Imperialism as antagonistic cooperation

First published at Spectre.

In the months before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s uneasy visit to Beijing last year, the CEOs of J.P. Morgan, Starbucks, Apple, General Motors, and Tesla had amiable meetings with former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang.1 Reaffirming what Xi Jinping and other Chinese ministers have declared on an annual basis, Qin assured Elon Musk that China “remain[s] committed to fostering a better market-oriented, law-based and internationalized business environment.”2

What some pundits label the decoupling of strategic industries in this period of intercapitalist tensions must be critically examined. Economic interdependence has shown surprising resilience even across rival geopolitical blocs. Existing theories of imperialism fail to fully account for these seemingly contradictory dimensions of today’s world system. Tricontinental theorizes the current stage of imperialism as “hyper-imperialism,” characterized by a unipolar “US-Led Military Bloc” as the sole imperialist force that renders all other global contradictions secondary or “non-antagonistic.”3 For the authors at Tricontinental, this imperialist bloc is being challenged by a multipolar “socialist grouping led by China,” representing “growing aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernization, and multilateralism, emerging from the Global South.” Such a perspective disregards the implications of both the interdependence between the two blocs and the emergent role of certain intermediate economies — for example, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia — in developing regional hegemonies that facilitate imperialism amidst geopolitical tensions.

In contrast to Tricontinental, some see the form of imperialism today as an interimperialist conflict in the same vein as the First World War, which Bolshevik revolutionaries V. I. Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin first theorized.4 This view overly downplays the decline of US hegemony while overestimating the rise of new imperialists as a counterbalance to US imperialism. These faulty conceptions are two sides of the same coin: they overstate the dynamics of rivalry, thus obscuring salient sites of interconnection in the imperialist system that can yield powerful opportunities for solidarity across antisystemic struggles.

Of course, deep antagonisms between nations nonetheless exist and have already generated a disastrous human cost, as in the US-Israeli assault on Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But, we must not miss capitalism’s readjustment of its own constitution to develop new terms for recovery and stabilization. Antagonistic cooperation, a conceptual framework developed by Marxists in postwar Germany and Brazil, provides the best tools for analyzing this particular stage of imperialism. Unlike the unipolar theorization of Tricontinental or the multipolar rivalry of those following the Bolshevik theorists, which both overemphasize rivalry between imperialist powers, antagonistic cooperation understands the imperialist system as an interdependent totality that can accommodate interdependence between and beyond geopolitical blocs. Additionally, unlike the two models described above, antagonistic cooperation also allows for heterogeneity of power relations within this paradigm even as the overall structure of dependency between core and periphery economies continues to exist. For one, the rivalry between the United States and China does not imply their equality in the global imperialist system, which is still led and dominated by the former. What Claudio Katz calls “empires-in-formation,” and other intermediate or subimperial countries, are also cultivating the ability to occasionally check US power through military, economic, or other means.5 But this signals neither an anti-imperialist affront to US hegemony nor a straightforward leveling of the playing field as a new terrain of interimperialist rivalry.

Antagonistic cooperation must also be distinguished from different individual (or branches of) capitalists competing with each other for profits while maintaining the system as a whole as a class. The concept specifically denotes how, as Enrique Dussel puts it, “the international social relation of domination between national bourgeoisies determines…the transfer of value in world competition.”6 In other words, antagonistic cooperation concerns the terms in which the relations of domination between nations take shape today. This essay identifies and explores three main characteristics of antagonistic cooperation: 1) the coexistence of a degree of antagonism between imperialist countries, empires-in-formation, and other intermediate, subimperial, and regional hegemons with their interdependence and cooperation; 2) the key role intermediate and regional economies play in maintaining global accumulation by developing a degree of political and economic autonomy to interface between geopolitical antagonisms; 3) the ever-deepening fusion of finance and state-led industrial capital that secures these two characteristics.7

