Multipolarity Archives - Invent the Future

China isn’t imperialist – here’s the proof

Is China simply another imperialist power, differing from the US only in degree? It’s a claim heard increasingly often on the left, from the Communist Party of Greece to Jacobin. This video sets out why that claim doesn’t survive scrutiny.

Working from Lenin’s classical definition of imperialism, Carlos Martinez examines whether China exhibits the super-exploitation of foreign labour that has always been imperialism’s economic core – and finds the opposite: China has been on the receiving end of value extraction by Western capital, not a source of it. The video looks at the real record of the Belt and Road Initiative against the “debt trap” accusation, at China’s strikingly peaceful military record since 1949, and at whether the underlying class dynamics of Chinese society could ever produce an imperialist foreign policy. And it closes by asking what China’s promotion of a multipolar world order means for the long-term prospects of overcoming imperialism altogether.

The video is based on Carlos’s chapter in the newly-released book China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, co-edited by Keith Bennett and Carlos Martinez, available now from Praxis Press.

More on the Belt and Road “debt trap” claim: China isn’t trapping the Global South in debt.

Transcript

Hello and welcome. This video is based on a chapter I’ve written for a newly-released book, co-edited with Keith Bennett: China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, out now from Praxis Press – link in the description.

In this video I want to work through the core of that chapter, which addresses a question that comes up again and again on the left: is China imperialist?

That China is an imperialist power is a fairly widespread claim, at least in the West. China is after all a major player on the world stage, with a large economy, a powerful military and expanding global influence, and it routinely faces accusations of “debt trap diplomacy” and other forms of economic coercion.

Some go even further: China has been described as “a rising imperialist power… that increasingly exploits Third World countries in pursuit of raw materials and outlets for its exports.” The Communist Party of Greece says China is “an integral part of the international imperialist system”, with its disputes with the US amounting to nothing more than a quarrel over “the division of the loot”.

In this framing, China is just another imperialist power, differing from the US and Western Europe only in degree, and all the talk of multipolarity is a veneer over the ambitions of a rising hegemon.

The strategic implication of that for the left is clear: if China is an imperialist power, it must be opposed and exposed like any other imperialist power. That’s the line of Neither Washington nor Beijing, which picks up where the old – and unlamented – Neither Washington nor Moscow left off.

I want to show why that’s wrong – that China has never been engaged in the type of economic, political and military domination that the word ‘imperialism’ implies; that its internal class dynamics and the actual geopolitical reality militate against it becoming imperialist, and that the multipolar world order it’s working to build provides a way out of imperialism for everyone.

What is imperialism?

Let’s start with a definition. In his classic pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin put forward what he called the “briefest possible definition” – that imperialism is “the monopoly stage of capitalism” – and then set out five basic features: the concentration of capital into monopolies; the rise of a financial oligarchy, essentially the banks, as the driving force of the economy; the export of capital as a key engine of growth; international combines that carve up the world between them – the modern multinational; and the complete territorial division of the world among the major capitalist powers.

That still holds up pretty well. But there’s one important development Lenin couldn’t account for at the time: a few months after he published that book, the Russian working class overthrew the tsarist system and founded the world’s first socialist state, which went on to back national liberation struggles and socialist movements around the world.

That set in train a new phase of human development: the phase of the transition to socialism.

Today’s world still has imperialist powers and it still has oppressed countries, but it also has socialist countries and countries – for example India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico – that are fairly deeply integrated into the global economy, that export capital like the vast majority of the world’s states, and yet they don’t dominate other countries. That’s a crucial difference from Lenin’s time: since the start of this transitional phase, it’s possible to actively engage in the global economy – to trade and invest on your own terms – without being an imperialist power.

So I’d argue that the most useful working definition of imperialism today is this: a system of economic, political and military domination of some countries over others, driven by the dominant countries’ pursuit of raw materials, land, markets and cheap labour, in which value flows continuously from the periphery (the oppressed countries) to the core (the imperialist countries) through structures that have been put in place and are held in place by means of coercion. That’s a bit of a mouthful, admittedly. More pithy perhaps is the definition by economists Li Zhongjin and David Kotz: “Imperialism is… the economic and political domination of one country by the ruling class of another aimed at extracting economic benefits for that ruling class.”

