Introduction
In 1992, neoliberal political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared the era following the collapse of the Soviet Union the “end of history,” as capitalism and liberal democracy asserted unquestioned hegemony over the world. Nearly thirty-five years later, global capitalism is facing serious threats. While some of these threats, like the rise of China or the war Iran is waging against the US and Israel, appear to be external, closer analysis reveals these as threats emerging from a structural crisis within capitalism itself.
Capitalism is systemically prone to crisis, but these crises create opportunities for communists interested in revolution. World War I and World War II were both products of profound capitalist crisis. Revolutionaries seized the opportunities these crises created to form the world’s first socialist state – the Soviet Union after World War I – and the world’s largest socialist state – the People’s Republic of China after World War II. However, in the face of the deep crisis facing capitalism today, the “left movement” in the United States is woefully unprepared to meet the moment. An intervention is necessary at the levels of both theory and practice; correcting one will not be effective without correcting the other.
The Weekly Rose has been kind enough to allow me to publish a three-part series of articles offering my perspective on the situation we find ourselves facing as anti-imperialists. Part I (this part) will be a theoretical intervention, offering a grounding of basic Marxist political economy while also forwarding a view of the global class structure that counters the prevailing view among the US “left.” I will also attempt to explain the current structural crisis of capitalism and introduce the political consequences it is having on US society. In Part II, I will give a basic analysis of the class structure of the United States and explore the national question in the context of the US, integrate that national analysis with the international analysis of Part I, and explore in depth the political consequences of the present capitalist crisis, specifically the rise of fascism and the three primary trends which have emerged within the US “left.” Finally, in Part III, I will offer a practical intervention, with my view of the path forward for communists in the US genuinely interested in the liberation of all humanity.
It is my view that the communist movement in the US has been deeply infected by settler chauvinism and pro-imperialist opportunism for nearly its entire history. All communist movements, no matter what country they’re in, are detachments of the international proletariat. If we are to meet the moment, it is time for us to start seeing ourselves in this way, which will require a break from the opportunism of the past. Below, I will offer the theoretical recentering I believe our movement needs to make that break.
Capitalism as a World System
To start, we should review the fundamentals of capitalism.
All goods are produced by using human labor to manipulate nature. Under capitalism, this is done specifically to produce commodities, which are goods produced for the purpose of exchange, rather than directly for use. This process — production for exchange — is the engine of capitalism, around which all capitalist society revolves. But for exchange to be possible, there must be a way to compare the value of one commodity with that of another. For example, we intuitively know that a pencil is worth less than a television, but why is that?
Marxists recognize two sources of value: nature and labor. There is inherent value in nature, but labor, by transforming nature into something useful, creates more value, which is imbued in the finished good. A good that requires more labor to produce — such as a television — is imbued with more value than a good that requires less labor — such as a pencil.[1] That means, when exchanging them, you will need to trade lots of pencils to get one television. But value is not a physical thing. As Marx put it, “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.”[2]
Value is not physical; it is a social relation. When we pay a certain amount of money for a commodity, we are implicitly recognizing that the amount of labor we performed to earn that money is roughly equivalent to the amount of labor needed to produce that commodity.[3] This recognition, even though it happens unconsciously, is important.
Every single thing that you buy has a deep history behind it and is only available for you to purchase because of the labor of others. The iPhone, laptop, or PC you’re using to read this article is the product of the labor of hundreds if not thousands of people, from its designers in California to its assemblers in China to the miners of its cobalt in the DRC. Each of them spent some of their limited time alive to make a part of your phone, and your phone represents the sum total of all that labor. This is true of virtually everything you interact with in your daily life. All products of human labor embody this relationship between people.
Capitalism is global. It is a world system that reflects the totality of the social relations described above. At the same time, capitalism is local. Capitalism is a global system only because it unifies the local experiences of billions of individuals in millions of communities. Because of this, global changes in capitalism affect the local experiences of everyone, albeit in different ways. But changes in local conditions also have an impact on global conditions. When the global price of crude oil rises, you’ll see your local gas prices go up, too. But fluctuations in global crude oil prices simply reflect changes in local conditions where it is produced or shipped. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway only about 30 miles wide, caused an oil price spike so steep that it collapsed Spirit Airlines, an international company that was worth $5.5 billion.[4] These types of changes aren’t seen exclusively along supply chains, either. Al Aqsa Flood, a Palestinian military operation which had a radius of only about 19 miles, inspired a global wave of anti-imperialist politics with an intensity that hasn’t been seen since the 1970s.
