Demarcating the Proletariat
Internationalism, Imperialism, and the Labor Aristocracy
Originally published in July 2025 and revised in February 2026
1. Introduction
The opportunists have enjoyed a temporary victory. With the fall of the socialist economies in Eastern Europe and Asia, there has not been a strong opposition to the dominance of capital, and with this dominance comes also the dominance of capitalist ideology and revisionist “Marxist” opportunism across the globe. Since revisionism is a deviation from Marxist proletarian liberation, and thus a reinforcement of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideology, any true Marxist should make it their priority to root revisionism and opportunism out, revealing them to be the bourgeois infections they are.
Within highly imperial countries like the United States, the revolution, or what little there is of it, is absolutely riddled with this infection. Most in the “left” here are not Marxist; they possess a philosophy that’s reflective of a very uneducated and unread anarchist-variety, some uncritically absorbing even portions of the rightest “anti-authoritarian” strains known as “anarcho-capitalism” or “libertarianism.” This commonality is no surprise, judging from how both these misguided leftists and the libertarians view the state as the final roadblock of the people’s liberation.
Ignoring this majority section of “leftists,” Marxists within the imperial countries are not much better. While espousing Marxism, proletarian solidarity, and a dialectical materialist worldview, they too are infected with opportunism and revisionism, mostly of three varieties:
A first variety of revisionists rejects Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat in lieu of trade unions and mass organizations, holding individualist and bourgeois democratic principles sacrosanct above materially revolutionary tactics, rejecting Lenin’s demand for “professional revolutionaries” and “bowing” to the spontaneity of a workers’ movement that is still in its infancy and very much bourgeois in character. This is ostensibly the same error of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Communists, which was critiqued by Lenin. He was proven right through the victorious October Revolution in Russia led by the Bolsheviks, whereas Luxemburg and the German Communists were proven dead wrong, finding the unions and democratic organizations they put their hopes in incapable of achieving revolutionary victory during the German Spartacist risings in the winter of 1918-19.
A second variety of Marxist revisionists are uneducated on the economy and, through their chauvinism, possess a theory that distorts Marxism and obscures the proletariat as a class within imperial production. Rather than understanding the proletariat correctly and dialectically within production, these idealists blur the scientific understanding of the proletarian class with philistine ideas of “working people,” or “wage-earners” in general, seeing one’s employment status as the only identifier of proletarian character. Their theories are horribly outdated, and their view of the economy is stuck in an early-capitalist period where workers produced domestically for a primarily domestic consumer populace, which has not been the case for any capitalist society ever since the beginnings of capitalist-imperialism, which, at our current time, has been running in a mature and all-encompassing way for over a hundred years.
These revisionists project a copy-paste economy onto every country in the world; a more or less “closed” economic system, with trade and the interrelatedness of countries, if it is even taken into consideration, understood idealistically as a “sign” of the collectivization of the workers and their eventual victory, and not as it exists materially: a concrete chain of interdependency and capitalist-imperial oppression, enshrining parasitism for some nations at the expense of others, and carrying this trend also into the proletarian class.
While this variety professes to uphold the revolution and believes in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie as a class and the guiding of society through socialism to communism by the dictatorship of the proletariat, they do not take into account the global market with its division of goods, resources, and labor due to imperial production, and thus fail in holding a materialist analysis, siding with the bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy over actual proletarian forces. Misguided by ignorance and a chauvinistic view of world relations, “Marxists” of this variety attempt to build “proletarian unity” with whatever wage-workers are around them, which, especially when living in a highly imperial country, results in terribly un-proletarian and bourgeois unities of labor aristocrats.
A third variety of revisionist Marxists are more energetic than the two, recognizing, at least semi-consciously, the international character of oppression. However, they get swept up in the national revolts that occur spontaneously due to capitalist-imperialist production, and their lack of discipline and despair leads them to abandon Marxism for liberal radicalism and the “rights” of bourgeois nations. Encased in this spontaneity, they form false dialectics around national oppression and attempt to blur these with the Marxist class analysis, applying the proletarian revolution to the national liberation struggles of oppressed nationalities. By forming non-class unities in this way, these “Marxists” serve to liquidate the revolution, completely abandoning the class view. Their idealist groupings favor the bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy, who hide in the jingoistic national identities constructed and defended by these revisionists.
It is the errors of these last two varieties of “Marxists” that we address in this article.
2. Ignorance, Spontaneity, and Despair
We should understand that, at the base of both of these errors, is a failure to correctly accommodate the capitalist-imperialist mode of production into a knowledge of economy. This results in an incorrect view of the productive forces, capitalist society, and the reality of the world in which we live. By not correctly applying the principles of capitalist-imperialism, these revisionists have an outdated, incomplete, or simply wrong analysis of the productive forces. Consequently, they also have an incomplete analysis of the classes surrounding the productive forces, and misidentify both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as classes and as dialectical concepts within Marxist revolutionary theory. In lieu of this understanding, they have fallen into the camp of bourgeois opportunism, widely viewing imperialism not as a Marxist, but as an idealist liberal. We will specifically address the third variety of revisionists more than the second, since the errors of the second variety will be fully clarified as we explore the errors of the third, their more energetic nationalistic counterparts.
The Marxists in favor of national “decolonial” revolt reflect an energetic attempt to actually dissect the imperial world and form appropriate divisions – albeit only an attempt, one that fails due to ignorance of capitalist-imperial production and bowing to spontaneity. In doing so, revisionists of this type fall for the old nationalist error that Lenin specifically struggled against, albeit with the nationalists of today sometimes using more expansive national identities than any one “nation,” such as “Indigenous” or “Pan-African,” a natural consequence of the development of social intercourse.
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat is a book by J. Sakai first written in 1983, with a 4th edition published in 2014. It is one of the clearest examples of this type of revisionism. Sakai is correct in identifying the domestic American producers as the African slaves within the early U.S., but his further theorizing reveals his ignorance of capitalist-imperialism as a mode of production, and he falls into revisionist and nationalistic error, holding that it is Africans, Black people, indigenous people, immigrants, or otherwise “non-white” nationalities that are proletarian, since it was the nations of “white” Europe that developed capitalism and created racialized oppression that benefitted them and their people at the expense of the “non-white” nations. He takes this further to full support of nationalist movements for these oppressed nationalities, seeing the throwing off of “white imperialists” as a necessary pre-step on the road to socialism.