Super-exploitation is the core of it

The core concept for understanding the reality of imperialism is the super-exploitation of labour in the oppressed countries.

Marx wrote that capital goes abroad “because it can be employed at a higher rate of profit in a foreign country.” The Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin identified exactly this dynamic – capital is exported in search of a higher rate of profit, drawn above all from the higher rate of exploitation in poorer countries – as the defining feature of imperialism.

The economist John Smith has done a detailed and useful investigation of what this looks like in the 21st century. He notes that the major imperialist powers have spent decades outsourcing production to low-wage economies, reinforcing a hierarchy in which the US, Western Europe and Japan – what Samir Amin called the “imperialist triad” – remain the core of the global economy, while the Global South is relegated to the periphery.

Eighty-three percent of the world’s manufacturing workforce now lives in the Global South, often exposed to forced labour, illegal overtime and relentless downward pressure on wages and safety. This reflects a process starting in the 1970s where, facing a chronic crisis of overproduction at home, Western capital turned to what Smith calls “global labour arbitrage” as a survival tactic. Paying starvation wages in the Global South is how Western capitalism has propped up its own declining profitability for decades.

Is China a super-exploiter, or the super-exploited?

Where does China fit into all this? Clearly, not on the side of the exploiters. Like South Asia, Africa and Latin America, China has been on the receiving end of huge capital inflows from the imperialist triad, as multinationals leveraged its vast, highly-educated and relatively low-wage workforce.

Certainly throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, value was created in China and captured by the West. John Smith’s 2008 study of Apple’s iPod found that the 12,250 Chinese workers making it earned just six percent of the average US retail wage – and while a similar number of workers were employed on each side, the total US wage bill was 719 million dollars against a Chinese wage bill of 19 million.

The economists Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, analysing this kind of unequal exchange, conclude that “there is a clear transfer of surplus value from China to the bloc of imperialist countries, averaging five to ten percent of China’s GDP since the 1990s… China is not an imperialist country by our definition; on the contrary, it clearly fits into the dominated bloc.”

Now, Chinese wages have been rising fast and clearly things have changed since 2008. Chinese companies do invest abroad. But there’s no evidence of systematic super-exploitation of foreign labour by Chinese capital – actually the biggest recipients of Chinese investment are the US, Britain and Australia, and it’s hard to see how those flows could be described as exploiting Western labour.

As for China’s lending to the Global South, this is typically composed of mutually beneficial deals, rather than deals designed to extract superprofits. China is offering developing countries an alternative to the predatory lending of the IMF and World Bank – and that’s a challenge to the imperialist system, not a reinforcement of it.

No imperialism without domination

The word ‘imperialism’ comes from the Latin for command, to rule; obviously it’s very closely connected to the word ‘empire’.

It isn’t just about concentration of capital or foreign investment – fundamentally, it’s about domination. So: does China assert economic, political or military domination over other countries? Has it joined Lenin’s “handful of exceptionally rich and powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by clipping coupons”?! Quite obviously not.

And yet the Belt and Road Initiative is routinely condemned as neocolonialism – China luring developing countries into debt traps to dominate them. This doesn’t stand up, and I’ve got another video on this topic that I’ll link in the description. But even the reliably reactionary Economist admits debt-trap accusations are “largely unfair”, noting that China “has financed roads, ports, railways and other needed infrastructure, when private lenders and other countries were often unwilling to do so.”

Chinese interest rates typically run at about half those of Western banks, without the austerity conditions the IMF attaches. Tim Jones of the charity Debt Justice calls the whole debt trap narrative a distraction by Western countries, and asserts that “their own banks, asset managers and oil traders are far more responsible”.

Of Chinese loans to Africa, 40 percent has gone to power generation and 30 percent to transport – addressing Africa’s infrastructure gap.