Defining antagonistic cooperation

In the 1960s, the Brazilian Marxist collective Política Operária (POLOP) gathered socialists from different traditions to investigate the role of the national bourgeoisie in periphery countries within a larger imperialist world system. They developed the concept of antagonistic cooperation, first coined by German communist August Thalheimer in his 1946 pamphlet, Basic Principles and Concepts of World Politics after World War II (Grundlinien und Grundbegriffe der Weltpolitik nach dem 2. WeItkrieg). POLOP encountered Thalheimer’s ideas through its Austrian-born member Erich Sachs, who had been exposed to Thalheimer and Bukharin during his brief stay in Moscow as a Jewish refugee in the 1930s.8 In his pamphlet, Thalheimer observes that though the fundamental contradictions of capitalism only sharpened (verschaerft) in the wake of the Second World War, unlike the outcome of the First World War, “the acuteness of inter-imperialist antagonisms has been interrupted (“den innerimperialistischen Gegensaetzen die Spitze abgebrochen”).9 He admits that, within the imperialist camp, “not all antagonistic forces have disappeared, but the fundamental result is the predominance of their unity over the two remaining groups: the Soviet state with its sphere of influence and the group of colonial and semi-colonial nations.”10 Thalheimer takes the example of the shifting relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States after the war, arguing that United Kingdom’s subordination to the US imperialist bloc does not mean the former has lost all its autonomy. On the contrary:

Although the United States is the military, economic, and ultimately political leader, it is not the sole determinant. There is a kind of interpenetration of mutual imperial interests and domains. It is both cooperation and competition, whereby cooperation predominates. One could use the term “antagonistic cooperation,” coined in physiology. Cooperation against the abolition of colonial rule and exploitation in general and against the socialist sphere, and competition for a share in the exploitation of the colonial territories. Both this cooperation and this competition are taking on forms of their own.11

Thalheimer’s conception of antagonistic cooperation illustrates how a single dominant hegemon does not foreclose the possibilities of antagonisms in its bloc, though such forces can unite to maintain the dependency of periphery economies. This relation of dependency is, as Dussel defines it, a moment in the competition of national capitals itself on a global scale.12 So, more accurately, we can modify Thalheimer’s definition and consider antagonistic cooperation a particular stage of imperialism in which the terms for competition between national capitals take shape through or are mediated by the “interpenetration of mutual imperial interests and domains,” rather than cooperation and competition as distinct tendencies.13 Thalheimer also reminds us that the “form” of antagonistic cooperation “is not fixed once and for all.” This framework does not completely preclude the reemergence of intensified interimperialist rivalry as in the First World War, but characterizes a particular stage of the imperialist system upon the rise of US hegemony.

Thalheimer’s view of imperialism treats the world economy as a kind of interdependent totality, building on Bukharin’s understanding of imperialism as a distinct stage of capitalism in which “the capitalist relations of production dominate the entire world and connect all the parts of our planet with a firm economic bond. Nowadays the concrete manifestation of the social economy is a world economy. The world economy is a real living unity.”14 Bukharin sees that rivaling national economic blocs may arise within this interdependence in the form of “state capitalist trusts.” Bukharin writes: “Being in opposition to each other, these trusts are rivals not only as units producing one and the same ‘world commodity, ’ but also as parts of a divided social world labor, as units which are economically complementary. Hence their struggle is carried on simultaneously along both horizontal and vertical lines: this struggle is complex competition.”15 The expansion of finance capital fortifies this unity, as “monopolistic employers’ associations, combined enterprises, and the penetration of banking capital into industry created a new model of production relations, which transformed the unorganized commodity capitalist system into a finance capitalist organization.”16 The expansion of finance capital fortifies this unity, as “monopolistic employers’ associations, combined enterprises, and the penetration of banking capital into industry created a new model of production relations, which transformed the unorganized commodity capitalist system into a finance capitalist organization.”17 Rather than tending to equilibrium, this “living unity” of imperialism that Bukharin describes tends toward unevenness in maintaining the expansion of profits on a global scale.

POLOP extends this analysis to differentiate periphery economies. Its members argue that the antagonistic cooperation of the world economy propels the peripheries’ uneven development. This unevenness helps develop a certain degree of political and economic autonomy for some nations despite the persistence of dependency. POLOP member Ruy Mauro Marini — most known for his theorization of subimperialism — builds on Ernest Mandel to explain that periphery economies are not homogeneously dependent on the core in the same way. Like Mandel, Marini distinguishes a semiperipheral layer of semi-industrializing countries (like Brazil) from other periphery regions. Marini observes that the speed of technical progress in advanced countries compelled capitalists to replace their fixed capital before it fully wore out (what Marx calls moral depreciation), and so, “these countries increasingly found it necessary to export equipment and machinery that had become obsolete to the periphery before they fully depreciated.”18 This bolstering of certain dependent countries leads Marini to believe that dependency is malleable and dynamic, and it “affect[s] different Latin American countries in diverse ways, according to their specific social formations.”19 Mandel describes this incongruity as “inter-zonal differences of development, industrialization and productivity [that] are steadily increasing.”20 As Katz notes, the approach to unequal exchange and dependency that Marini and Mandel endorse tracks “the heterogeneous dynamic of accumulation, which increases the disparity between the components of a single world market as it expands.”21 In other words, the antagonistic cooperation of the imperialist system also complicates a straightforward understanding of the polarization between the core and the periphery.