While shining a general light on white supremacy, the bourgeois origin of the “American” settler society, and the general reaction and opportunism within the labor unions and so-called “Communist” organizations of the United States, Sakai’s erroneous revision and sidelining of class struggle for national struggle (an error that is common among the modern “left”) reflects the exact same nationalist revisionism Lenin combatted in many of his writings from the early 1900s (particularly in “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” [1914] and “The National Question in Our Programme” [1903] among many more). Like the revisionists then, who believed Poland’s independence was a prerequisite to the socialist revolution, Sakai and these “Communists” create faulty revolutionary dialectics around national or racial oppression while failing to grasp imperialism as economic, or the ongoing mode of capitalist production perpetuated by financial capital. They fail to understand that national oppression is a feature of our mode of production, and that the oppressed nationalities will not be able to become un-oppressed without a revolution over those productive forces. Contradictions around “race” or national identity are not primary, but secondary ones in service to imperial capital in order to proletarianize workers at greater rates over others; a specifically economic factor that reflects the wider contradiction of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat around the means of production. The antagonism between Europe and the rest of the world, or between white people and non-white people – both national contradictions – reflects the antagonism in the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which, as the primary class contradiction that runs through the whole world’s production, requires a class view and class revolution, and not a national one, in order to be resolved. While these revisionists – steeped in bourgeois idealism, with many in some degree of adventurist despair – set up other groups before the proletarian class, there is no other unity for the oppressed that is capable of alleviating their oppression, since the proletariat as a class is the material antithesis to the oppressor minority class; the minority of bourgeoisie that are the primary perpetuators and benefactors of all the world’s oppression, and who parasitically depend on the proletariat for their profit and livelihoods.
Still, the popularity of Sakai and other “Marxists” who abandon class analysis and bow to the spontaneity of national revolt reveal quite a lot about the current state of our movement; namely, the masses’ real demand for the imperialist relation to be demystified, and for a wide unity of the oppressed to take a form that is capable of answering imperial parasitism. Sakai and the other nationalist revisionist “Marxists,” not to mention the still widely neo-liberal “leftist” miasma, recognize the unquestionable parasitism within highly imperial societies like the United States and those in Western Europe. Lacking a dialectical materialist view however, and still steeped in some degree of idealism, they erroneously define these parasitical strata along national or racial lines, as “Europeans,” or “white colonizers.”
We must answer the demand of the masses and correctly solve the problem of imperial parasitism. We cannot trail behind the people as they grasp for unity against their oppressors and a correct reason for why so many of their so-called “workers” reek of reaction and are traitors to the cause of liberation. We cannot allow just any self-proclaimed “Marxist” to lead the proletariat and the revolution into liquidation by repackaging the defeated theories of the past, which has already happened prominently with Settlers and will continue to happen until actual Marxists are capable of interjecting scientific socialism into the discourse and making ideological gains.
Communists must be well-educated on the imperialist mode of capitalist production as an economic force first and foremost; before understanding imperialism’s secondary contradictions of militarism, national supremacy, and national supremacy’s inverse, national oppression, since all flow from the productive forces under our specific historical stage of capitalism, which, among others, has, as its defining features, the domination of financial capital and monopoly. This historical stage of capitalism is known as imperialism
3. The Imperialist Mode of Production
Imperialism is not policy, racism, or an order of violence. It contains all these things, but what it is first and foremost is the mode of capitalist production within our modern day.
Lenin meticulously analyzed this mode of capitalist production in his book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and also succinctly defined it in his article, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, both works every Marxist should be intimately acquainted with. We will quote his brief definition from the latter article now:
Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism. Monopoly manifests itself in five principal forms: (1) cartels, syndicates and trusts—the concentration of production has reached a degree which gives rise to these monopolistic associations of capitalists; (2) the monopolistic position of the big banks—three, four or five giant banks manipulate the whole economic life of America, France, Germany; (3) seizure of the sources of raw material by the trusts and the financial oligarchy (finance capital is monopoly industrial capital merged with bank capital); (4) the (economic) partition of the world by the international cartels has begun. There are already over one hundred such international cartels, which command the entire world market and divide it “amicably” among themselves—until war redivides it. The export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities under non-monopoly capitalism, is a highly characteristic phenomenon and is closely linked with the economic and territorial-political partition of the world; (5) the territorial partition of the world (colonies) is completed.[1]
Lenin and all good Marxists do not relegate imperialism to only national supremacy; rather, they understand imperialism as existing in the economy itself, as a feature of modern capitalist production. One of the primary foundations of this definition of imperialism is monopoly. In the below excerpt from Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin describes the transformation of capitalism into capitalist-imperialism via the force of monopoly.
Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly.[2]
It is a law of capitalist production that the largest capitalist players in a market take in the most profit from that market, and they are always reinvesting their spoils back into their businesses in order to “double-down” on their gains to dominate the market further, bringing about higher rates of profit and more riches for themselves. This trend centralizes the market into fewer and fewer hands until a firm monopoly is established by either the dominance of one capitalist, or, more often, by the agreement of a few big ones to split the profits, rather than fight endlessly over market percentiles. Without any authority standing above the capitalist class, all capitalist action will inevitably transform into monopoly where the capitalists, having absorbed or dominated any real competition, set prices and dictate their will unchecked – that is, until the internal contradictions of capitalist accumulation cause a crisis, leading to production and labor being redistributed according to war.