The people actually living with these loans agree. Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister, responding to debt-trap accusations last year, said: “The Belt and Road Initiative is not a debt trap… it is a lifeline for our social and economic development.” Angola’s Minister of Energy and Water says that “China has never imposed any projects on us; each project was selected by us… Nobody offered us support except China.”

And China is actively sharing technology the West has always hoarded – payment systems, satellite networks, telecoms, renewable energy – opening up a pathway out of Western dependence.

Is there such a thing as peaceful imperialism?

Another thing is that China is remarkably peaceful for an imperialist power.

As Hugo Chávez put it: “China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.”

This directly connects to the political theory. Bukharin observed that the struggle to invest capital abroad “is always reinforced by military pressure”, and Rudolf Hilferding argued that finance capital needs a state strong enough to “intervene in every corner of the globe”.

The entire imperialist system was built through military force – Britain’s empire on naval supremacy over sea lanes on which, famously, the sun never set and the blood never dried; Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian imperialism were all built on brutal conquest; the US itself was built through war against Indigenous nations, against Mexico, and then across Latin America and the Pacific. And even after formal colonialism ended, the imperialist powers carried on using force to maintain their dominance – the wars on Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and today Iran; the proxy wars on Syria and Yemen; the sanctions strangling Cuba, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua and other countries.

As Thomas Friedman famously put it in the New York Times, with remarkable candour: “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas”.

China’s record simply looks nothing like this. China participated in the Korean and Vietnam wars on the side of the victims of imperialism. Then it had a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979. In the nearly half-century since, China hasn’t dropped a single bomb on foreign territory. Its per-capita military spending is around one-twentieth of the US’s; it holds roughly five hundred nuclear warheads to the US’s five thousand, and it’s maintained a no-first-use policy since its first nuclear test in 1964.

So if we’re saying that China has become an imperialist power without recourse to military force – without coercion, without war – then we are throwing Lenin’s theory of imperialism out the window.

Could China become imperialist?

So China isn’t imperialist today. But could it become imperialist in future? For a country to go down that road, three things have to be true: 1) it has to be capitalist, in the sense that profit maximisation is the core motive of its economy; 2) its capitalist class has to exercise control of the country’s foreign policy; and 3) the objective conditions have to exist for it to actually dominate other countries.

Let’s take these in turn.

In China, the profit motive is certainly important, but it isn’t the principal factor driving economic strategy – after all, a huge share of the economy is directed by the state, the major banks are state-owned and answerable to the Chinese people, and infrastructure and technology projects go ahead regardless of short-term returns. As economist Arthur Kroeber puts it, China is “an economy where the state remains firmly in command… but where market tools are used to improve efficiency.”

Meanwhile, People’s China has never experienced economic contraction. Chinese capital simply doesn’t face the crises of profitability and overproduction that have historically driven Western capital abroad.

Nor is capital the main driver of China’s foreign relations, which are built on the UN Charter, the principles of peaceful coexistence, the principles of non-interference, and the construction of a multipolar world.

Back in 1974, at the UN General Assembly, Deng Xiaoping said that if China ever turned into a bullying superpower, “the people of the world should expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.” Xi Jinping reiterated this idea at the 20th Party Congress: “China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansionism.”

So the Chinese state has a consistent foreign policy, based on the long-term interests of the Chinese people. Even if private companies in China wanted to subvert it in the interests of making a quick buck, they lack the political power to do so.

And even if the Chinese state did harbour imperialist ambitions, the objective conditions for pursuing those ambitions simply don’t exist. Some writers on the left have claimed that China is walking the same “road well-travelled” as Britain, Germany and the US. What they haven’t noticed is that road isn’t actually open any more. Lenin noted, over a century ago, that the world was already “completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible” – and redivision means displacing existing imperialist powers by force. That was the whole logic of the First World War.

China’s peaceful record indicates very strongly that it’s not pursuing such a path.

In summary, the only way China could become an imperialist power is through capitalist counter-revolution – which is, ironically, exactly what the existing imperialist powers would love to see happen.

Multipolarity and overcoming imperialism

The last point I want to make is about the global order China is trying to build.