Capitalism affects virtually every person on the planet, but it does not affect them all in the same way. How capitalism affects each person depends on their place in it, both physically and socially. Revisiting the example of an iPhone, capitalism affects its designer very differently than its cobalt miner. The iPhone designer is an adult who has a college degree, lives in California, makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and will likely live to be seventy or eighty years old. The cobalt miner lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, might be as young as seven years old, makes $4 a day, and may not survive to adulthood.[5] The local conditions of each of these people are vastly different, yet their experiences are connected due to the global nature of capitalism, which is also what makes it possible for you to hold in your hand a device that contains a slice of each of their lives.
A simple view of class struggle in capitalism pits workers (the proletariat), who have to sell their labor power for a wage in order to survive, against capitalists (the bourgeoisie), who exploit the workers and the precarity of their situation to enrich themselves. While this is accurate at the most basic level, the reality is more complicated. The iPhone designer and the cobalt miner are both workers selling their labor power for a wage, but it doesn’t seem quite right to group them together in the same class given how vastly different their living conditions are. It was Marx and Engels in the Manifesto who said the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. The cobalt miner has nothing to lose, but what about the iPhone designer? They have quite a lot to lose, such as a house, a car, retirement savings, and a stock portfolio. Given these disparities, it is fair to ask if the Congolese miner and the American iPhone designer really do belong to the same class. Answering this question also requires an explanation as to how they experience such vastly different living conditions and wage levels to begin with.[6]
Capitalism evolved to go beyond national borders to exploit the labor and natural resources of other nations. Lenin identified this evolution as imperialism. Imperialism has given rise to the globalization of both the production and exchange of commodities. Consequently, imperialism has also globalized the class structure of capitalism, but this does not mean that all workers globally suffer similar conditions. Wage levels and living conditions greatly differ between countries, with generally high wages and standards of living being found in the imperialist Global North countries and generally low wages and standards of living being found in the exploited Global South countries.[7]
Centuries of colonial genocide and resource theft have enriched the European countries and their offspring settler colonies at the expense of the colonized nations. As mercantilism gave way to capitalist imperialism, the mechanics of that theft changed. As the European powers industrially developed in the 1800s and early 1900s, they did so by under-developing their colonies, partly in the form of over-exploitation. The technology for advanced industrial production — such as coal-powered manufacturing and the means to build robust transportation infrastructure — was monopolized by Europe/America, and access to newer manufactured goods in the colonies required trading enormous amounts of raw materials and agricultural products in exchange. The imperialist countries never paid fair prices for those goods, while demanding their own goods be bought at extraordinarily high prices. With their colonizers blocking access to the technologies that could make them productively self-sufficient and never making enough money from their exports, the colonized countries often had to take out enormous loans from those same colonizers for basic infrastructure, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of dependency.
While all this was happening, class struggle raged. In the colonies, this largely took the form of nationalist anti-colonialism against the European occupiers, but anti-colonial politics were mostly confined to the colonies themselves. In the imperialist countries, class struggle had a decisively reformist character. Strong trade unions allowed workers to demand a larger share of imperialism’s spoils in the form of social welfare programs and higher wages. Working class politics in the core were built on the foundation of colonial exploitation and genocide in the periphery, which is why anti-colonial politics never took root in a meaningful way within the workers’ movements of the imperial core. Thus, within the globalized class system, a privileged stratum of workers emerged in the imperialist countries. While still exploited for their own labor, these workers became more or less pacified in compromising with their imperialist ruling class.
Things began to change in the 1970s and 80s with the birth of neoliberalism. While many can identify this economic shift led to an assault on trade unions in the imperialist countries, its more consequential change was the globalization of production. Formerly, high-tech industrial production was concentrated in the Global North, while the Global South produced raw materials and agricultural products. With neoliberal globalization, firms based in the Global North began shifting their manufacturing to the Global South to take advantage of much lower regional wages. To facilitate this shift, these multinational firms had to begin building the technology and infrastructure to produce advanced manufacturing goods in the exploited countries. This process has accelerated substantially in the past few decades and given rise to remarkable changes in the global structure of capitalism.
According to bourgeois economics, close to half of global economic value is produced by the Global North.[8] Two primary factors explain this: 1) the world’s largest and “most valuable” multinational corporations are based in the imperialist countries, so their economic value is calculated as a product of the respective Global North country in which they are based; 2) wages are much higher in the Global North, so one hour of labor in the Global North is calculated as producing much more economic value than one hour of Global South labor.
