Imperialism and the end of globalisation

August 22, 2025
Issue 
US flag book cover
William Jeffries: 'globalisation is coming to an end and new contradictions are starting to unfold'.

William Jefferies is Senior Lecturer at SOAS University of London and author of the recently published War and the World Economy: Trade, Tech and Military Conflicts in a De-globalising World. Green Left’s Federico Fuentes spoke to Jefferies about imperialism today and why the period of globalisation is coming to an end.

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Does the concept of imperialism remain valid?

Imperialism certainly remains a vital concept.

Vladimir Lenin defined it in 1916 as the synthesis of banking and industrial capital into finance capital, and that remains essentially correct.

Lenin also wrote that great powers seek to divide the world into their own spheres of influence, and that also clearly defines the current period.

One hundred years later, things have moved on, but in some ways they have not.

For me, the definition of imperialism as monopoly capitalism remains correct, so long as you look at the situation today concretely.

Are there particular changes that stand out for understanding imperialism today?

One particularly interesting current feature is the scale of deindustrialisation in the United States and Britain.

Today, the proportion of manufacturing workers in Britain is about 7%, and many of them are in industries such as food production. The situation in the US is not as extreme, but there is still a steep decline in industrial production.

So, to what extent can you still talk about finance capital in the US or Britain being the merger of banking and industrial capital? Instead, there is the dominance of near banking in the form of huge financial organisations, such as Blackstone, which developed after the 2008 financial crisis.

They clearly dominate the US economy and essentially function by earning the rate of interest rather than the rate of profit. This is important because the rate of interest is not earned through buying or producing commodities, it is dependent on financial flows (even if, underpinning it, is the buying and producing of commodities).

If imperialism is the merger of financial and industrial capital, then in the US and Britain today, it is clearly weighted towards banking and finance and away from industrial capital.

China, on the other hand, is the other way around. China has financial capital in the form of huge state-owned banks, but it also has industrial capital in the form of huge industrial conglomerates. In China, we see the reassertion of the primacy of industrial production over banking and finance.

This matters because, in the end, the producer of commodities has the most power. They can produce what everyone needs and have a direct means of extracting surplus value (as opposed to an indirect means via interest flows to financial institutions).

In the next 5-10 years, China will seek to assert the primacy of industrial production. China wants to take back a portion of the rate of interest that currently flows to banks in the West. That will create an inherent contradiction between China and the US (and the West more generally).

In your book you refer to the period that followed the end of the Cold War as the “long wave of globalisation”. Could you outline the dynamics within global imperialism during globalisation?

People mistakenly counterpose globalisation to imperialism, but globalisation did not abolish imperialism. Globalisation helped conceal the rapacious nature of imperialism for a period, as US hegemony became so dominant due to the dynamism of its economy.

But globalisation is coming to an end and new contradictions are starting to unfold. That is also why the US is rediscovering the need to be more rapacious.

I view the long wave of globalisation in the context of long way theory, which originated with Alexander Parvus, even though it is traditionally attributed to Nikolai Kondratiev and Leon Trotsky.

Parvus said there would be long periods of Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) in the world economy. He said that changes such as extending or opening of new markets, the rise of new sectors of capital accumulation, the cuts in turnover times, and new technological advances, would define an entire period in the world economy.

This would not end the usual business cycles, but these cycles would develop within this longer wave, cycle, period or whatever you want to call it, with crises sharpening and their duration shortening. He foresaw this continuing until the forces of development unfolded to their full potential, only to be followed by a sharp commercial crisis, and then an economic depression.

My book looks at the long wave of globalisation that started in 1989–91, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its conversion to the market, along with China’s crushing of the democracy movement and its transition to the market.

With the Soviet Union’s collapse and China’s transition to the market, there was essentially a doubling of the number of workers worldwide that could be exploited by capital.

Remember, the mid- to late-’90s features China’s marketisation of state-owned enterprises and the sacking of about 70 million workers. To put that into perspective, the entire workforce in Britain today is about 35 million.

Also, you had huge quantities of means of production that were not paid for but simply stolen by capital: we are not talking about inconsequential things but cities such as Warsaw, Prague, etc.

There was also the collapse of national liberation struggles, which in many cases depended on the Soviet Union: South Africa, Palestine, Ireland, all these struggles were to some extent resolved in the ’90s.

And you had the defeat of the working class, exemplified by defeats such as the British miners’ strike, and more broadly the defeat of the idea of socialism, which has been identified with the Soviet Union.

All this fundamentally transformed the world economy and began a new long period.

It also created the preconditions for hyperglobalisation — as the International Monetary Fund calls it — which followed from roughly 2001 until the financial crisis of 2008. This was a phase of very strong growth. Then from 2008 onwards, you still had steady growth and high profits, but not like we saw during hyperglobalisation.

Now, if we fast forward to today, the long wave of globalisation is starting to come to an end. You have to be careful to not be too definitive while such shifts are still taking place, but there does seem to be a shift towards deglobalisation.

People deny this, but look around: we have sanctions, the breaking up of the world into blocs, wars, etc. A good way to think about it is this: if globalisation is not going forward, then it is going back. The world was becoming more globalised, now it is becoming less.

In your book you say that with globalisation’s end we are entering a new period of crisis, but differentiate between a crisis of capitalism and a crisis for capitalism. What do you mean?

In the coming period, wars will become more intractable and vicious. Look at Gaza: they are massacring people every day, and they no longer even pretend to “accidentally” bomb a hospital.

The contradiction between China and the US is also going to deepen. The US will use its enormous extra-economic tools to defend its power, as it can no longer use traditional economic tools given it has lost its industrial base.

We will also see inflation, which really means an attack on people’s living standards.

You have to be careful about telescoping such things; it is very tempting to fall into wish fulfillment. But I think these things will unfold. That will recreate the objective conditions for class conflict — and with it, the subjective conditions too.

Again, you have to be careful about being overly schematic, but I think there will be a recreation of the conditions for class struggle in the next period. We can already see a certain change.

We might not have a social crisis but there is grumbling discontent: people are fed up, they see no future. This is important, but it has not yet expressed itself as social conflict.

That is why I differentiate between a crisis for capitalism and a crisis of capitalism.

Crises for capitalism do not threaten capitalism. For example, we have had regular financial crises, most notably the 2008 financial crash, but the system has coped. These crises did not threaten the system’s existence as a whole, and were resolved at least to the extent needed to ensure extended reproduction.

The only real crisis for capitalism is a crisis of capitalism — that is, a social challenge capable of doing away with the capitalist order. That does not exist yet.

But with the end of the long wave of globalisation, we see multiple crises for capitalism opening up: trade and military wars, climate change, migration, environmental degradation. And, as they recreate conditions for social conflict, we may yet see these transformed into a crisis of capitalism.

What is certain is that these crises will provide opportunities for socialists.

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