ONCE we grasp the connection between a decade or more of ever-rising levels of corporate profits (and the enormous bonuses and remuneration packages which inevitably accompany corporate power and ownership) and the year-on-year decline in the purchasing power of our wages, the systemic nature of Britain’s crisis becomes clear. 

The dual character of British capitalism — simultaneously a key player in the global imperialist system engaged in the extraction of super-profits from the labour of millions both at home and abroad — emerges.

Supranational entities like the European Union, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank appear as part of the natural order and only bit by bit does it emerge that these are the superstructural elements that police this system of super-exploitation.

Naturally there are distinctions, contradictions and even conflicts between the imperial powers whose joint enterprise is the maintenance of this system. 

The way in which the World Bank and the IMF are each allocated distinct roles arising from the necessary compromises between North American capital and European capital is just one of these more or less enduring deals. 

The World Bank polices the foreign exchange and loan arrangements of low- and middle-income countries which are locked into the global monetary system by which the US finances its government debt. 

As is usual the US president nominated the World Bank president, so the North American Ajay Banga is Joe Biden’s choice. The IMF boss since 2010 is the Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva, whose nomination was thus endorsed by the then European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso.

Biden’s response to the specifics of the US domestic economic crisis was to erect tariff barriers against European — specifically German and French, and to a lesser extent Italian — manufactured products, and at the same time borrow massively to fund industrial subsidies to US manufacturers, most specifically to facilitate the more profitable transition to electric cars.

That this dovetailed with US foreign policy towards Europe — principally through its military sponsorship of the rump Ukrainian state — in disrupting cheap and accessible Russian energy supplies and substituting for them more expensive fracked US gas — is merely an expression of the unitary nature of US domestic and foreign policy. 

This year’s debacle, which saw the French and German governments collapse before the US assault, was accompanied by the almost complete subjugation of the European Union’s own institutions to the US strategy and has produced a crisis of confidence in the shaky edifice of European unity.

The sense in which European values — liberalism in philosophy, politics and economics — constitute a distinct trend in world politics has always been a construct of imperial thinking. 

The Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo connected political liberalism with the exploitation and profit-taking of the first mercantile and then industrial states of Europe and North America. 

His writing is especially exercised by the continuities between liberalism as such and the material basis upon which it arose: slavery, the super-exploitation of slave and indentured labour and the circuits of trade and capital accumulation that these entailed; which, in British politics, was highlighted by the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol and by the current controversy over the slave origins of the royal fortunes.

The exercise of military power against indigenous peoples, or in the defence of imperial profit-taking and resource acquisition, constitutes an enduring thread in British capitalism as our generations live it and is exemplified by Britain’s post-second world war history of colonial war and neocolonial exploitation.

An almost unbroken series of such wars, Malaya, Cyprus, Aden, Kenya and Suez, were followed by the Falklands conflict, and then the more collective imperial adventures under US leadership or Nato decision, including the 1990 Gulf war, the Nato attack on Yugoslavia, the war on Afghanistan and both the 2011 attack on Libya and the most recent joint Russian, French, British and US division of Libyan spoils.

The early appearance of divisions over the present proxy war against Russia were highlighted by the famous 2014 utterance of the assistant US secretary of state Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt as they discussed how to finesse their preferred candidates for the top jobs in the nominally sovereign state of Ukraine and the conflicting preferences of the European powers involved.

The casual sense of entitlement that the top functionaries of the imperial state display is there in the BBC’s own transcript of the conversation when Nuland, (the present No 4 in the US foreign policy establishment), wraps their arrangements up: “I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, fuck the EU.”

Obscured by the excesses of war is the wholesale acquisition of Ukraine’s abundant natural wealth, its enormous grain and sunflower harvests. 

Earlier this year, as the war developed, powerful oligarchs, in collusion with Western financial institutions, began acquiring formal control of vast tracts of Ukraine’s agricultural land.

Western “aid” to Ukraine is conditional on structural adjustment programmes imposed by Ukraine “partners” and last year USAid triumphantly declared that “finally, after 19 years of restrictions, the moratorium on land sales was lifted on July 1 2021.”