This understanding of core/periphery relations as uneven and dynamic entails, as Thalheimer correctly argues, that the form of antagonistic cooperation is not fixed. Marini’s analysis enables us to recognize a certain degree of political and economic autonomy among lesser Western imperialist countries subordinated to the US bloc and in the intermediate economies below the upper rungs of imperialist countries. Other theorists of POLOP further explore this analysis to unpack how some countries cultivate contradictory political relations with other imperialist powers in the world system. POLOP’s 1967 program articulates that an interdependent and cooperative capitalist system can make room for different kinds of antagonistic relationships between states: “With the postwar development, the imperialist system has entered the phase of antagonistic cooperation. This is a cooperation aimed at the conservation of the system and which has its basis in the very process of centralization of capital, and which does not eliminate the antagonisms inherent in the imperialist world. Cooperation prevails and will prevail over antagonisms.”22 As Sachs explains in another essay:

[This antagonistic cooperation between rivaling imperialist powers] finds its logical extension in the relations between them and the national bourgeoisies of the underdeveloped capitalist world. In Latin America and Brazil, this has had the following general consequences: a) a limited field of maneuver for the native bourgeoisie, who have periodically been able to exploit the contradictions between imperialist powers (the United States, England, Germany, etc.) to improve their own positions; b) an acceptance of and growing dependence on the domination of US imperialism in an economic association, in which imperialist capital participates in industrialization, occupies virtual command positions and decisively influences the pace of economic activity.23

In other words, these intermediate economies can play an indispensable role in facilitating the operations of the imperialist system without necessarily challenging or joining the ranks of major imperialists. The subimperial autonomy of such regimes, guided by their “native bourgeoisie” seeking to maximize their profits in the world market, may even buttress the power of existing imperialists. From the perspective of the dominant imperialists, the developing political power of certain intermediate economies can also provide opportunities to secure the expansion of capital against working-class unrest.

We may extend Leon Trotsky’s formulation of uneven and combined development — which he describes as “an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms (of production)” to understand the heterogeneity of intermediate economies. While intermediate states like Turkey, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (despite their continued ties to the United States) are developing relatively autonomous spheres of political and economic hegemony in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, they are, strictly speaking, not imperialist formations. However, such levels of independent regional influence mean that subimperialism is not always a useful analytic. These intermediate economies show that countries can project hegemonic forms of regional power robust enough to check imperialism without becoming full-fledged imperialists or anti-imperialist forces. This schema permits us to understand how the rise of international financial institutions and multinational firms affords unprecedented cooperation in the global capitalist class, which can remain durable in geopolitical crises. As Sachs writes:

Antagonistic cooperation does not free the capitalist world from internal shocks at all levels, ups and downs. There are moments when antagonism seems to predominate, when the national bourgeoisies threaten an “independent” foreign policy, rebel against the schemes of the International Monetary Fund, and nationalize particularly unpopular foreign companies. The same phenomenon occurs among the imperialist powers themselves in moments of periodic relaxation of international tension. It disappears when there is a new upsurge in international tension and, as in France in 1968, when the capitalist regime is put in check. In the long run, cooperation for the maintenance of the system prevails.24

This model of cooperation can thus account for substantial instances of disruption. Sachs’s example of the national bourgeoisie occasionally rebelling against the IMF proves particularly prescient in understanding the actions of BRICS today. These reactions testify to the real existence of crises and instability in the era of imperialist antagonistic cooperation, which is itself situated in a broader geopolitical consensus committed to preserving the expansion of capital accumulation.