China rarely frames its foreign policy in overtly revolutionary language these days, but it stands at the core of an objectively anti-imperialist trajectory: the push towards a multipolar world, described by Jenny Clegg as “a pattern of multiple centres of power… shaping a negotiated order”.

That’s by definition a shift away from a US-dominated unipolar order towards a more equal and democratic system in which all countries – including those of the Global South – have a voice; in which all countries can assert their sovereignty and choose their own development path free from hegemonism.

Time and time again, the imperialist powers have blocked the development of the Global South, and have worked to crush socialist movements and governments, from Chile to Indonesia to Grenada to Angola to Iran to Nicaragua. Through the structures of the UN, BRICS, the G77+China, the Non Aligned Movement, the Forum on China Africa Cooperation, China-CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China is actively advancing the interests of the developing world.

So multipolarity offers real opportunities for peace and development, and a more favourable context for humanity’s advance towards socialism.

China is not an imperialist power. Rather, it’s an anti-imperialist power, and its foreign policy is directed towards a fundamental transformation of the global order – away from hegemonism, towards multipolarity, sovereignty, cooperation and peace.

At a moment when the imperialist powers, led by the US, are resorting to ever more desperate violence to maintain their dominance, China’s promotion of multipolarity, and its vision of a global community of shared future, matter more than ever.

There’s a lot more detail and a full set of sources behind the points I’ve made in this video – you can find that all in the chapter in China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, out now from Praxis Press, link in the description.

Thanks very much for watching. Do give it a thumbs-up for the sake of the algorithm, and see you next time.

The role of China in bringing down the empire

In the video embedded below, Carlos Martinez speaks on the role of China in the global project of bringing down the empire, at the Workers World Party hybrid forum “The World is Bringing Down the Empire!” (9 July 2026).

The single biggest factor in overcoming imperialism in the present epoch is the emergence of a multipolar world – and the single biggest factor in that process is the rise of People’s China. This talk traces how China’s role has evolved from the overt anti-imperialism of the 1950s, through the “hide your strength and bide your time” period of Reform and Opening Up, to the leading role it takes in world affairs today: the Belt and Road Initiative, the Community of Shared Future for Humanity, and the Global Development, Security, Civilisation and Governance Initiatives.

Along the way, Carlos addresses war and peace, China’s engagement with Africa, the recent war on Iran, and the argument – associated with Samir Amin – that a multipolar world provides the framework for the necessary overcoming of capitalism.

Transcript

Comrades, thank you very much for inviting me.

I’ve been asked to speak on the role of China in the global project of bringing down the empire. I want to start with a simple claim, which is that the single biggest factor in overcoming imperialism in the present historical epoch is the emergence of a multipolar world. And the single biggest factor in that process is the rise of People’s China.

So let me talk about what China’s role actually is, how it’s changed over the decades, and why it matters so much for everyone who wants to see a different world; a world of peace, equality, prosperity, friendship and solidarity.

The world says no: Iran, the Global South and the end of the unipolar moment

The US-Israeli war on Iran has been defeated – and the world’s response to it, above all from China and the Global South, reveals how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted. In the article below, Carlos Martinez argues that Iran’s victory provides important evidence that the unipolar moment is over.

The criminal US-Israeli war on Iran has wrought devastation on a horrendous scale. The campaign has included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and numerous other political leaders and scientists; the bombing of schools, hospitals, bridges and energy infrastructure; and, from April, a naval blockade of Iran’s ports. Aerial attacks have killed around 3,500 civilians, including 168 children at an elementary school in Minab, in one of the gravest single atrocities since the Vietnam War.

This is a war of aggression, pure and simple. There has been no Security Council authorisation, and UN human rights experts have denounced the assault as a violation of the most basic principles of the UN Charter. The pretext – that Iran was on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon – is the same threadbare story Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling since 1992, and is roughly as credible as Tony Blair’s claim in 2003 that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

But something distinguishes this war from the Iraq war a generation ago. In 2003, Washington could assemble a “coalition of the willing”, browbeat the UN, and assume the world would fall into line. In 2026, the world is conspicuously refusing to do so. And the war has not merely been opposed – it has been defeated. As of late June it stands suspended under an interim memorandum of understanding whose terms read like a list of concessions wrung from Washington. The response to this war – above all from China and the Global South – tells us a great deal about how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted.