Within the production of the late medieval period, there were already an established class of monopolistic bankers who would lend money to the lords, the cities, or the guilds. While still wrapped up in aristocratic rights and not being capitalists in the truest sense, it was this class that funded the early “discovery” of the new world, and who benefited from the returns on their investments in colonial companies. These early financial “monopolies,” based on the accruements made primarily under the feudal mode of production – puny in power compared to those that would occur under the capitalists – were the initial financiers of the early exploratory and colonial expeditions that energized early imperialist productive relations. With the rise of the capitalist class proper and especially the advancements to industry brought on by them, the colonies took the heavy burden of the market, turning into plantations of slave labor and sources of raw materials. Within the colonial possessions, the soil was made barren with repeated harvests of the same cash crops – tobacco, sugar cane, rice, etc. – all stuffs that were sent back to Europe to be processed by the industrial proletariat there and to feed European appetites, making the investors in these colonial enterprises fabulously wealthy. The immense profit produced by this exchange incentivized production and colonial conquering further, with the European capitalist nations, spurred on by the speculation of financiers, conquering practically all of the Earth that was economically viable by the turn of the 20th century. It is at this point that the imperialist mode of production can be said to be in full form, constituted by the complete domination of financial capitalists over industry, with commodity production made subservient to speculative banking interests like investments, returns, and the derision of profit from the sale and purchase of capitalist ownership alone in the form of stock, a marked development from the capitalism of the past headed by industrial capitalists.
Now, under this form of financier capitalism – capitalist-imperialism – there is nothing left for us but the progressive march for socialism or the regressive cycle of the capitalist-imperialist financiers’ routine re-divisioning of the world amongst themselves, resulting in cataclysmic war, death, and deprivation for the masses. The World Wars were the inevitable consequence of this type of production, where, bereft of any new productive forces and with the financier’s returns declining, the European nations had to bludgeon themselves to death trying to divide up the ones they had already; the financiers investing in war with their return being the conquered productive forces, resources, and labor of their neighbor. As usual in war, it was the working class and the poor who paid the price for all of this. Such world-spanning conflicts are bound to happen again, and smaller regional ones are always going on. So it will remain until the masses shake off the yoke of capitalist-imperial production.
Today, and most starkly, the Palestinian people, among many others, face the open violence of the capitalist-imperialists, who have marked their land for development and for profit, and will not stop the march of their capital, including even the genocide of the Palestinian population as a tactic in line with their class aims. This imperialist action, like all imperialist action under the capitalist mode of production, has, at its core, capitalist profit creation as its primary motivation.
Due to the prevalence and success of many national revolts worldwide however, imperialism has adapted generally “softer” tactics than overt military occupation, especially in recent times. The capitalist-imperialists more often rely on debt to hold foreign labor in its place of abject oppression, offering predatory loans that come directly from imperial governments or from international associations of investors like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank. With little recourse to develop their economy outside of imperialist control, the loans are accepted by the bourgeois governments of these proletarians, and stipulate that the country’s resources and labor are available to the world market, open for exploitation on the part of the global bourgeois class via the maintenance of poverty wages and free-market policies; the violent reality of capitalist economic “development.”
Pao yu-Ching, a Chinese Marxist whose literary work revolves around analyzing the revisionist turn to capitalism in China, here describes the modern status of imperialism and the state of proletarians within the dependent countries:
On top of many years of colonial rule, imperialist powers have continued their political and economic domination even after people in these countries fought and won their “independence.” The dream of the national bourgeoisie in these countries in the early post-war[3]years to develop capitalism independently has been resoundingly smashed after the crises in 1982-85 and then in 1997-99. After rounds of restructuring by global monopoly capital, assisted by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), these countries went through rounds of austerity programs to cut public health and education already severely under-funded. The Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) imposed by the IMF on these debt-ridden countries demanded financial deregulation and privatization in order to facilitate the takeover of these assets by foreign capital. Labor reform programs forced these countries to keep their labor market flexible including longer working hours, lowered wages and relaxed restrictions on other working conditions, as well as prevention of labor organizing. Even before the latest global neoliberal restructuring, colonial and semi-colonial countries had never established political or economic sovereignty. After the neoliberal restructuring they had little choice but to accept the conditions demanded by global monopoly capital, because their hope to develop their own economies no longer existed. They have since opened their borders for imports of foreign capital and commodities (including basic food) and have joined the new global division of labor by exporting products produced by cheap labor via the global supply chain.[4]
We will now offer up some concrete examples of imperialist relations towards dependent countries. India’s “National Floor Level Minimum Wage” is 178 rupees a day, which amounts to roughly $2.08 USD.[5]These poverty wages are maintained by the predatory investments into the country by large organizations of international capitalist-imperial financiers, such as The World Bank, which currently has 83 lending operations in India, totaling $18.2B in commitments.[6]However, the “developed” countries – the homes of the majority of the world’s capitalist-imperialist financiers – depend on the masses of producers in so-called “undeveloped” countries like India for the necessities of their lives. For example, in February 2025 alone, India exported $8.35B worth of goods to the U.S., the top three commodities being telephones, packaged medicaments, and diamonds,[7]all practically fully-formed commodities produced for American consumers by proletarians making the same in a day what a $7.25 minimum wage worker in the United States makes in 17 minutes.
The looting of resources from dependent countries is another feature of imperial-capitalist production. In 2023, Colombia, which has long been dominated by U.S. imperialists, exported $4.65B in crude petroleum to the U.S., making this their biggest export by far. At the same time, crude was imported by Columbia from the U.S. to make up for lacks in their domestic supply or because it was cheaper to buy from the imperialists, this amounting to the tune of $446M.[8]With crude being produced in great quantities by Columbia, only to sail for the shores of the United States, these lacks in Columbia’s domestic production that necessitate foreign imports are entirely artificial, caused by the imperialist mode of production and the domination of the financiers in the imperial countries. It is worthwhile to note that these raw resources, resources that allow for a massive profit by U.S. capitalists in the sale of refined petroleum, are being extracted by Colombian workers who are guaranteed a monthly salary of $1,450,000 Colombian pesos,[9]equitable to only $353 USD,[10] which translates to around $11 a day in U.S. currency. Many of the other Latin American proletarians share a similar fate regarding the U.S. imperialists’ usurping of their labor and resources.
