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Jan 10, 2023 68 tweets 21 min read Read on X
In 1916, Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism.

In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah said that neocolonialism is the last stage of imperialism.

Both are obsolete. Since 1990, we’ve been in a new, even higher stage.

A 🧵 on debt, finance, the US, the Arab Spring and China.
Lenin and Nkrumah were correct in their time. But imperialism keeps changing, so theory must change too. Clinging to old models despite new data is the essence of dogmatism.

Nkrumah in fact predicted a new stage would result from the socialist bloc's collapse. Then it collapsed. “The ideal neo-colonialist ...
This thread will contain many tweets. I'll begin with some numbers showing the quantitative changes in how imperialism has been maintained and enforced since 1990.
First, financial coercion by the IMF, honed during the 80s, tripled in the decade after 1990. From 1984-1989 the IMF loaned an average of $4 billion a year; in an equal period after (1990-1995) it averaged $8.2 billion a year. In 2020 it was $37 billion.
imf.org/external/np/fi…
The amounts are relatively small, but these loans come at a high price, and are often targeted at countries in crisis that are least able to refuse. Before a member country can even be considered for a loan, the IMF requires that its economy undergo "structural adjustment"
These adjustments typically involve social spending minimums, the elimination of price controls, the devaluing of local currency, and refocusing industry on resource extraction and direct exports. Essentially, they are a weapon of class warfare against the peasants and workers.
I've already written a little about how the IMF deployed this weapon against Sudan in the 80s. Similar schemes were targeted at Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire, Mexico, Bolivia, and many others all over the world.
Second, as an unchallenged superpower, the US became twice as warlike as before. The US has conducted 400 total military interventions in its history—50% in the past 70 years and 25% in the past 30 years. The rate of new interventions doubled after 1990.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… Image“According to MIP, the US h...
The US had always been relatively hesitant to wield its military directly, usually relying on the CIA and proxies such as the Nicaraguan Contras. But only a month after the Berlin Wall was broken, the US military openly invaded Panama.
The US military transformed from a deterrent against the spread of socialism to a global occupying force. In 1989 it had bases in 40 countries; by 2021 it was 80 countries. In 2008 a new strategic command for operations in Africa (AFRICOM) was created.
dra.american.edu/islandora/obje…
Third, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US govt's go-to soft-power tool for coopting revolution and sabotaging resistance to its system of exploitation, expanded by an order of magnitude. In 1989, it spent just $21 million; by 2008, it was spending $135 million per year.
The NED's roster of "experts" have included former US government officials you may recognize, like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzenzinski, Elliott Abrams and Madeleine Albright.
A co-founder of the NED told the Washington Post that "a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
washingtonpost.com/archive/opinio…
The actual purpose of the NED and its sister organizations is to bring "democracy" to the enemies of the US empire. According to the NED's website, it is funded by an annual appropriation from Congress, and is answerable to it and to the Executive Branch. “NED’s continued funding is...“NED is answerable to a wid...
So it's probably no surprise a data regression analysis of all NED activity from 1990-1999 found that NED aid "neither produces democracy nor follows democratization" and that there was a NEGATIVE relationship between NED grants and democracy scores.
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
These quantitative changes show that qualitatively, after 1990, the United States and its closest allies (the UK, France, Germany, Japan) gained a complete monopoly on political influence throughout almost the entire world.
This has never before been the case in any stage of imperialism. Empires had always had competitors, whether it was another empire (such as how the European powers warred with one another in Lenin's time), or a competing economic order like the Soviet Union's. No longer.
Resistance to imperialism thus became vastly more difficult. The Arab Spring of 2011 is a good example. Its major flash points—Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Jordan—were praised in 1999 for "successfully" implementing structural adjustment programs.
merip.org/1999/03/how-tu…
In reality, this meant misery for the Arab worker. The Egyptian textile industry, for example, was privatized and its workforce halved. Wages stagnated as the cost of living increased. Things got worse throughout the 2000s, until many couldn’t afford food.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Even Libya was duped into "reforming" to attract foreign investment. In 2007, one-third of all public employees were laid off; being the last bastion of Arab Socialism, the govt gave a generous severance of 3 years' full salary. It expired in 2010...months before the Arab Spring.
On the eve of the revolutions, academics warned the US government that rising global food prices were correlated with social unrest and political instability. Action was not taken.
web.archive.org/web/2013091700… Image
At the same time, the NED sank its hooks into the region. The NYTimes later reported that "key leaders of the movements" had been paid by NED-funded NGOs. Western finance created the conditions for an uprising, and western soft-power stepped in to guide it
nytimes.com/2011/04/15/wor…
Overall, workers were left even worse off than before, in some places (Libya, Syria, Yemen) MUCH worse. The US and its allies—especially France—took the opportunity to militarily intervene and destroy the Libyan state, which had been an impediment to exploitation in the region.
The US govt didn't necessarily know the Arab Spring would happen. But it didn't need to predict when or where revolution would occur; it just had to be ready. NED is active EVERYWHERE in the world—EXCEPT North America and western Europe.