Imperialism vs multipolarity: how the war on Iran backfired on the US

The US-Israeli war on Iran was meant to halt the world’s drift towards multipolarity. Instead it accelerated it.

In this talk from the webinar “Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions” (organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group), Carlos Martinez argues that the war on Iran is the sharpest illustration we have of two clashing visions of world order – a declining empire that rules through sanctions, blockades and bombing, and an emerging multipolar order based on sovereignty, development and peace.

The presentation covers:

What the war was really about: Iran, Palestine, the Belt and Road, and the containment of China
Why Iran survived in 2026 what Mossadegh’s Iran could not in 1953
China’s role: buying Iranian oil in defiance of sanctions, the UN Security Council veto, economic and diplomatic support
How the outcome has strengthened Iran, weakened the US, isolated Israel, and accelerated the rise of the multipolar world

Watch the full webinar: Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions.

Transcript

I’m going to make Iran – rather than China or the US directly – the main focus of my remarks, because the war there is the sharpest illustration we have of the two clashing visions we’re discussing today.

First I’ll talk about how the Iran war relates to the overall global struggle between imperialism and multipolarity.

Second, how the emerging multipolar reality has shaped the outcomes of that war.

And third, how those outcomes are, in turn, reshaping the trajectory of the multipolar project.

Cuba: siege socialism or barbarism

The US president has said he expects the Cuban government to be gone “by the end of the year”. His administration has indicted Raúl Castro, killed nearly 200 people in extrajudicial strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, and tightened a blockade now in its 64th year. So it’s worth asking, seriously: what is the actual alternative to socialist Cuba that’s being proposed by the imperialists?

In this video, Carlos Martinez takes up the late Michael Parenti’s concept of “siege socialism” from his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds, and argues that Cuba is the canonical example of it today. The video looks at what Cuba has held onto under siege – life expectancy higher than the US, infant mortality lower than the US, world-leading literacy and medical training – and compares it with the countries in the region that took the path Washington wanted them to take, such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and pre-revolutionary Cuba itself.

Carlos also looks at why the trajectory may be turning: Chinese investment in 92 solar parks, the rise of multipolarity, and the prospect of energy sovereignty as the way out of the siege.

Rosa Luxemburg’s “socialism or barbarism” was a philosophical statement in 1916. In the Caribbean in 2026, it is a concrete choice.

Note an article version of the video has been published in the Morning Star.

Sources and further reading:

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (1997)

Cuban government statement on the indictment of Raúl Castro

Cuba Solidarity Campaign

China stands with Cuba against illegal indictment of Raúl Castro

Cuba is not a failed state – it is a besieged state

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

A few weeks ago, Donald Trump told reporters that he expects the Cuban government to be gone by the end of this year. He called Cuba a failed country and added, “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years doing something and it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.” His Secretary of State, Marco Rubio – more commonly referred to as Narco Rubio – has declared that Cuba has consistently posed a threat to the national security of the United States, which is essentially the standard preamble for regime change operations.

Last week, the Department of Justice unsealed a federal indictment against Raúl Castro for events that took place 30 years ago and in which Cuba acted in a completely just, completely legal manner.

Iran, China and the multipolar moment

Recorded in Changsha, China, this wide-ranging conversation between Carlos Martinez and Danny Haiphong focuses on some of the most urgent questions in contemporary world politics: the Iran ceasefire, the Strait of Hormuz, the collapse of US military credibility, and what it all means for China and the multipolar world.

Carlos argues that Iran is playing a sophisticated and restrained game – responding precisely and proportionately to every US provocation, never escalating beyond what the situation requires. The IRGC’s recent seizure of Israel-linked vessels attempting to bypass Iran’s Hormuz regulations was not aggression but enforcement: Iran exercising sovereign control over its territorial waters in response to a US blockade that itself violates the ceasefire terms. With 34 Iranian oil tankers having bypassed the blockade and reached global markets, the attempt to economically
strangle Iran is visibly failing.