72% of the world’s cobalt, a mineral needed in the production of lithium batteries used in electronics geared towards “First World” consumers, comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo,[11]a country that only recently raised its federal minimum wage from the equivalent of $2.50 USD a day to $5.[12] According to 2022 numbers put out by the IMF, the IMF and World Bank holds 15.7% and 14.9% of the DRC’s external debt respectively, with China owning 28.2%.[13] Unsurprisingly, it is its biggest external creditor that is also the DRC’s biggest user of the country’s resources, with China importing $1.46 billion dollars in copper and cobalt from the DRC during March 2025 alone,[14]all extracted by the labor of Congolese proletarians making pennies an hour.
Capitalism has indeed become a “higher social and economic system,” the system of capitalist-imperialism, dependent not only on the maintenance of low wages in the dominated, “underdeveloped” countries, but also on the theft of their resources, which the imperialists get on the cheap due to the low-level of development and the deals they make with compradors in the country. This makes the workers in the dependent countries, the chief suppliers of the surplus labor value sucked up by the globe-spanning capitalist-imperial market in the course of production. This must be taken into consideration and made a part of our theories and practice. Marxists must not trail behind the masses in their understanding of the global economy. If we do not adequately understand the imperialist mode of production and the relations of the working class within this mode of production, then we cannot adequately understand the proletariat, and what kind of Marxists are we then?
When we say the “imperialist mode of production,” we are echoing Lenin’s definition of imperialism, and referring to specifically 1. the uneven division of labor, capital, and commodities between differing countries caused by the monopolies of a highly parasitical minority of the world constituted as imperial financial bourgeoisie, and 2. the understanding of this division as part of production itself.
4. “The Export of Capital” and the Imperial Financiers
While we must understand imperialism generally, it is useless if we cannot apply our general theories to the particular and make sense of our world. So then, particularly, which are the dominant imperial countries, and, conversely, which are the dominated, dependent ones?
Lenin calls “the export of capital one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism,”[15] and we can quantify and compare the exportation of capital and the class that exports capital –namely, the class of imperial bourgeois financiers — across countries in order to make our determination about which countries land on which side of the imperial divide. It goes without saying, however, that before we can begin this assessment, we must adequately understand what “exportation of capital” means, and who the imperial bourgeois financiers are.
Lenin’s term “export of capital” refers to the investments of financiers towards the comprador capitalists engaged either in government or in industry in the dependent countries, who, content to live as kings over an impoverished country, take these as “kickbacks” in return for indenturing their countrymen to the low wages and rights dictated to them by the imperialists. The oppression of the proletariat in these countries ensures high returns on the financiers’ investments, and is a primary method of achieving their profit. The investment capital that leaves the imperial country to be used as industrial capital within the underdeveloped countries, or as loans for “development” that enrich the comprador capitalist powers, are “exports of capital,” and constitute oppressive imperial relations between a dominating financially-developed country, and a dependent underdeveloped one.
The imperial bourgeois financiers are the highest and most wealthy strata of financial bourgeoisie who sit above production and enrich themselves entirely from the income derived from their investments and ownership of companies in the form of stock. Their profit is made from the buying and selling of this ownership, and from the stock dividends and returns on their many global investments. The imperial financiers make money all over the world, investing in dependent countries and receiving massive returns due to the low cost of labor and materials. Through their majority shares in global corporations, they own enormous monopolies, oscillating global production, supply, and trade between differing countries depending on which is more conducive to their “bottom-line.” From these activities, they accrue enormous wealth, living lavish lives on the backs of billions. They are the product of and ruler over the capitalist-imperialist mode of production, and the highest class of bourgeoisie.
The leading bourgeoisie of the dependent countries, a section called comprador capitalists, work with the imperial bourgeois financiers. Since their own country lacks the economy to compete in the global market of the imperialists, the compradors transform their national workforce into a form pleasing to the foreign imperial financiers, keeping wages low and resources open for extraction, linking their meager productive forces up with the imperialists’ chains of production. This is the way the comprador capitalists receive their profit, and their share of the surplus labor value of the proletariat.
5. The Imperial Division of Countries
The country with the highest concentration of imperial bourgeois financiers and exporting the most capital is overwhelmingly the United States, as it has been for the last several decades since at least the end of World War 2. We should understand the United States as itself a product of capital – the investments of the European proto-capitalist merchants and feudal aristocracies of the 15th-18th centuries into colonial companies. The independent U.S. came to dominate the imperial landscape through first the cheap labor of chattel slavery, and then the cheap labor provided by waves of immigration and the development of and full use of the prison system (both through in-prison production of commodities by the incarcerated and through the threat of incarceration cast over a wide swath of the domestic proletariat). With this domestic base, it was able to birth financiers and dominate post-war European reconstruction. Carrying forward with this momentum it engaged in open conquests for its imperial bourgeois financiers in the name of “anti-Communism” during the Cold War, especially in Central and South America. The Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, plus many more wars, coups, and terroristic attacks on governments all reflect the actions of American imperial bourgeois financiers to conquer new markets and reinforce their dominance on proletarians for cheap production costs and profit.
Additionally, all of the big international imperial financial associations like the IMF and World Monetary Fund are dominated by American financiers, with the so called “democratic West” (even those portions like Australia that sit resoundingly in the East) being “defended” by NATO, a military alliance where two thirds of the total defense spending is supplied by United States taxes.[16] The Euro-American imperial bourgeoisie that benefited from the returns of post-war reconstruction cemented Europe under the umbrella of American capital, effectively making the countries of Western Europe the privileged underlings of American imperialism, satellite markets under their American overlord that retain a huge degree of parasitism, allowing them and their countrymen opulent lives on the backs of the vast majority of the world.