The strength and relevance of POLOP’s framework of antagonistic cooperation lies in its recognition that capitalism can creatively renegotiate new terms for survival. On the other hand, Tricontinental’s hyperimperialism thesis mistakenly sees the China-led multipolar order as an opportunity to break from the reproduction of the capitalist economy. Some adherents of the theory of revived interimperialist rivalry argue that today’s profitability crisis may compel more military confrontation among imperialists to stabilize the system.25 While this is not incorrect, we must not overlook how such conflicts would take shape through a deeper nexus of intercapitalist interdependence than obtained in the systemic crises of the 1890s and 1930s (resolved by full-scale global warfare). However, we must also not mistake this interdependence for an inert tendency of the system toward equilibrium. In reality, the maintenance of this cooperation requires continual upkeep, especially as the capitalist system is forced to address the repeating appearance of crises stemming from its internal contradictions. The crises of profitability in the 1970s and the 2000s, for example, required fundamental transformations in how capitalism is organized in order to restore growth (and the suppression of working-class insurgency).

Thus, the terms for cooperation must be consciously reinvented to be maintained. Indeed, the Soviet Union’s collapse threatened the stability of interimperialist cooperation. Another POLOP member, Victor Meyer, presages that “competition among cartels progressively increases, regional defensive blocs multiply, and they clash with each other” and “conflicts born within the capitalist system tend to become fiercer.”26 But Meyer underestimates the strength of the integration of nation-states into the international financial system. This process continues to propel the expansion of accumulation into new markets, even as rivalries deepen. Without downplaying the ever-present threat of antagonistic crises and rivalries between states, this analysis foregrounds the capacity of the imperialist world system to maintain cooperative dynamics to maximize paths for global accumulation. However, we must not mistake this striving for the guarantee that they can successfully restore a new long wave of peaceful growth of profits. As Mandel points out, subjective factors like “intensified class struggle” and other social forces also help determine whether “capital can implement the restructuring necessary to decisively redress the rate of profit.”27 Nonetheless, this framework helps explain the durability of the capitalist system — despite heightening internal antagonisms. While US unipolarity has cohered the capitalist world system for decades, the United States may be joined by a host of new actors in this role.

Antagonistic cooperation today

The interdependence between the United States, Russia, and China shows that even the most threatening antagonisms cannot fully sever the ruling class’s commitment to global accumulation. The role of finance capital in structuring the world economy that Bukharin tracks has grown to monstrous proportions today — a key engine that has allowed capitalism to continually displace its contradictions into new geographies, as Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey have theorized. Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno identify the “formation of a new finance capital” after the 2008 financial crisis, as the rise of asset managers has concentrated capital to an extreme degree through their ownership of highly diverse portfolios of industrial and other corporate firms.28 The United States still retains its predominant role in facilitating this system. For example, Paolo Balmas and David Howath show that the growing internationalization of the renminbi through investment channels does not supplant the dollar’s hegemony.29 This concentration of capital that persists through national rivalries exemplifies Nicos Poulantzas’s treatment of the capitalist state as a “strategic field and process of intersecting power networks, which both articulate and exhibit mutual contradictions and displacements.”30 Maher and Aquanno, analyzing the resilience of the US Fed despite Donald Trump’s efforts to contain it, pinpoint “institutional barriers circumscribing ‘political’ interference were reinforced by the organic linkages between the financial branch and the financial system.”31 Internal processes within states connect with global financial forces to counteract efforts to completely unify the different ruling classes’ interests at the level of the state. The antagonistic cooperation of the world system exacerbates these contradictions between the state and the capitalist classes, generalizing them on a global level. National development and industrial policies pivotally depend on global finance, as states take on more financial risk to expand capital accumulation. This convergence of finance and industry has readjusted the terms of imperialist dependency in the peripheries. Development no longer functions as the antithesis of neoliberalism, but, as Verónica Gago writes:

The developmentalist moment, if we no longer oppose it to financial hegemony and its colonization of the state in the last decade of the twentieth century, could then be seen as a moment of internalization of neoliberal power, which is boosted through rentier resources, intertwining elements that seemed contradictory (and that continue to be so according to certain rhetorics): rent and development, renationalization of companies and increased financialization, social inclusion and mandatory banking.”32