However, if we measure value as Marxists do – that is, considering how much labor is contributed to the global economy – we see a much different picture. Hidden behind the disguise of bourgeois economics, we find that 90% of all global value — that is, labor hours — is produced by the exploited Global South countries, while those countries receive less than half of global income, with the workers themselves only receiving about a fifth.[9] This should be striking to anyone receiving these figures for the first time. Virtually the entire world runs on Global South labor, yet the workers who are compensated the best and consume the most are the ones in the Global North, whose cumulative labor amounts to a mere tenth of global production.
In the era of neoliberal globalization, this phenomenon is made possible by a process called unequal exchange. Unequal exchange is an economically complex process, but it can be basically described as follows: since high-wage Global North countries control global value chains (which take advantage of extremely low wages in the South) and terms of trade on the world market, they sell their goods to low-wage Global South countries at inflated prices, while purchasing goods from the Global South at deflated prices. This allows Global North countries to pocket enormous amounts of extra value for free. In 2021, the exact measure of this pocketed value was 16.9 trillion euros, or about 21 trillion dollars, of unpaid labor.[10] For reference, that’s nearly the entire GDP of the United States in 2021. The surplus value from this unpaid labor doesn’t just go to the capitalists in the Global North; it’s also what keeps Global North wages much higher than wages in the rest of the world.
According to the conventional “socialist” view, a worker is exploited because the surplus value they create when producing commodities is appropriated by capitalists. Workers are donors of surplus value. Through class struggle, such as organizing unions to demand higher wages, workers can recuperate some of the surplus value that is appropriated by the capitalists. However, the only way for workers to receive the fruits of their labor — the full amount of surplus value they produce — is to revolt against the capitalists and seize the means of production, after which goods are produced for the benefit of society as a whole, rather than to generate profits for a few capitalists.
The reality of unequal exchange complicates this picture. After all, how can it be possible that the workers who produce only 10% of all value in the world also consume more than half of it? The vast majority of workers in the Global North are not donors of surplus value, but recipients of it. This means they consume more value than they produce, not just at a social level but at an individual level as well. Based on calculations of the globalized value of labor by Torkil Lauesen, Danish revolutionary and political economist, workers who make more than $4/hr — virtually all workers in the Global North minus imprisoned workers and the most exploited stratum of undocumented migrant workers — consume more value than they produce.[11] When Northern workers struggle for higher wages (say from $15/hr to $17/hr), they are not struggling to recuperate a greater share of the surplus value they generate themselves, but to get a larger share of the surplus value that capitalists have already appropriated from labor in the Global South. This allows capitalists to rake in enormous profits generated from exploitation abroad and sell the products to a loyal consumer base in their home countries, whose high wages are essentially subsidized by exploitation in the South.
In Lenin’s time, the term “labor aristocracy” was used to describe a minority of privileged workers who made higher wages than the majority of other workers. As a consequence, the labor aristocracy often aligned its politics with the capitalist class rather than the working masses. In the modern era, this concept must be considered from a global perspective, and thus more generally applied to the workers of the Global North. As Arghiri Emmanuel, Greek political economist and former economic advisor to Patrice Lumumba, explains,
No Marxist would deny that certain wages, far from providing surplus-value, contain it. The question of whether this only happens with the 200,000-dollars annual salary of an Executive Director at General Motors, or with a Sub-Director’s 100,000 dollars salary, or already with the wages of a qualified French worker at 4,000 francs a month, is a mere matter of calculation, not of conceptual analysis. In the same way, whether the “workers’ aristocracy” as defined by Lenin includes 5% or 10% or 90% of the working class of this or that nation at this or that moment is not a question of principle but a matter of history and of general economic conditions.[12]
With this in mind, we can see a clear global class structure that shapes the local class structure within each country. While there are workers and capitalists in every country, many workers in the Global North align themselves politically more with their own ruling class than with the oppressed workers of the Global South, not simply because they are brainwashed or because their consent is “manufactured,” but primarily because they are materially parasitic on the Global South’s labor. US workers often show more solidarity with their own imperialists than with the colonized workers against whom their imperialists are waging genocidal wars, because they also benefit from the killing.