Outside of the overwhelmingly dominant imperialist power of the United States and its European cohorts, there are less dominant countries. China, despite espousing Marxism, is the worlds’ second-most powerful imperialist. U.S. and European capitalists invested in Chinese manufacturing heavily in the 1980’s and 1990’s – it being open to them after the capitalist reversal under Deng Xiaoping. The low wages of Chinese proletarians made these investments highly-profitable, allowing for cheaper manufactured goods and higher returns for the imperial financiers as well as profit for the Chinese compradors. After decades of this trend however, China’s manufacturing sector has matured considerably, due in no small part to the international investments of the imperialists. Dialectically related, the imperialists have watched their own countries’ domestic manufacturing shrivel, unable to compete against the cheaper wages, leading to rising unemployment and general labor crisis while the Euro-American financier minority reaps in mountains of wealth. The capital China has received from this exchange has allowed for the growth of their own financial bourgeoisie, and for their ability to make their own international investments and become imperialists in their own right. This has been relegated towards the most impoverished nations at the moment, most notably African countries that hold raw minerals, but this trend will only grow and mature. The Chinese financiers have nearly arrived in a unique position to capitalize –in the actual sense – upon the growing crisis within the United States and imperialist production at large, becoming the world’s next #1 parasitical section of humanity and catapulting their country into becoming the world’s greatest imperialist power. While still possessing a significant portion of their economy that has been co-opted towards the Euro-American imperialists, China is rising out of dependent status and into the vile role of a dominant imperialist country, soon capable of openly rivaling the United States.
Below China sit several countries that are not as dominant, possessing fewer financial bourgeoisie. These countries are generally getting more capital exported into them than they are able to export out, but are still able to export some degree of capital themselves. These can be considered semi-dependent countries. Russia, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, and some of the more developed countries of the Middle-East like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, are representative of this group. These countries generally sit in the “pockets” of the bigger imperialists, with their capitalists generally aiding in the foreign imperialists’ extraction of surplus labor value and resources from their country’s proletariat. However, they still possess portions of substantial industrial and financial bourgeoisie that have capital and interests that are opposed to the interests of the bigger imperialists, and are able to gain profit. These forces scrape and claw for greater rates of labor value extraction from either their own countrymen, or from their own access to foreign labor power in the more dependent countries, always facing an uphill battle against the bigger imperialist forces of the world that are stacked against them.
The truly dependent countries are mostly kept out of imperialist accumulation -- that is, they are not possessing very many financiers -- and have their economies oriented outward as cheap exports, supplying the majority of both the surplus labor value, and the raw materials for capitalist-imperial production globally. In these countries, the proletarians are oppressed by the entire global capitalist class, both domestic and foreign. The vast majority of the countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle-East, Eastern Europe, and South America – countries, which are less capitalistically developed and often called “3rd World” or “developing” countries – are relegated to serving the interests of the bigger imperialists over and against their own countrymen. The domestic market is choked out by the imports of the imperialists, preventing productive forces from developing. The leading bourgeoisie here are compradors subservient to foreign capital. They and the country’s crony government officials receive incentives from imperialist governments and associations like U.S. AID, The World Monetary Fund, and the IMF to secure open-market policies and austerity measures, serving the entire labor force of the country up to the imperialists and assuring that the workers remain at a poverty level and that labor costs are cheap.
As done above, we can group countries into dominant, semi-dominant, and dependent based on the amount of financiers within the country, and the amount of capital they export to other countries. This allows us to understand the imperial division between countries in an accurate way. This division is so that we may discern the international division of the proletariat, however, for “countries” are nothing more than the grouping of classes, and as Communists, we stand for the proletarian class.
As was discussed concerning China, we should understand the particular countries within these categories as capable of changing categories due to the development of capitalist-imperial production as it responds to imperial rivalry or any number of environmental, societal, or economic crises. Spain used to be the largest imperial nation, then the United Kingdom, the United States, and perhaps, soon China. Imperialism is a mode of production, with the biggest imperialist country being the country that houses the biggest and most numerous imperial bourgeois financiers. While this system of production will remain until the socialist revolution, the biggest players can and will change faces.
6. Centering the Proletariat Proper
Now that we have explored the imperialist mode of production and the imperialist division between countries, showing how it makes certain proletarians the impoverished backbone of the global economy, we can update our general understanding of the proletariat beyond the errors of the bad Marxists presented at the beginning of this article. The proletariat has been thoroughly internationalized, not belonging to any one country, as it, admittedly, never has, since capitalism has always depended on international trade in some shape or form. Still, imperialism has divided the proletariat, making some the primary producers of the whole economy, supplying the majority of the extracted surplus labor value and the raw resources of production, while other workers experience the greater privileges of the so-called “First World,” allowed to keep greater portions of their surplus labor value in the form of the greater buying power of their wages and the cheap commodities produced by the lower “caste” of the proletarians abroad.
This does not mean that the contradictions between dominant and dependent nations that play themselves out in national struggles should be unequivocally supported in lieu of the proletarian revolution. While national liberation struggles may, depending on particular circumstances (not least of which is the level that the proletariat as a class is able to materially influence the national struggle)serve the interest of the proletarian class, Marxists must not bow to nationalistic sentiment, for to do so is to raise up the flag of the bourgeoisie, who dominate every purely national movement. Rather, we must convey to the proletariat the reasons why and how they have been oppressed along national or racial lines by the system of capitalist-imperialism and the capitalist class. If we convey this effectively, we will raise the national revolts of oppressed nations into international proletarian revolution against the international bourgeoisie, which is the only form of struggle capable of meeting the contradiction national oppression actually reflects.
The strivings for liberation by the people of dependent nations are a symptom and a sign of their greater proletarian oppression, and we must, as Marxists, do our best to illuminate this truth to the people. Aligned with this truth, we should understand the revolutionary proletariat of capitalist-imperialism as existing primarily within the countries that are targeted by the imperialists. It is generally the workers within the dependent countries that can be called the dialectical producer counterpart to the imperial bourgeoisie’s parasitism, and thus the revolutionary proletariat in the truest sense.
If this truth is correctly applied to our theories, we will stop building policy in favor of “workers” mindlessly, and instead build policy that reflects the proletariat in the particular, catering to a living section of worker that possesses the revolutionary features of the proletarian class as elucidated by Marxist materialist theory, based on this sections’ material relation to production.
Dialectically, the adherence to the more revolutionary proletariat also means making a division from that stratum of the proletariat that does not possess the revolutionary features of their class, the labor aristocracy, or the high-paid workers of the highly imperial nations, whose adjacency to the financiers and all levels of bourgeoisie makes them parasitical and anti-revolutionary.
7. The Labor Aristocracy
Are we charting entirely new ground when we demand that Marxists de-center workers in the dominant imperialist countries for those in the dominated ones? We are absolutely not. Is there a precedent within Marxism for such an inter-class division? There absolutely is.