The military picture for the US is stark. Drawing on Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analysis, Carlos and Danny detail the extraordinary depletion of US munitions – nearly half of Patriot and THAAD interceptors, 45 percent of precision strike missiles, 30 percent of Tomahawk stockpiles – expended in just 40 days of hostilities. Replacing these systems will take years. Meanwhile Iran has been rapidly replenishing its stockpiles of missiles and drones. The asymmetry is decisive: Iran has more cards to play, more escalation options unused, and a population of 93 million ready to defend their country. A land invasion, Carlos notes, would be the greatest US military defeat since Vietnam, and perhaps in history.

The conversation turns to the deeper strategic logic of the conflict – which is not only about Iran, but about Palestine, regional hegemony, and the long-term objective of suppressing China’s rise. Control of Venezuelan oil, disruption of Iran’s energy relationship with Beijing, dominance of the Strait of Hormuz: these are moves in a long game aimed at encircling China before a potential hot war in the Pacific. The irony, Carlos argues, is that the war has achieved the opposite – depleting US military capacity, accelerating the multipolar trajectory, and motivating the countries of the ‘intermediate zone’ in Europe and elsewhere to engage more deeply with China as a stable and responsible global actor.

China and Venezuela: building a Great Wall against imperialism and hegemonism

The following text is based on a presentation given by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez at a discussion forum titled The Emancipatory Struggle for Independence in Latin America, held on 18 July 2024 at the historic Casa Miranda in London, where the celebrated Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda lived from 1802 to 1810. The event was organised by the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and was hosted by His Excellency Ambassador Félix Plasencia González.

Comrade-ambassador Félix Plasencia, friends and comrades, it’s an honour to be here with you this evening.

I would like to speak about a specific aspect of independence, which is: the relationship between sovereignty and internationalism.

To my mind this is a very important part of Venezuela’s political project since the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. Venezuela has been fierce in defending its sovereignty, and it also has an exemplary record of internationalism and solidarity.

The two things are inextricably linked. And Chávez understood this in a very deep way, that sovereignty and independence are not the same as isolationism. And that to embrace internationalism does not mean to give up your sovereignty.

Indeed the opposite is the case: sovereignty cannot be won, and cannot be defended, outside of the context of the broadest possible unity against imperialism; against those countries that seek to deny others’ sovereignty.

The history of the last century provides ample evidence of this.

In his famous pamphlet on imperialism, Lenin observed that by the beginning of the 20th century, “the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers was completed”. Which is to say, the entire planet had been divided into two: a small number of imperialist countries on the one hand, and a vast number of oppressed countries on the other.

Lenin’s pamphlet was written in 1916. A year later, as you all know, a new factor emerged in global politics: the existence of a socialist country, leading in the following decades to the establishment of a socialist group of countries.

The existence of this socialist group of countries was in turn a powerful boost for the national liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and elsewhere. These movements were able to win and defend their sovereignty – to struggle against imperialism – through the heroic efforts of their people of course, but combined with the solidarity of other countries, other movements. In the process they created a new group of liberated countries, such that the division of the world back that of a small number of imperialist countries on the one hand, and a vast number of non-imperialist countries on the other.

The brilliant Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh famously stated that “nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” And the Vietnamese people won their independence and freedom, with the support of the Soviet Union, with the support of China, and with the solidarity of progressive movements and people the world over.

Studying the liberation wars in Vietnam, in Mozambique, in Angola, in Algeria, in Zimbabwe, in Guinea-Bissau, the movements leading these struggles were all profoundly internationalist, all looked for inspiration and support to the socialist countries, and all were grounded in the revolutionary internationalism that forms such a key component of Venezuela’s political ideology, of Chavismo.

Today the example that stands out is that of Palestine. The Palestinians are fighting for their sovereignty, for their independence, for their basic national rights; against colonialism, against racism, against apartheid, against ethnic cleansing. They are taking on a genocidal aggressor in Tel Aviv, backed by genocidal aggressors in Washington and London. But the people of the world stand with them. The entire Global South stands with them and demands their legitimate national rights be restored.

