It is a sign of the depth of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International—during which nearly all of the European social democratic parties joined the interimperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states—has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions. Although the more Eurocentric sections of Western Marxism have long sought to attenuate the theory of imperialism in various ways, V. I. Lenin’s classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (written in January–June 1916) has nonetheless retained its core position within all discussions of imperialism for over a century, due not only to its accuracy in accounting for the First and Second World Wars, but also to its usefulness in explaining the post-Second World War imperial order. Far from standing alone, however, Lenin’s overall analysis has been supplemented and updated at various times by dependency theory, the theory of unequal exchange, world-systems theory, and global value chain analysis, taking into account new historical developments. Through all of this, there has been a basic unity to Marxist imperialism theory, informing global revolutionary struggles.

However, today this Marxist theory of imperialism is commonly being rejected in large part, if not in its entirety, by self-proclaimed socialists in the West with a Eurocentric bias. Hence, the gap between the views of imperialism held by the Western left and those of revolutionary movements in the Global South is wider than at any time in the last century. The historical foundations of this split lie in declining U.S. hegemony and the relative weakening of the entire imperialist world order centered on the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan, faced with the economic rise of former colonies and semicolonies in the Global South. The waning of U.S. hegemony has been coupled with the attempt of the United States/NATO since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to create a unipolar world order dominated by Washington. In this extreme polarized context many on the left now deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by the core imperialist countries. Moreover, this has been accompanied more recently by sharp attacks on the anti-imperialist left.

Thus, we are now commonly confronted with such contradictory propositions, emanating from the Western left, as:

1. one nation cannot exploit another;
2. there is no such thing as monopoly capitalism as the economic basis of imperialism;
3. imperialist rivalry and exploitation between nations has been displaced by global class struggles within a fully globalized transnational capitalism;
4. all great powers today are capitalist nations engaged in interimperialist struggle;
5. imperialist nations can be judged primarily on a democratic-authoritarian spectrum, so that not all imperialisms are created equal;
6. imperialism is simply a political policy of aggression of one state against another;
7. humanitarian imperialism designed to protect human rights is justified;
8. the dominant classes in the Global South are no longer anti-imperialist and are either transnationalist or subimperialist in orientation;
9. the “anti-imperialist left” is “Manichean” in its support of the morally “good” Global South against the morally “bad” Global North;
10. economic imperialism has now been “reversed” with the Global East/South now exploiting the Global West/North;
11. China and the United States head rival imperialist blocs; and
12. Lenin was mainly a theorist of interimperialism, not of the imperialism of center and periphery.