Capitalism and Crisis
Capitalism is systemically prone to crisis. Historically, when capitalism’s global structure has undergone evolutions, it has done so as a response to crisis. Imperialism itself was a response to capitalism’s first crisis of overproduction and underconsumption. English workers in the early- and mid-1800s were paid only subsistence wages, so there was not enough of a domestic consumption market in England for capitalists to turn a profit on all the commodities their workers produced.[13] The solution to this was to make wage concessions to the workers while increasing capital investment and exploitation in the colonies. This gave the capitalists an increased domestic consumption market for the sale of their goods without eating into their profit rates. It also gave them an additional avenue to invest their capital, for capital cannot increase its rate of accumulation if it is not continually reinvested. Thus, capitalism resolved its first crisis.
However, the capitalists did not arrive at this solution on their own. The solution was born out of bitter class struggle between the English workers and the capitalists exploiting them.[14] This is the story of all of capitalism’s historical changes: a combination of structural crisis and class struggle leads to a rearrangement of the system. However, each evolution, while temporarily averting crisis, creates the conditions for future crisis; temporary solutions always comes with new problems that rear their heads later on. These recurring crises are not failures of the system, but are instead hard coded into its DNA.
Neoliberal globalization — capitalism’s most recent restructuring — was the solution to declining profit rates in the 1970s, one in which the imperialists emerged victorious against the decaying workers’ movement in the Global North. Multinational firms succeeded in getting their tax burdens slashed while shifting production to the Global South to reduce labor costs. This is how we ended up with today’s global economic structure, where almost all the world’s production happens along global value chains throughout the Global South and the vast majority of consumption is concentrated in the Global North. But as with other responses to crises, this solution only offers temporary relief to the imperialists.
In previous periods in capitalism’s history, the dominance of the imperialist countries was cemented by the following: 1) their monopolization of advanced industrial technology and infrastructure, 2) their political control of global financial and monetary institutions, which allowed them to set the terms for Global South access to loans and other development aid; and 3) their military power. Today, the conditions created by neoliberal globalization are undermining all three of these.
For production to be shifted to the Global South, Global North firms had to invest significant capital in those countries to develop the machinery, infrastructure, and management techniques necessary for high-tech manufacturing. They did this to take advantage of labor that is much cheaper than labor in the imperialist countries. This process took several decades, but now 61% of all high-technology product exports in the world come from the Global South.[15] [16]
Now, the imperialist countries have a new vulnerability: as countries in the Global South continue this trend, their reliance on the Global North countries lessens. The best example of this is China, which less than a hundred years ago had a life expectancy of only thirty-five years. Now, China’s life expectancy has more than doubled,[17] and the country is the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, producing more than the nine next largest manufacturing countries combined.[18] Consequently, China now has considerable economic and political leverage even when dealing with the United States, the world’s largest and most aggressive military power.
China’s development has had profound effects on the international order, and one of the most consequential effects for countries in the Global South is an emerging alternative architecture for economic development. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the only sources of economic development aid for countries who needed it were the imperialist countries or the international financial institutions (IFIs) established in the aftermath of World War II, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, both of which are controlled by the imperialist countries. This forced the peripheral countries between a rock and a hard place: forego financial assistance necessary for development of key industries and infrastructure, or take on enormous loans. These coercive agreements came with political and economic conditions, such as privatization of public infrastructure and opening the economy to investment from imperialist multinational firms.[19] However, in the last 15 years or so, China has begun offering much more favorable development loans for Global South countries to develop national infrastructure and necessary productive industries. Unlike loans from the imperialist countries and IFIs, Chinese aid doesn’t come with political conditions. Western governments have alleged this is “debt trap diplomacy,” a ploy to gain leverage over the exploited countries when they can’t pay their debt. On the contrary, China has shown a remarkable tendency to renegotiate terms or outright forgive debts — a trend that even some bourgeois economists in the West have recognized.[20] Without reading too much into China’s intent,[21] this dynamic creates a situation objectively advantageous for peripheral countries compared to one where development aid is exclusively the domain of the imperialist powers.
The development of the productive forces in the Global South and avenues for political and economic aid outside of the imperialist institutions comes at a time when the United States is struggling to maintain its military primacy. The US-Iran war has shown the US to be far less omnipotent than has been assumed for the last two decades. Despite an overwhelming amount of advanced military assets in the West Asian region, including dozens of military bases, Iran has imposed devastating losses on the US. The majority of US military sites in the region have been rendered inoperable by Iranian attacks.[22] At the peak of hostilities, American munitions and missile interceptors ran critically low, to the point where the US had to withdraw assets from the Pacific theater to support the war effort in West Asia.[23] The losses were so severe that US officials are still actively hiding the extent of the damage from the public.[24] After years of relentless economic pressure and months of all-out war, the US has proven unable to topple the Islamic Republic or forcefully reopen the Strait of Hormuz for energy shipments without the consent of Iran. The United States has suffered from imperial overstretch and poor military strategy for some time, but the extent of its weakness has now been laid bare on the world stage.