Much of Ukraine’s industrial base has been damaged by war but the most industrialised regions, those presently reincorporated into Russia, were originally ceded to Soviet Ukraine in order to give it a more substantial industrial base.

Oligarchic and corporate control and the associated corruption have meant that the remnants of collective ownership and state direction in the rump Ukraine are weakened. 

In this sense Ukraine is an extreme case of the provisional status of most countries outside of the most developed capitalist world in that the formal independence of its state structures is constrained by its integration into the global order.

The notion of an “international rules-based order” to which states in the global South is subordinated really defines the boundaries of imperialist hegemony and the challenges to it.

The iconic and ironic map which shows the “international community” as comprising North America, western Europe, Australasia and Japan makes the point that much of the global land mass and most people in the world are outside this charmed circle.

The rise of the Brics — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — with at least 20 developing states looking to join, is changing the global balance.

The magazine Foreign Policy, which voices the issues that trouble the US foreign policy establishment, argues that “Brics members see the emergence of multipolarity as both inevitable and generally desirable — and identify the bloc as a means to play a more active role in shaping the post-Western global order. 

“Member states share a deep-seated scepticism of US-led unipolarity and believe that the Brics nations increase their strategic autonomy and bargaining power when negotiating with Washington.”

Despite gloomy prognostications from liberal opinion that little united the Brics, it has survived and grown with even reactionary figures like Jair Bolsonaro or Narendra Modi active participants in its summits.

No-one on the left would describe either of these figures as “progressive,” yet it is clear that all political leaders in this alternative world find that the material conditions in which they operate compel measures of compromise as well as conflict with the imperial hegemon and its allies in the EU and Japan and Australasia.

It is necessary to avoid idealising even the most charismatic of such figures in the global South.

The resolute defence of his country’s interests by Hugo Chavez was combined with a realistic take on the weaknesses and compromises of Venezuela’s venal elites. 

He died in the heroic phase of his life and his revolutionary image is cherished by millions while even those who are prepared to compromise with local reaction and the US are compelled to claim affinity with him and his politics.

His successor is less manifestly cast from the same mould and a fierce controversy rages in Venezuela over the compromises the PSUV leadership now considers necessary.

Attempts by key figures in the state apparatus and the ruling PSUV to substitute — through legal manoeuvres — a fake “Venezuelan Communist Party” of their own creation for the actually existing PCV has followed a breach in the agreement the Venezuelan communists reached with Chavismo.

The PCV argues that experience demonstrates that processes that begin with a progressive and anti-imperialist content but are led by leading forces of a “polyclass and social reformist character” sooner or later end up betraying popular aspirations and serving as a vehicle for the imposition of measures at the service of capital. 

This is the historical role of social democracy, they argue, which today is fulfilled today by PSUV, and they go on to specify “criminal policies of destruction of wages and labour rights, criminalisation of union struggles, privatisation of public enterprises, concessions to the US and European oil monopolies, dollarisation of the economy, transfer of wealth and all kinds of guarantees to the capitalists, together with the deepening of corruption and ethical decomposition in their ranks.”

It is not clear that boiler-plate characterisations of social democracy make a necessary fit in every situation but the Venezuelan developments raise challenging questions about the changing nature of political formations in countries in the global South and the very real problems that arise when simultaneously engaged in conflict and compromise with imperialism.

There are none better than Venezuelans to judge what is best for their country and there is a material basis for the different views that arise. 

The material reality of capitalist relations of production in much of the Venezuelan economy, and a deep-rooted and bureaucratised culture of corruption in state enterprises and the oil industry, testify to the existence and persistence of class forces that are threatened by socialist advance and have material interests to defend. 

It would be foolish to discount the ideological effect of imperialist pressure in both the economy and in the social superstructure, in the media and among state and party functionaries. Similarly, in the solidarity movements abroad there will be conflicting views.

The responsibility of the labour movement here lies firstly in influencing British politics in the defence of Venezuela’s national independence and sovereignty because these provide the best conditions for the resolution of the country’s economic and political problems independent of foreign intervention or imperialist pressure.

We join with all who share these aims without imposing or accepting any preconditions on unity or the freedom to criticise.