Democracy is already fine there, I guess. Image
This is how the new stage of imperialism is maintained. But who benefits from it, and how?

Lenin's 1916 definition of imperialism is still mostly relevant, in that he identifies the motor force of exploitation in the perpetually profit-hungry financiers of monopoly capitalism.
It has two main deficiencies today, however. One is obvious—the world isn't divided into colonies anymore. Only settler-colonies (e.g. US, Canada) and a few direct colonies (e.g. Puerto Rico) remain. The exploited countries are now neocolonies.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/… “we must give a definition ...
Nkrumah described further how neocolonialism operates in his book. There is a huge difference between colonialism and neocolonialism, which has serious implications for HOW the finance capitalist class profits from its empire.
Before, imperialists could siphon money toward the core via colonial state taxation. This was a major mechanism of exploitation of India by the UK; economist Dr. Utsa Patnaik estimated the total amount extracted to be approximately $45 trillion.
aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/…
But a neocolony is at least nominally independent and cannot be plundered so directly. The transfer of wealth from the global periphery to the core of empire now takes on different forms.
One of them is the servicing of external debt. Countries the World Bank classifies as "Low & middle income" pay over $1 trillion a year to service external debts.

Global debt has also vastly increased since 1990. For some, debt service is almost entirely to pay interest. Image
But this isn't the primary reason why western banks lend.

$1 trillion is a lot, but $10.8 trillion is a hell of a lot. That's the total drained from the IMF's "non-advanced" to "advanced" countries (US, Europe, Japan, &c.) via trade in 2015, per research by Jason Hickel, et al.
This transfer is known as unequal exchange, and is now the primary imperialist mechanism of exploitation. It arises in a large part from a discrepancy between the high price of commodities in the core and the low cost of labor to produce them throughout the global supply chain.
We now come to the second deficiency of Lenin's definition, which is the importance he gives the export of capital. This criterion is lacking in much less obvious way.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/… “we must give a definition ...
It would seem the export of capital is still a key factor in imperialist exploitation. Loans are a form of capital export; and Marxian economist Arghiri Emmanuel, who first developed the theory of unequal exchange, considered the mobility of capital to be an all-important factor. Image
So there's nothing new under the sun—yet MOST capital exports today do NOT play a role in either.

MOST exported capital, in fact, is now exported from one western country...to another western country.
UN statistics show that in 2021, 80% of the world's entire foreign direct investment stock was invested by "developed economies"—and an equal amount was also invested IN "developed economies"
unctad.org/system/files/o… Image
Since prices, incomes, &c. in western countries are mostly equivalent, they cannot (with some exceptions) be victims of each other's unequal exchange.
Also, even during colonialism, most capital exports DEVELOPED a country, not keep it underdeveloped.

Per research by economic historian @JayTharappel, 80% of the British Empire's capital exports were to settler-colonies (US, Australia, &c.), not India.
scienceopen.com/hosted-documen…
As a result, settler-colonial destinations of British capital advanced into the core, while India and other colonies languished in poverty.
Lenin's definition isn't incorrect—it's just incomplete. Not all capital exports are created equal; some have positive economic effects while others have negative ones.

The export of capital is therefore a NECESSARY condition of imperialism, but not a SUFFICIENT one.
We can get a sense of this difference in type by comparing western and Chinese investments in African countries.

$500 billion of the Belt and Road's $838 billion total investment stock was construction-related, while just 0.1% of US investments were in construction. ImageImage
The US exports five times as much capital as China, but US foreign direct investment is mostly in the "finance and insurance" category. The G7 member with the largest share of FDI stock in construction was Italy with 9%.
data.oecd.org/fdi/outward-fd… Image
According to the founder of urban planning research center MORE Architecture, "any big project in African cities that is higher than three floors or roads that are longer than three kilometers are most likely being built and engineered by the Chinese."
forbes.com/sites/wadeshep… Image
The west is notorious for promising big initiatives to "counter" the Belt and Road over the years. So far, none of them have amounted to much of anything. ImageImage
A study by McKinsey in 2020 found that US investors had a greater potential "appetite" for infrastructure investment in Africa than any other country...yet only 10% of projects were actually funded.
mckinsey.com/capabilities/o…
To get rich, first build a road. Western financiers had plenty of time and capital to fund African infrastructure, but largely chose not to—not only because the real money is in extracting rents, but because the more infrastructure you build, the harder it is to extract rents.
The western press has excoriated the Belt and Road Initiative from many angles. One criticism is that some projects "fail" in that Chinese investors don't get a return on investment for the stuff they built.
That happens to be true. Funding infrastructure in Africa is risky and not very profitable.

