Adam Hanieh is a professor of Political Economy and Global Development, whose research focuses on capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East.
麻豆传媒鈥檚 Federico Fuentes sat down with Hanieh, who will be speaking at in Naarm/Melbourne over September 5-7, to discuss the state of global imperialism today and the significance of Donald Trump鈥檚 presidency.聽
The full interview can be read at聽.
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Does the concept of imperialism remain valid? If so, how do you define it?
It certainly remains valid and there is a lot to learn from both the classic writers on imperialism, such as Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as from later contributions and debates, including by anti-colonial Marxists of the 鈥60s and 鈥70s.
At the most general level, I define imperialism as a form of global capitalism centred on continued extraction and transfers of value from poorer countries to rich countries, and from classes in poorer countries to classes in rich countries.
There is a tendency to reduce imperialism to simply geopolitical conflict, war or military intervention. But without this core idea of value transfers we cannot understand imperialism as a permanent feature of the world market that operates even in supposedly 鈥減eaceful鈥 times.
The are complex and require careful thought. The export of capital as foreign direct investments into dominated countries is one mechanism. The direct control and extraction of resources is another.
But we also need to look at the various financial mechanisms and relationships that have been widespread since the 1980s: for example, debt service payments made by countries in the Global South.
There are also differences in the value of labour power between rich and poor countries. Unequal exchange in trade is another route. Migrant labour is a really important further mechanism.
Thinking about these multiple forms opens up our understanding of the world today 鈥 beyond just the question of war or inter-state conflict. It also helps reveal who benefits.
Lenin foregrounded finance capital, which was the result of the increasingly integrated control of banking capital and industrial, or productive, capital. That remains valid.
But it is more complicated today, in that some layers of dominated capitalists in poor countries have become partially integrated into capitalism in the rich countries. They not only often have citizenships in those countries but benefit from these imperial relationships.
There is also a lot more cross-border ownership of capital and the rise of offshore financial zones, which makes it much more difficult to trace the control and flow of capital.
Understanding imperialism today requires of from such integration into core centres of capital accumulation, and the ways in which different financial markets are connected.
A third feature that arises from these transfers of value is the concept of the . Lenin dedicated to analysing the political implications of imperial relationships in creating social layers in rich countries whose politics became oriented and connected to their own capitalist class.
One feature of contemporary imperialism that was not well theorised in the early 20th century is how imperial domination is necessarily bound up with particular kinds of racist and sexist ideologies, which help justify and legitimate it.
It is really important to integrate anti-racism and feminism into how we think about capitalism, anti-imperialism and anti-imperialist struggles.
How can we understand the dynamics within global imperialism today?
Since the early 2000s, we have seen the rise of new centres of capital accumulation outside of the United States.
China stands at the forefront of this. This was initially connected to the flow of foreign direct investment into China and the wider East Asian region, aimed at exploiting cheap labour as part of a reordering of global value chains.
But since then, China鈥檚 rise has been associated with a relative weakening of US capitalism in the context of profound and deepening global crises. This relative erosion of US power can be seen across various metrics.
Over the past three decades, US domination of key technologies, industries and infrastructures has weakened. One indication is the fall in the US鈥 share of global GDP from 40% to about 26% between 1985-2024.
There has also been a relative shift in ownership and control of the world鈥檚 biggest capitalist firms. The number of Chinese firms on the , for instance, overtook the US in 2018 and remained that way until last year, when the US regained leadership.
But we need to emphasise the relative weakening of US strength. The US still retains an enormous military advantage over rivals, and the centrality of the US dollar is not in question.
The latter is a major source of US power because it allows the US to exclude competitors from US financial markets and the banking system. So much US geopolitical power is articulated through its financial dominance 鈥 another reason why we need to consider imperialism beyond simply its military forms.
There is also a bigger picture to these global rivalries that we should emphasise: the multiple and interconnected crises that now mark capitalism globally.
We can see this in the stagnation of profit rates and the large pools of surplus money capital seeking valorisation; the huge rise in public and private debt; overproduction in many economic sectors; and the stark reality of the climate emergency.
So, when we talk about the dynamics of the global imperialist system, it is not simply a question of inter-state rivalries and measuring US strength versus other capitalist powers.
We need to set these conflicts within the longer-term systemic crisis that all states are trying to navigate.
How do you understand the rise of US President Donald Trump in all this?
Among some liberal commentators, Trump is frequently portrayed as some kind of mad egoist overseeing an administration hijacked by billionaire right-wing extremists (or secretly run by Russia). This perspective is wrong.
Regardless of Trump鈥檚 personal narcissism, he represents a clear political project that is grappling with how to manage the US鈥檚 relative decline within the context of the bigger systemic crises that confront global capitalism.
If you follow the discussions among his economic advisors there is strong evidence of this. A particularly revealing example is a written in November 2024 by Stephen Miran, an economist who was just confirmed as chair of Trump鈥檚 Council of Economic Advisors.
Miran argues that the US economy has shrunk relative to global GDP over the past few decades, yet the US carries the cost of maintaining the world鈥檚 鈥渄efence umbrella鈥 in the face of growing inter-state rivalries. Crucially, he says the US dollar is overvalued due to its role as the international reserve currency, and this has eroded US manufacturing capacity.
He proposes to address this problem by using the threat of tariffs to compel US allies to shoulder a greater share of the costs of empire. Miran says this will help bring back manufacturing to the US (an important consideration in the event of war).
He proposes a range of measures to limit the inflationary impacts of this plan and maintain the US dollar as the dominant currency despite the hoped-for devaluation.
This kind of perspective is being pushed by the Trump administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The key point is not whether this plan works or whether it makes economic sense, but to understand the motivations behind it. It is explicitly conceived as a means to deal with the problems facing US and global capitalism, and to reassert US global primacy through displacing its costs onto other parts of the world.
So, we must approach the Trump administration as actors with a coherent project. Obviously there are a whole lot of internal contradictions and tensions generated by this project, and clear disagreements from some 麻豆传媒 of US capital and longstanding foreign allies.
But these tensions are also a reflection of the highly unstable nature of global capitalism at the moment. The global resurgence of far-right ideologies is a further indication that we are dealing with a bigger systemic crisis that all capitalist states are grappling with.
I want to emphasise again the climate emergency. It is very clear that we are entering a phase of cascading and unpredictable climate collapse, which will materially impact billions of people in the coming decades.
The right might deny the reality of climate change, but that is ultimately because capitalism cannot let anything impact accumulation.
We need to centre the climate question in our politics today, as it will increasingly run through everything.
[Read the full interview at .]