These three trends – the increasing productive independence of the Global South, emerging alternatives to the imperialist-led international financial institutions, and the waning military might of the imperialist countries – are the primary factors contributing to capitalism’s current crisis. But what actually is the crisis?
Due to the above trends, the amount of value the imperialist countries appropriate from the exploited countries via trade has started to decline.[25] This has severe consequences for Global North society, regardless of class. Paltry wage growth, declining job opportunities and mass lay-offs, and rising prices are all affecting the imperialist working class — most acutely the oppressed racial, national, and gender minorities who are always the hardest hit during times of crisis. The capitalists and their political elite have little recourse but to resort to coercion and force. As Torkil Lauesen explains at length:
The loss of economic superiority in terms of industrial production and world trade, and a weakening position in global finance, has changed US economic policy from promoting neoliberal globalization to the increasingly prevalent use of economic blockades, sanctions, and tariffs as a weapon in a geopolitical struggle to regain dominance. According to The Washington Post, the U.S. has imposed sanctions targeting a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty.[26] On top of this, in April 2025 the US launched a global trade war. Through these policies, it is eroding the world market and the trust in dollars as world currency, both of which the US has relied on for the past century. The erosion of the world market is also hitting its partners in the imperial triad, the E.U and Japan, causing conflicts in their alliances. Through this tariff regime and through sanctioning so many countries, the US has convinced an increasing number of states to seek alternative economic and financial structures to the ones governed by the US.
Add to all this the political crisis in the US itself that splits the economic and political elite and cuts through the population. Trump’s second presidency will accelerate the decline of US hegemony. The industrial-military-complex, the agricultural business, and the coal and oil industries support the Republican slogan “Make America Great Again” and its resultant policy of geopolitical confrontation. The tech giants, Google, Apple, and Amazon, and the electronics and automotive industries all wish for a return to neoliberal globalization, under the leadership of the US. However, you cannot turn back time. The Global South will not accept such an agenda.[27]
As the large multinational firms based in the Global North struggle to increase the surplus value they can squeeze from the super-exploitation of labor in the Global South, the trickle-down of super-profits to Northern workers’ wages is drying up, and these historical beneficiaries of imperialism are losing their privileged position within the global class structure. Neoliberal globalization can no longer guarantee their enjoyment of the imperial mode of living. Consequently, Northern workers are faced with two political choices: either join the most vociferously imperialist fascists in an attempt to secure a seat in the upper strata of the world economy or join the struggle of the globally oppressed in defeating imperialism and striving toward communism.
Many workers have already started choosing their sides. We have seen an enormous surge in the fascist movement, manifested in the US by MAGA. We have also seen a rise in anti-imperialist sentiment and radical left ideals. Unfortunately, the new radicals face a far less organized and coherent infrastructure to plug into compared to the fascists, who already wield the full force of the imperialist state. This is in large part because the organized “left” in the US has struggled to grapple with the realities of unequal exchange and the privileges it imparts on American workers. Until we take these realities seriously, we will continue pursuing failed strategies. Revolutionary strategy must be guided by a proper analysis of the class forces at play in our national and local conditions and how they fit into the class structure of the capitalist world system. This is why I wanted to start this series with an analysis of the global economic situation.
In the next part of this series, I will zoom in more specifically to the class structure of the US. It is impossible to understand class in the US without also analyzing the national question, so class and nation will be explored together. Part II will also explore how US politics have reflected the present crisis of imperialism, which will include an analysis of both the rise of fascism and the three primary trends which have emerged within the US “left” movement.
[1] There are some general exceptions to this. Value is measured by socially necessary labor, so pointless labor does not arbitrarily add to a good’s value. Similarly, a good only has value if it fulfills a human need.
[2] Marx, Karl (1867). Capital, Vol. I: Part I: Commodities and Money, Chapter One: Commodities, section 4: ‘The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’, p. 53. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1962.
[3] Sale price often does not exactly represent value, but value in terms of labor is generally the baseline for determining price, before considering factors such as monopolization and price gouging, among others.