China does it anyway.
In fact, the average return on Chinese foreign investments is quite low, less than half the global average.

Interest rates on Chinese loans to Africa are also half what is charged by western lenders, according to British NGO Debt Justice. ImageImageImageImage
This is screwing up the whole system. Western economists complain that China secretly gave billions in emergency loans to struggling countries in 2022, which "postpone[d] the day of reckoning" they thought poor countries deserved to face at the IMF's hands
fortune.com/2022/09/12/chi…
Worse still, if you don't pay back a Chinese loan, nothing bad happens.

According to a comprehensive analysis by China-Africa expert Professor Deborah Brautigam, et al., Chinese lenders have never once seized assets or "structurally adjusted" anyone.
static1.squarespace.com/static/5652847… “We found no “asset seizure...
Chinese loans aren't for free. PRC advocates mention that China has forgiven many debts, which is not entirely accurate. It has, but those are a minority of its loans.

Instead, when push comes to shove, the debt stays on the ledger, but Chinese lenders simply won't collect. ImageImage
The worst thing that may happen if you're in arrears, in fact, is that Chinese creditors won't give you MORE loans.

If you don't pay back the IMF and the World Bank, they will take it from you in blood. Even the IMF's debt *forgiveness* brings pain.
A debt isn't a debt if you don't pay it back. The discipline of Chinese international lenders in refraining from profiteering, in fact, is pretty remarkable. There's a good reason for it—just like the west, profiting from loans isn't their primary goal.
China and the west have completely opposite ulterior motives in finance. The western empire uses debt as leverage to impoverish its victims so it can continue to make the real money through unequal exchange. China is there to make sure roads get built, even if at a loss.
This benefits China in less tangible ways: its construction industry and its manufactured goods are ensured new markets, and it earns goodwill. It also undermines the west's exploitation, and maybe eventually, its hegemony.
How is this acheived? Aren't Chinese lenders capitalists, profit-hungry by nature?

Well, no, actually. A 2015 study published by Australian National University Press in found that 89% of China’s overseas direct investment came from state-owned enterprises
jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16…
The loans are issued by China Eximbank, which in 2007 became the world's largest export credit agency. It operates as a tool of the government, and is not expected to satisfy shareholders or turn a profit. Image
In fact, China entirely lacks a financial oligarchy, another of Lenin's criteria for imperialism. It has many capitalists, and billionaires, but not financial billionaires.
In China, the state owns the banks, the Party owns the state, and the workers and peasants own the Party. Unlike financial capitalists, they are not required by their class interest to super-exploit workers in other countries.
Some modern Marxists err by considering the PRC an empire just because it exports capital. It's clear this isn't the case. Lenin's theory of imperialism must be updated and clarified based on new observations, just like many other scientific theories have been throughout history.
This isn't a criticism of Lenin's reasoning. He couldn't know how things would change in the 20th century. If he were alive now, he surely wouldn't have identical takes on entirely new phenomena. He would make new observations and write more theory to explain them. So should we.
A few corrections and clarifications.

As @ZeusGrobbelaar informed me (thank you!) the Libyan government probably didn’t follow through with its plan to lay off thousands of public employees in 2007, reported here by Reuters:
nytimes.com/2007/01/22/wor…
The Libyan government at the time was trying to attract foreign investment and was promising a lot of privatization schemes, like this one in 2010, but the actual reforms likely proceeded more slowly.
reuters.com/article/ozatp-…
In the end, I think Gaddafi and the Libyan ruling class made a tragic mistake of thinking they could reconcile with the west on their own terms and survive. Despite their overtures, the empire found it preferable to annihilate them instead.
Second, note the original source for calculating the distribution of the British Empire’s capital exports.

I do strongly advise you check out the paper @JayTharappel cites it in, it’s quite informative.
Also, I neglected to credit a few of the screencaps regarding Chinese debt relief and China Eximbank. They are from The Dragon’s Gift by Deborah Brautigam, which I highly recommend you read to further understand Chinese finance and other aspects of the PRC’s relations with Africa Image
For further reading, check out this related thread, which explains more about the reasons behind the transition to neocolonialism, and how imperialism has changed:

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More from @KyleTrainEmoji

Dec 19, 2023
“Does the wealth of the Western world still come from imperialist extraction?”

In very large part, yes. IMF-classified “advanced economies” drain $10 trillion from the rest of the world each year, through unequal exchange underlying international trade.🧵
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
“Is that a lot?”