Although they did not live to see capitalism fully develop into capitalist-imperialism, Marx and Engels both correctly identified a developing division of the workers, expressly through the acknowledgement of parasitism among those in England, which they related to the country’s monopolies and colonial possessions, in other words, the country’s imperial character. Lenin included their critiques of England’s workers in his article, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” tying their valid criticisms of British imperial worker parasitism into his formation of the imperial labor aristocracy. We reproduce portions of that article now, containing both Lenin’s commentary, and his quotes from both Marx and Engels:
In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: “...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.”
In a letter to Marx, dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks about “those very worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie.” In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.”
On December 7, 1889, Engels wrote to Sorge[17]: “The most repulsive thing here [in England] is the bourgeois ‘respectability’, which has grown deep into the bones of the workers.... Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the best of the lot, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor...”
That these ideas, which were repeated by Engels over the course of decades, were so expressed by him publicly, in the press, is proved by his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892. Here he speaks of an “aristocracy among the working class”, of a “privileged minority of the workers”, in contradistinction to the “great mass of working people”. “A small, privileged, protected minority” of the working class alone was “permanently benefited” by the privileged position of England in 1848–68, whereas “the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement”.... “With the break-down of that [England’s industrial] monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position...”[18]
The full imperialist mode of capitalist production had not yet been fully realized at the time of Marx and Engels, and so, for them, the labor aristocracy and imperial parasitism remained a purely English phenomena that was only beginning to be understood. However, Lenin lived to see both the maturing of the financiers as a class, and a mature imperialist mode of production. He recognized the opportunism of the workers in the dominant imperialist countries as “the pivot of the tactics in the labour movement that are dictated by the objective conditions of the imperialist era,”[19]building upon Marx and Engels’ observations.
...why does England’s monopoly explain the (temporary) victory of opportunism in England? Because monopoly yields superprofits, i.e., a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world. The capitalists can devote a part (and not a small one, at that!) of these superprofits to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance (recall the celebrated “alliances” described by the Webbs of English trade unions and employers) between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries.[20]
Here Lenin makes a clear connection between imperial profit (monopoly) and the parasitism and opportunism of imperial workers, specifically tying the domination of “underdeveloped” countries to the imperialist mode of production as a whole, and to the parasitism of workers in the dominant imperial countries. All three of the following sections are from “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.”
...there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to ‘rest on the laurels’ of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism.
…the exploitation of oppressed nations—which is inseparably connected with annexations—and especially the exploitation of colonies by a handful of “Great” Powers, increasingly transforms the “civilised” world into a parasite on the body of hundreds of millions in the uncivilised nations.
...the opportunists (social-chauvinists) are working hand in glove with the imperialist bourgeoisie precisely towards creating an imperialist Europe on the backs of Asia and Africa...objectively the opportunists are a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of a certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement.[21]
At the time of his writing Imperialism and the Split in Socialism in 1916, the opportunist workers of the imperialist labor aristocracies that Lenin critiques were manufacturing laborers involved in unions. These workers worked in advanced industrial factories, refining raw materials taken from the colonies and transforming them into sellable capitalist commodities. Blind to the imperialist mode of production, they advocated for capitalist reforms and better conditions for themselves, justifying these demands in the name of the proletarian class while, in actuality, they rejected the global revolution and sold out the multitudes of foreign proletarians, who were becoming more and more central to production. More than a hundred years of capitalist-imperial production has gone on since then, and the parasitism of the whole imperial society has only matured generally, resulting in numerous developments that require careful study.
For one, the exportation of capital from the dominant imperial countries has resulted in numerous manufacturing industries developing within the dependent countries. These industries are in service to the needs and demands of the imperial societies however, relegated to producing commodities for “First World” consumers, who have seen their own manufacturing industries shrivel up and die; the capitalists making full use of the cheap labor in dependent countries. This is the dominant imperial countries becoming proper “usurer’s states,”[22] their parasitism developed to the point where they can leave producing behind and rely on cheap imports. While some heavy industry and manufacturing still exist in the dominant imperial countries, a disproportionate amount of industries reflect the domination of finance capital, and only reflect production in a minuscule way, with many workers employed in sprawling corporate offices, financial services, or the “front-end” final preparation and distribution of commodities which originate outside the nation’s borders, created by proletarians abroad in the dependent countries.
The increase in general parasitism within the dominant imperial countries, especially within the United States, is also accompanied with an increase to the number of bourgeois financiers and their level of domination over the productive forces. This has resulted in whole industries being developed within, and for, the maintenance of imperialist superprofit; industries whose product is the maintenance and growth of raw capital for the imperial bourgeois financiers. These industries are financial in nature: industries that deal with the management, manipulation, exportation, or importation of capital alone; venture capitalist companies, investment firms, wealth consulting services, investment banks, etc.
The ubiquity of the stock market and ease of purchasing miniscule amounts of company equity for those within the dominant imperial countries – especially for labor aristocrats – has allowed whole sections of workers to share in the abject owning of labor through the so-called “smart financial advice” of investing in stock. While many of these would-be financiers will have, in actuality, wasted their money, the stock values of giant corporations are at least partially maintained by foolish well-to-do-workers turned amateur stock brokers in their minds.
Additionally, the global corporation has been fully solidified as the primary force of industrial production, leashed to the capital of the imperialist financiers. Following the laws of the capitalist-imperial system however, the most labor-intensive production within these corporations is performed in countries where wages are cheaper. The global imperial division of the proletariat runs through the structure of the global corporation, enshrining parasitism for those working within the bloated corporate offices in the dominant imperial nations, primarily performing financial or managerial tasks, and degradation to those supplying the labor of actually producing commodities; labor that is mostly performed by proletarians within the dependent countries. The increased profit gained from the cheap labor within dependent countries more than makes up for the increased logistical cost of transporting product from one side of the globe to the other, and these corporations reveal the absolute anarchy within imperialist production as they create supply lines that stretch across the globe in order to bring a simple commodity to market.