[4] Schneid, R. (2026, May 2). Spirit Airlines Shuts Down Due to Iran War Fuel Crisis. Other Low-Cost Airlines Could Be Next. Time. https://time.com/article/2026/05/02/spirit-airlines-shuts-down-iran-war-fuel/
[5] Staff. (2026, March 20). ‘It helps us survive’: Poverty forces children into mine work in DR Congo. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/20/it-helps-us-survive-poverty-forces-children-into-mine-work-in-dr-congo
[6] One might say it’s unfair to compare the wage of an iPhone designer with that of a miner. However, even if we compare the wage of an American miner with that of a Congolese miner, the American miner still makes in one hour 6x more than the Congolese miner makes in a full day. Even after adjusting for cost of living, the difference remains astronomical.
[7] The Global North countries are the USA, Canada, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan. These imperialist countries represent roughly 15% of the global population. The other 85% of the world’s population resides in the Global South, generally encompassing Latin America, the Carribbean, Africa, and most of Asia. These countries can also be called peripheral countries.
[8] World Bank Group. (2021). ICP 2021: Size of economies. https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/brief/ICP2021\_DataViz\_1
[9] Hickel, J., Hanbury Lemos, M., & Barbour, F. (2024). Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy. Nature Communications, 15(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49687-y
[10] Hickel, J., Hanbury Lemos, M., & Barbour, F. (2024). Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy. Nature Communications, 15(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49687-y. Calculations use the 2005 euro and dollar.
[11] Lauesen, T. (2025). Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (p. 127). Iskra.
[12] Emmanuel, Arghiri (1975) ‘Unequal Exchange Revisited’. IDS Discussion Paper No. 75, pp. 63-64. Institute of Development, University of Sussex, Brighton, England. Cite format retained from Lauesen’s work.
[13] Value is imbued in commodities by workers expending labor power to produce them. However, that value can only be appropriated and pocketed by the capitalists in the form of profit when a commodity is sold to a buyer.
[14] The capitalists did not actually increase the wages of the workers, but the workers successfully staved off a reduction in their wages after a tax on imported foodstuffs was repealed, which lowered the cost of living and consequently increased the purchasing power of their wages. This forced the capitalists to look for another solution, which they found in the colonies.
[15] Kumar, S. (2024). Trends of Exports of High Technology Products from Global South. Development Cooperation Review, 7(1), 51-56. Retrieved June 10, 2026, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394885492\_Trends\_of\_Exports\_of\_High\_Technology\_Products\_from\_Global\_South
[16] It should be noted that these developments are not occurring evenly across the Global South. Most of this high-tech development is happening in East and Southeast Asian countries, whereas most Latin American and African economies are highly dependent on agricultural and raw material exports.
[17] Clark, D. (2025, November 28). Life expectancy in China 1850-2020. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041350/life-expectancy-china-all-time/?srsltid=AfmBOoofOnrcLqawSJubSy73LDyP7XdDFordiZiTi7vB6wDu95V7zdTB#statisticContainer
[18] Baldwin, R. (2024, January 17). China is the world’s sole manufacturing superpower: A line sketch of the rise, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/china-worlds-sole-manufacturing-superpower-line-sketch-rise
[19] For more information on structural adjustment programs, visit https://globalinequality.org/structural-adjustment/
[20] Brautigam, D., & Rithmire, M. (2021, February 6). The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/
[21] There is much debate on “the left” about whether China has restored capitalism and their foreign policy is imperialist. That discourse falls outside the scope of this article, but it is important to analyze the objective consequences of China emerging as an alternative source of development aid to Global South countries.
[22] Olmsted, E. (2026, May 1). Iran Has Damaged Bonkers Number of U.S. Military Sites. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/post/209850/iran-destroyed-majority-military-sites-middle-east
[23] Siow, M. (2026, March 17). US military’s Iran war pivot forces Asia-Pacific security rethink. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3346849/us-militarys-iran-war-pivot-forces-asia-pacific-security-rethink
[24] Lubold, G., Kube, C., Gains, M., & Lebedeva, N. (2026, April 25). Iran caused more extensive damage to U.S. military bases than publicly known. NBC. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-caused-extensive-damage-us-military-bases-publicly-known-rcna331853
[25] Lauesen, T. (2025). Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (p. 131). Iskra.
[26] Washington Post (2024), ‘How four U.S. presidents unleashed economic warfare across the globe’, (25 July 2024). Cite format retained from Lauesen’s work.
[27] Lauesen, T. (2025). Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (pp. 231-232). Iskra.
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