component to the question of imperialism and class struggle. As states on the periphery attempt to reclaim sovereignty, class struggles also occur within those states. The colonised territory is not composed of a single class: there are comprador elites, incipient bourgeoisies, trading classes, workers, and peasants. What is the relationship between these internal class contradictions and the attempt to reclaim sovereignty?

Lenin, in his thesis on the national and colonial questions, argued that it might be necessary to ally with the bourgeoisie in the peripheries, because the overcoming of the colonial and imperial relation must come first, and the proletarian revolution can follow. This makes sense as a way of thinking about imperialism as the primary contradiction, with other contradictions remaining secondary until they become primary later. But as Fanon and Amin argued, to actually achieve sovereignty one needs a peasant-centred anti-imperial, anti-colonial revolution — one in which class power is located in the peasantry and working classes, even if the bourgeoisie is not immediately done away with. The resources of national development must be recycled back into the country, producing a more universal form of development — not one that develops the bourgeoisie through neocolonial relations, but one that develops the entire country. There is a relationship between the class basis of decolonisation and anti-imperialism and the actual achievement of real sovereignty: the construction of a strong state necessary to fight imperialism, in motion with popular movements and struggles on the ground.

US Imperialism Today

After the Second World War, imperialism transformed into what Amin calls collective imperialism. The United States established itself as the primary imperialist power, with Europe and Japan — what Amin calls the "triad" — existing as subordinate powers. Europe and Japan acquiesced because they needed US leadership to manage and control the rise of the South during the era of decolonisation. US imperialism thus operates on two fronts: establishing neocolonialism over the peripheries while maintaining control over Europe and Japan. One key mechanism is controlling the flow of energy into and out of Europe, maintaining Europe’s dependence on the United States and keeping it in line.

US imperialism also emerges during the era of decolonisation and consolidates facing a particular set of challenges. The United States does not have access to colonies in the way the British did; it must reconstruct the system of imperialism on the neocolonial terms that Nkrumah describes. A key component is the relationship established between oil and the dollar — linking the purchase of oil on the international market to the US dollar. If we think about Lenin’s analysis of the relationship between bank capital and industrial capital, we can extend it to the power of the US dollar, premised upon its tie-up with oil, the US-Saudi relationship, and US control over West Asia. This generates a financial power through which the United States reimposed relations of dependency on the South after the 1970s.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States was able to impose even greater dependency. But two challenges to US imperialism, often underobserved, were launched in the 1980s and 1990s. China posed a challenge to the economic leg of US imperialism; the Islamic Republic of Iran, and later Russia, posed a challenge to its military leg. Today, what is at stake in West Asia and beyond is the US attempt to reimpose the military and economic basis of its imperialist order.

The United States is targeting China because China has contested the financial power of US monopoly finance capitalism by offering Global South states access to capital and surplus in ways that break them out of dependent development. In West Asia, the military force through which the United States established the oil-dollar relationship — through its Zionist and Saudi proxies — has been fundamentally challenged by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, by Hezbollah, by Ansar Allah in Yemen. Something existential is at stake for the United States in re-establishing overwhelming military supremacy, which is what it attempted to demonstrate against Iran — but has been unable to do so.

What we are seeing in the anti-imperialist struggle is a convergence between these military and economic challenges. Iran’s ability to withstand sanctions is related to China’s ability to offer Iran economic depth and an economic architecture through which it can overcome sanctions. China’s ability to continue with its economic programme is not unrelated to Iran’s ability to resist US imperialism militarily in West Asia from the 1980s to today, or to Russia’s ability to obstruct the projection of US military power on its borders. As the Chinese foreign minister recently said: the defeat of Russia is something China cannot allow — it would be a disaster even for the Chinese development project.

The Palestinian struggle, including al-Aqsa Flood, is not only a question of decolonisation. There is an anti-imperialist component, a geopolitical edge to the Palestinian struggle to overcome the way in which Zionism has held a monopoly on military force in the region. It is a challenge to the US imperialist system more broadly. The United States is trying to counter the Chinese project of integrating Iran into the region, of pushing what the Chinese call a “development peace” across the Global South. It is trying to build an India-Middle East corridor to cut China out. And the concern of states like China and Iran is to establish as much sovereign power as possible — to overcome dependency without seeking to replicate the system of domination. Their main concern is sovereign development, but the challenge they face is that sovereign development can no longer be secured without interventions on the international scale: building out an alternative economic and military architecture to defend those gains. This is why China speaks of holding the commanding heights of the economy, of AI and technological development: not from a wish to dominate in the manner of the West, but to overcome dependency. People may have relevant and rightful critiques of China; its own stated concern, however, is sovereign development — and the same logic applies to Iran and to Yemen.