Yes. It’s over a tenth of the entire world’s GDP. And it doesn’t even include lesser mechanisms of exploitation like the payment of interest in debt, royalties for patented technology, or other forms of rent.

The actual number is likely a bit higher.
This isn’t some big mystery. People have already figured this out.

Anyone who is still denying it is either ignorant or has the agenda of maintaining said imperialist extraction.
Read 5 tweets
Sep 1, 2023
Housing prices fell dramatically in the US in 2007-2008.

Housing prices are falling dramatically in China right now.

What's the difference?

In one sentence: Chinese banks will not make people homeless.

In several sentences... 🧵
The reason why so many people lost their homes during the 2008 financial crisis has to do with adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs).

In the US, ARM-dealing was highly predatory, promising very low interest ("teaser rates") to begin with, which would then greatly increase later on. Image
People who took on such mortgages were planning to refinance their ARM later to avoid paying the higher interest rates. (Or else planned to sell before then.) But after the market collapsed, they were stuck in their ARM—lenders wouldn't allow refinancing.
reuters.com/article/us-usa…
Read 11 tweets
Jul 22, 2023
Sometime in the next seven years, a human being will set foot on the Moon for the first time since 1972.

That human will probably be a Chinese taikonaut, and the outrage from the West will be like nothing we’ve seen.

A thread 🧵 on China 🇨🇳 and the New Space Race 🚀 A picture of the moon
Let’s briefly review the history of the United States’ Moon policy.

JFK’s famous promise of a Moon landing by 1970 was fulfilled. But it may not surprise you to learn that Western plans since then have been…overly optimistic. A picture of an Apollo landing
In 1989, George HW Bush gave a speech promising a return to the Moon sometime in “the new century.”
presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/rema…
Read 21 tweets
Jul 15, 2023
The progress China has made in renewable energy just THIS YEAR makes the entire rest of the world look like it's standing still.

I wrote in December that to call China the "world leader in renewable energy" was a colossal understatement.

That’s even more true today.

Thread 🧵
Huainan floating solar farm in Anhui Province.
Huainan floating solar farm in Anhui Province.
Even the Western press considers the PRC's climate target to be all-important to preventing complete global disaster. It was estimated to reduce projected temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius, the largest *drop* ever calculated by climate models.
foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/25/xi-…
Climate science groups called it the "most important announcement on global climate policy in at least the last five years."

Anyone doubting that the PRC is willing and capable of not just fulfilling, but exceeding, its goals is not paying attention.
climateactiontracker.org/press/china-ca…
Read 43 tweets
May 1, 2023
Sudan’s government did everything the IMF told it to. It devalued its currency by 10x, cut fuel subsidies, and normalized relations with Israel.

But instead of forgiving Sudan’s debt as promised, the Paris Club reneged. Sudan’s debt is still increasing.
https://t.co/Nn8ubmAhB2country.eiu.com/article.aspx?a…


“Recent economic reforms include the removal of fuel subsidies and a sharp exchange rate devaluation under an IMF-monitored programme required to enter HIPC.  Another condition for accessing HIPC was removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, achieved last year after Sudan agreed to provide compensation to victims of attacks and normalize relations with Israel.”
Image
“In mid‑June the Paris Club announced the suspension of debt relief for Sudan through its Enhanced Initiative for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) owing to the October 2021 military coup. We expect the indefinite suspension of the HIPC for Sudan to continue at least until discussions with the IMF resume after the 2023 elections; this will widen the external debt to GDP ratio over the 2022‑26 forecast period.”
The power the IMF (and its puppet masters the US and Europe, which control its policy decisions) has over countries like Sudan is immense. To make a deal for debt relief, the victim country must enact “reforms” FIRST, before receiving anything.
In a just world, the IMF and the Paris Club would face some kind of consequences for breaking their word. If one party to an agreement fulfills their promise but the other party delivers nothing, the second party should face consequences.
Read 9 tweets
Apr 19, 2023
France is the second-strongest economy in the EU, the only nuclear power, and is energy-independent. If any country can lead Europe out from under the US thumb, it’s France.

However, it can’t without undergoing some fundamental social changes.

Thread 🧵 “Europe must resist pressur...“China completes first yuan...“BEIJING, March 28 (Reuters...
Everyone is saying the word “multipolarity” these days. When do we get there, exactly?

The best academic writing about it I know of is from Samir Amin. In 2006, his take was that an anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist Europe was a key criteria for a multipolar world to exist. “Real advances towards a di...
France is still one of the strongest bastions of social democracy (i.e. least neoliberal) in the west. Income inequality is staying relatively constant there. The pension age, which everyone protested a recent increase to, is still one of the lowest in Europe. Image
Read 26 tweets

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