Hugo Chávez, Xi Jinping, and a global community of shared future

The following is the text of the presentation delivered by Carlos Martinez at a round-table discussion on Venezuela’s foreign policy in a changing world, held on 20 February 2024 at Bolivar Hall in London. The event was organised by the Ambassador of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the UK in coordination with the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.

The speech discusses Hugo Chávez’s vision of a multipolar world, and explores how that vision overlaps with China’s strategy of pursuing a global community of shared future.

Other speakers at the event included Her Excellency Rocío Maneiro, Ambassador of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the UK; Francisco Domínguez, Secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign; Calvin Tucker, Campaigns Manager of the Morning Star; and Radhika Desai, Convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

Dear friends and comrades, thanks so much for inviting me to today’s important event.

And thank you in particular to Her Excellency compañera-embajadora Rocío Maneiro, who continues to do such a wonderful job representing her country and standing in solidarity with the progressive movement here in Britain and with the working class and oppressed peoples of the world.

Thanks also to the indefatigable comrade Francisco Domínguez for his hard work putting this event together.

I’m going to focus these brief remarks on the connection between Venezuela’s foreign policy and that of China.

As you’re all no doubt aware, Hugo Chávez had an extremely far-sighted worldview. While the Bolivarian Revolution has always aimed to have good relations with the US, its foreign policy has nonetheless been informed by the identification of that country as the principal enemy to sovereignty and to socialism, not just in Venezuela but throughout the world.

And of course the US’s consistently aggressive stance in relation to Venezuela – its campaign of sanctions, of coercion, of destabilisation – has only confirmed what Chávez and his comrades already knew.

Chávez saw Venezuela as part of a global movement challenging half a millennium of colonialism, imperialism and racism; a global movement that included the growing leftist and pro-sovereignty trend in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also China, Cuba, Russia, Libya (until NATO’s war of regime change in 2011), Syria, South Africa, Vietnam, Iran, the DPRK, Belarus and others.

This global movement seeks to put an end to the unipolar era of US hegemony, and to create a multipolar – or as Chávez called it, pluripolar – world, with multiple centres of power, in which countries and regions all have their role in global politics and in which no one power can impose its will on others.

Under the guidance of Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has become one of the most prominent voices in support of this multipolar project.

Indeed, one of the slogans of Chávez’s 2012 presidential election campaign was: “to develop a new international geopolitics forming a multicentric and pluripolar world to achieve equilibrium in the universe and guarantee planetary peace.”

Nato’s proxy war highlights urgent need for a multipolar future

The following is a slightly updated version of an article by Carlos Martinez in the Global Times, published on 22 February 2023.

A year ago, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in Beijing at start of the Winter Olympics, issuing a joint statement that called on the West to “abandon the ideologised approaches of the cold war”. The statement expressed their shared opposition to the further expansion of Nato and emphasised the need for “long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe”.

President Xi said the two countries were “working together to bring to life true multilateralism.” A year later, with the horrifying proxy war between Russia and NATO dragging on, the people of the world are living – and dying – with the consequences of the US and its allies’ stubborn refusal to join the path of multipolarity.

With the benefit of hindsight, the Ukraine crisis has acquired a certain tragic inevitability. Russia had made its red lines perfectly clear over the course of many years: that Ukraine must never become part of Nato; that Nato’s expansion must end; that Ukraine must never be allowed to be used as a launching pad for war on Russia; and that the national rights of the Russian-speaking peoples of Eastern Ukraine must be respected.

As John Wojcik wrote in the left-wing US journal People’s World in January 2022, what happens in Ukraine is of critical importance to the survival of Russia. “From Napoleon to the Kaiser to Hitler, Russia has been invaded too many times from Europe, and it is understandably determined to maintain a militarily non-aligned buffer zone on its border.”

