Imperialism in Marx, the Marxist Tradition, and Today

At the close of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, capitalism’s productive weakness and the challenge of socialist China are sending the imperial countries in a paroxysm of aggression, economic and military. Dominant approaches like “globalization” and “empire,” which also claimed many Marxist theorists, are manifestly discredited. Thanks to a more than century-long surrender to neoclassical economics, Marxists are divided between those who deny the theoretical link between capitalism and imperialism and those who have forsaken Marx and Engels’s work as a guide to theorizing that link and proceed eclectically. Building on the author’s previous work, this article, a revision and extension of her 2025 David Gordon Memorial Lecture, returns to Marx and Engels’s original theorization of capitalism as contradictory value production as the basis for explaining its link to imperialism and resistance to it. It lays bare the geopolitical economy of what Marx called “the relations of producing nations” to explain the current conjuncture of multipolarity and the historical possibilities contained in it. JEL Classification : B14, B24, B51, F54