All of this and more has profoundly affected the “strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement,” or, the labor aristocracy. The labor aristocracy of Lenin’s time was the “highly-skilled” and well-paid industrial workers in trade unions. Now, labor aristocrats are no longer just bribed with imperialist superprofits; they work within whole financial industries built out of them and whose “product” is nothing less than the maintenance and perpetuation of the imperialist’s financial capital. They have become a permanent parasitical section of "worker” irrevocably tied to the fate of the imperial financier capitalists, with many being compensated enough to own stock and become, fractionally at least, bourgeois.
It is very evident that the parasitism and opportunism of imperial society that Lenin diagnosed long ago has only gotten worse, demanding, as it did in his time, immense critique and the division of all true Communists from its influence. Lenin said this expressly in “The Split in Socialism:”
The proletariat is the child of capitalism—of world capitalism, and not only of European capitalism, or of imperialist capitalism. On a world scale...the ‘proletariat’ of course ‘will be’ united, and revolutionary Social-Democracy[23] will ‘inevitably’ be victorious within it. But that is not the point...The point is that at the present time, in the imperialist countries of Europe, you are fawning on the opportunists, who are alien to the proletariat as a class, who are the servants, the agents of the bourgeoisie and the vehicles of its influence, and unless the labour movement rids itself of them, it will remain a bourgeois labour movement. By advocating ‘unity’ with the opportunists...you are, objectively, defending the enslavement of the workers by the imperialist bourgeoisie with the aid of its best agents in the labour movement. The victory of revolutionary Social-Democracy on a world scale is absolutely inevitable, only it is moving and will move, is proceeding and will proceed, against you, it will be a victory over you.[24]
Lenin is very clear here; a victory of the proletariat means a victory over the bourgeoisified workers in the highly imperial countries and those sections of the workers who are led along with them: the labor aristocracy. Materialist dialectics shows us that quantitative change brings about qualitative difference when the extreme is reached. The labor aristocracy is the point where the proletariat qualitatively becomes bourgeois due to the high quantity of surplus labor value they are allowed to keep over and against the low amount the proletariat proper keeps over the course of imperialist production. This ties the labor aristocracy to the imperialists, reflected most strikingly in the modern day of mature imperialist production by their working in positions that directly manage financial capital. Communists should uphold Lenin’s directive to rid ourselves of workers who are bourgeois, meaning that we must find a way to divide ourselves, our theories for revolution, and the proletariat as a class from the labor aristocracy and its bourgeois influence.
8. A Tenuous Situation
It is imperative that we understand the labor aristocracy dialectically and relationally with the other classes and sections of workers, understanding that it is not stagnant or existing in isolation. As the most privileged section of worker, labor aristocrats are often able to ascend into the ranks of the bourgeois proper, such as when they save their high salaries to buy stock or open a business of their own. As a worker however, they are also liable, and at a much higher rate than they are to become bourgeois, to face proper proletarianization, losing access to their wealth and having to enter the more “lowly” workforce that is more representative of the proletarian class and less adjacent to the financiers.
Since the labor aristocracy is an imperial phenomenon, it is most represented in the dominant imperial countries, with the most dominant imperial country having the most financial bourgeoisie and the most labor aristocrats. Because of the inevitable shifts and collapses in the imperial mode of production, the “privileged minority of the workers,”[25] or, the labor aristocracy,of any given country will inevitably lose their privilege, ceasing to be altogether and becoming proletarian due to the ascendance of rival imperial power, which brings with it a new ruling section of bourgeois financiers and a new labor aristocracy, all dolled up in new nationalities as well.
Engels remarked on this fact when discussing England’s labor aristocracy in a letter to August Bebel[26]in 1883, saying that “participation in the domination of the world market was and is the basis of the political nullity of the English workers,” and that “once America and the united competition of the other industrial countries have made a decent breach in this [England’s] monopoly...you will see something here,” understanding that “a really general workers' movement will only come into existence here [England] when the workers are made to feel the fact that England's world monopoly is broken.”[27]
All monopolies are bound to be broken due to their own internal contradictions, and the monopolies of the current world imperialist financiers will be as well, to be replaced by new world imperialist financiers. When a new section of financiers from a different country gains a hold of labor and is able to extract more profit than the currently dominant financiers, the wealth management companies and other financial and corporate apparatuses in service to the old guard of financiers — the places where the labor aristocracy works — deteriorate, eventually ceding to the rising imperial country and their foreign financiers. When this happens, there will be nowhere for huge sections of the labor aristocracy of the once prominent imperial country to go except back into the proletariat proper.
9. Updating our Praxis
Having explored imperialism and the labor aristocracy in some detail, we can now put forward practical things Communists can do to help push the revolution forward using this information. We have put them in list form so that they may be referred to and made a prominent part of your praxis.
Understand labor aristocrats as a section of bourgeosified workers.
Understand the general parasitism of workers within the imperialist countries, and understand and be able to explain why this is the case due to the imperialist mode of production.
Emphasize internationalism, and especially the proletarians within the dependent countries who are dominated by the imperialist powers in all our theories, tactics, and propaganda. Be able to explain why they materially constitute the revolutionary proletarian section of the world due to their position on the ground floor of production, and the high quantity of surplus labor value extracted from them.
Understand that nationalities are put in opposition and made antagonistic to each other in the course of capitalist-imperialist production in order to form certain groups into an impoverished and desperate bedrock labor force. A strictly national revolt in response to these conditions can never alleviate the oppression of the proletariat of even that nationality, not to mention the proletariat globally. Communists, as a rule, reject nationality in favor of international class solidarity, and we must enforce this rule among comrades.
Reject thinking of imperialism one-sidedly as policy, military conquering, or foreign oppression alone, and understand it as an economic force of capitalist production as illustrated by Lenin.
Develop a working understanding of the imperialist economy to the point that you understand, in the particular, how the production and distribution of commodities takes place across multiple countries.
Reject thinking of the current imperial status of a country non-dialectically, like it will never change, or that new imperial countries will not rise, rival, and eventually overcome it.
10. The Revolution Moving Forward
What would the results be if the actions laid out in the previous section were widely applied within our movement?