It was within the West’s power to prevent the current war, and it remains within the West’s power to put a stop to it now. Unfortunately the leading Western power, the US, has only a marginal interest in helping to bring about peace in Europe. If the US wanted peace, it could have supported Ukraine in adopting a path of military neutrality and building friendly and mutually-beneficial relations with both East and West. But the US privileges hegemony over peace, and has therefore constantly meddled in Ukraine with a view to exploiting its people and geography to project imperial power against Russia.

Multipolarity to prevail despite US ‘decoupling’ push

The following article by Carlos Martinez first appeared in Global Times on 1 December 2022. It addresses the signs of an emerging split in the New Cold War front, with Germany in particular starting to assert some foreign policy independence from Washington.

In an important speech on economic strategy, delivered at a recent forum organised by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for Germany to orient itself toward the reality of an “increasingly multipolar world” that is arranging itself right now.

Scholz stated, countering a narrative that Europe and North America can simply return to reliable economic growth following the disruptions of COVID-19 and the crisis in Ukraine, that the growing strength of Asia had fundamentally changed the international landscape. There will be no going back to the good old days in which North America and Western Europe enjoyed stable economic growth and high employment rates.

Inter alia, this is a tacit admission that the West’s wealth has been built to a significant degree on the basis of extraction from the developing world. The “good old days” were when Europe and North America were rich and Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean were poor and subordinate

What was the material foundation of these good old days? It was colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the brutal underdevelopment of Africa, the Opium Wars, and more. The expansionism and systematic pillage during the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries created a profoundly lopsided world, dominated by a handful of Western capitalist powers.

This cosy arrangement was disrupted by the October Revolution, which marked the beginning of a new era of world history. The construction of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Cuba – and the mighty wave of anti-colonial liberation in the post-WWII period – brought about a profound transformation in global politics.

But the US and its allies have worked ceaselessly to undermine the socialist world and to impose neocolonial domination in those places where colonial rule had been dismantled. This is the context for the Cold War; for the Korean War, the Vietnam War; the overthrow of progressive governments from Indonesia to Grenada to Chile; the support for apartheid regimes in South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

Wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, along with several rounds of NATO expansion, were early episodes in the Project for a New American Century – the US proposal for consolidating and expanding its hegemony in the post-Soviet era. But China and other countries, particularly in the Global South, have been moving along a different trajectory, in pursuit of a multipolar, multilateral project, based on the principles of the UN Charter.

This strategy is directed toward lasting peace and worldwide sovereign development. Its manifestation in reality is clear enough: while the US is by far the world leader in military spending, military bases, wars of aggression, regime change operations, unilateral sanctions and economic coercion, China is the world leader in mutually-beneficial trade, infrastructure development, and renewable energy.

The Biden administration’s response to the rise of multipolarity has been to escalate the US-led new Cold War and to promote decoupling, dividing the world into two competing and exclusive blocs. While Biden has presented this division as being between democracies and autocracies, in reality the group he is trying to establish is based on the George W Bush doctrine: you are either with us or against us.

The US created AUKUS last year – a group of countries united by shared whiteness and commitment to imperialism – in order to bolster the military encirclement of China. Meanwhile Washington has taken advantage of the crisis in Ukraine to recruit new members to NATO and attempt to weaken Russia by prolonging the conflict (a strategy that has certain parallels with the US’ role in Afghanistan in the 1980s).

European powers in particular are being subjected to tremendous pressure to “decouple” from China and Russia, but such a decoupling doesn’t serve the interests of the people of Europe. It was therefore an assertion of political independence for Scholz to travel to Beijing in early November – the first visit to China by a Western head of state since the start of the pandemic, and just days after the close of the 20th National Congress of the CPC.

The trip took place in spite of the bitter criticism of certain Cold Warriors among the German political class, not to mention the rumblings of disapproval from Washington. But Scholz appears to have realised – as did his predecessor, Angela Merkel – that the days of unipolarity and hegemony are over.

Before leaving for Beijing, he stated bluntly that “China remains an important business and trading partner for Germany and Europe — we don’t want to decouple from it.”

Such a rupture in the transatlantic alliance is to be very much welcomed. The people of Europe and the world will only lose from any New Cold War or decoupling. The world’s future is multipolar and peaceful.