In the broadest view, it would mean the progression of the socialist revolution, and the creation of fertile ground for the formation of new international unities among the working class that are actually revolutionary, having the class interest of the proletariat and willing to engage in socialist revolution with all it entails. More particularly, the above actions, when successfully implemented, will isolate the most bourgeosified stratum of workers, and thus the section that plays a chief role in propagating opportunism amongst all workers generally; misleading them with their many worker characteristics, when, in essence, they are bourgeois. Once this stratum is isolated from the rest of the workers, we will be able to struggle with all the lesser aristocratic laborers “down the line,” making and perfecting through theory and practice clear lines of demarcation between proletarian and bourgeois workers as a whole, dividing ourselves from our enemies and allowing the revolution in imperial societies to move forward with each successful divide from the opportunist liquidators.
While this type of inter-class purging is especially crucial within highly imperialist countries like the United States or in Western Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the semi-dependent countries like Russia or Brazil), it is not so much a task for the Communists in the less dominant countries. Since their own domestic workers are more purely proletarian, the Communists in the less imperial countries are able to more readily unify with their countries’ workers, whereas those in the imperial countries must struggle with the stronger bourgeois element.
11. Conclusion
As capitalist-imperialism continues to demand the absolute lifeblood of laborers from the most impoverished countries on Earth, threatening war always, continuously supplying it to some corner of the globe, and threatening to destroy the sustainability of life on the planet, it’s inexcusable for us as Communists to misunderstand the mode of production we live under, or to bow to spontaneity, impatience, and despair by jumping headlong into the spontaneous revolts of the masses or of the national minorities when they can never bring about liberation without a class analysis and the class unity of the proletariat.
Marxism shows us that the world, and all within it, is intelligible, and we must take the time and effort to learn the economic motion of capitalist-imperialist production so that we may make it intelligible to the working class. Empowered with this knowledge, the proletariat of each country will be able to make materialist divisions from their enemies and deceivers, and alliances with their friends in the international proletariat. From this, they will transform themselves into a vigorous, energetic, international, and revolutionary proletarian class, willing and striving collectively towards socialism – unburdened by the liquidators, bolstered by their comrades, and moving headlong against their enemies.
End Notes:
[1] Lenin, V. I. “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.” Originally published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, No. 2. December 1916. Republished in Lenin Collected Works. Progress Publishers. 1964. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.
[2] Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. “VII. Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism.” First published in pamphlets in 1917. Republished in Lenin’s Selected Works. Progress Publishers. 1963. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/.
[3] “Post-war” here refers to the period directly after World War 2.
[4] Ching, Pao-yu. From Victory to Defeat: China’s Socialist Road and Capitalist Reversal. Foreign Languages Press. 2019. Pg. 9.
[5] Trading Economics. “India National Floor Level Minimum Wage.” Accessed on 7/7/2025. https://tradingeconomics.com/india/minimum-wages.
[6] The World Bank. “The World Bank Group in India,” “Strategy.” Accessed on 7/7/2025. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/india/overview#2.
[7] Observatory of Economic Complexity. “United States/India.” Accessed in March 2025. https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/usa/partner/ind. (historical trade data requires a subscription)
[8] Observatory of Economic Complexity. “Crude Petroleum in Columbia.” Accessed on 7/7/2025. https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/crude-petroleum/reporter/col.
[9] CXC. “Overview: Columbia.” Accessed on 7/7/2025. https://www.cxcglobal.com/global-hiring-guide/colombia/payroll-and-benefits-in-colombia/.
[10] Exchange-Rates.org. “COP to USD: Convert Colombian Pesos to US Dollars, 1.0000 COP = 0.0002503 USD, July 7, 2025 at 10:25 PM UTC.” https://www.exchange-rates.org/converter/cop-usd.
[11] Ritchie, Hannah & Rosado, Pablo. “Most of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but refined in China.” Our World in Data. Oct 2, 2024. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/most-of-the-worlds-cobalt-is-mined-in-the-democratic-republic-of-congo-but-refined-in-china#:~:text=Almost%20three%2Dquarters%20of%20the,cobalt%20is%20made%20in%20China.
[12]Redazione. “DR Congo, minimum wage doubles: new challenges for the public and private sectors.” Focus on Africa. Jan 8, 2025. https://www.focusonafrica.info/dr-congo-minimum-wage-doubles-new-challenges-for-the-public-and-private-sectors/
[13]International Monetary Fund, African Dept. “Democratic Republic of the Congo: Fourth Review Under the Extended Credit Facility, Request for Modification of Quantitative Performance Criterion, and Financing Assurances Review—Debt Sustainability Analysis.” Jun 14, 2023. https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2023/244/article-A002-en.xml?ArticleTabs=fulltext
[14] Observatory of Economic Complexity. “China/Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Accessed in April 2025. https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/chn/partner/cod. (historical trade data requires a subscription)
[15] Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. “VIII. Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism.” First published in pamphlets in 1917. Republished in Lenin’s Selected Works. Progress Publishers. 1963. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch08.htm
[16]North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “Funding NATO.” Last updated Jun 27, 2025. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm.
[17] Friedrich Adolph Sorge (9 November 1828 – 26 October 1906) was a German communist political leader who emigrated to the United States.
[18] Lenin, V. I. “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.” Originally published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, No. 2. December 1916. Republished in Lenin Collected Works. Progress Publishers. 1964. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.
[19]Ibid
[20] Ibid
[21]Ibid
[22] Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. “X. The Place of Imperialism in History.” First published in pamphlets in 1917. Republished in Lenin’s Selected Works. Progress Publishers. 1963. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/.
[23] “Social-Democracy” was a term used by early socialist parties and adopted by Lenin and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to denote the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat. It was a term and moniker that Lenin grew to dislike, and which the Bolsheviks later abandoned due its lack of a scientific basis within Marxism.
[24] Lenin, V. I. “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.” Originally published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, No. 2. December 1916. Republished in Lenin Collected Works. Progress Publishers. 1964. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.
[25] Ibid
[26] August Bebel (1840-1913) was a German Communist and one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
[27] Engels, Friedrich. “Engels to August Bebel in Borsdorf near Leipzig.” First written in 1883. Gesamtausgab. International Publishers. 1942. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_08_30.htm.