A major consequence of this global reorganization of capital is an unprecedented level of economic interdependence among the financial and industrial institutions of new rival geopolitical blocs. For one, Vanguard is now one of the largest shareholders in both Exxon and the Chinese state-owned Sinopec. Despite the emergence of geopolitical tensions between the West and the BRICS bloc alongside other “refurbished state capitalisms,” as Christopher McNally puts it, the latter “are deeply enmeshed in the global political economy and their practitioners own immense amounts of global financial assets, most significantly US treasury debt. Both models of capitalism are thus simultaneously co-dependent and in competition.”33 Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon go further to say that the world economy today features “not a clash of neatly distinct, rival models of capitalism, but multilinear, hybrid, recombinant landscapes of state intervention, which both shape and are shaped by world capitalist development.”34 Not all economies outside the Western bloc that have developed some degree of political and economic autonomy are equivalent: Brazil and China, for example, do not play the same geopolitical function. In any case, this “asymmetric multipolar world order” still features the United States at its helm, as Ashley Smith describes, but with new challengers like China, Russia, and other regional ones that the United States cannot fully control, in which “countervailing tendencies mitigate them from developing into open warfare.”35

In this sense, the framework of antagonistic cooperation enables us to understand how US imperialist dominance can coexist with emergent imperialists, lesser imperialists, subimperialists, and other regional hegemons. For example, Western sanctions on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine have not led to a straightforward severing of economic interdependence. Chevron, Mobil, and other Western firms continue to support Russian gas through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (which has seen an increase of $200 million in revenue between 2023 and 2024).36 One set of capitalists’ push for decoupling faces resistance from counterparts within their own ranks.37 And so, new forms of state power and geopolitical blocs do not signify that all major capitalists share the same interests as their own national states. In particular, German and American corporations have been eager to call for the stabilization of relations between the United States and China. The competition between Chinese planemaker Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) and Boeing did not obstruct a new joint agreement to deepen collaboration at a joint research center in late 2022.38 Most COMAC supply chains still involve Western firms. Despite new Chinese sanctions on Raytheon early last year, the company continues to play a significant role in supplying materials for China’s domestically produced jets through its subsidiaries.39 Raytheon’s chief executive Greg Hayes admits it still has “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling … is impossible.” The rise of public-private partnerships is another expression of this desire against decoupling, evidenced by the growth of companies like Yanfeng Automotive Interiors, the world’s largest auto interiors supplier, jointly owned by a Chinese state-owned enterprise and a global multinational corporation, or other joint ventures around the world between Chevron and Sinopec. Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements reported last year that while supply chains are becoming longer and more indirect, they have not grown more dense — suggesting that China remains a key player in global supply chains.40

The growing complexity of supply chains also reflects the power of mid-sized and other regional states to mediate the terms of the imperialist system. From the United Arab Emirates’s role in shaping the conflicts in Sudan and Yemen to Iran’s regional hegemony in the Middle East, more and more countries far from the upper rungs of the imperialist system are developing their own extractive, imperialist-like, spheres of influence. And while US hegemony and structures of dependency persist, empires-in-formation and intermediate economies play increasingly important roles in mediating the imperialist system. Katz perceives that “intermediate formations occupy a significant place that breaks the strict parallel between subimperial powers and economic semi-peripheries, as the geopolitical weight of some countries differs from the integration into globalized production achieved by others.”41 Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Israel, Tanzania, and Mexico, among other countries, are playing both sides with the US and China to fund new developmental projects, which, as Seth Schindler and Jessica DiCarlo put it, “are more than manifestations of geopolitical competition—they are also constitutive of regional, national, and local visions and aspirations.”42 US tariffs negatively impact Chinese imports, but the latter continues to boom for items from electric vehicles to batteries. The drop in Chinese imports to the United States in 2023 is linked to the rise in Mexican imports: Chinese businesses are rerouting commodities to the United States through Mexico to avoid tariffs — a phenomenon some have labeled nearshoring. Tanzania and Kenya have courted IMF and Chinese loans to further privatize domestic resources in the name of development.43 Earlier in June, Kenyan President William Ruto secured billions of dollars from the United States to construct a new railway mere days after confirming China’s support in extending an existing railway.44 He states Kenya is “neither facing West nor East; we are facing forward where opportunities are.” These instances exemplify what Patrick Bond identifies as an often understated aspect of unequal ecological exchange, which recognizes that imperialist dependency is not challenged, but rather “facilitated by BRICS extractivism” when factoring in “depleted non-renewable resources, local pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and unpaid social reproduction of labor” in the global South.45 In this sense, empires-in-formation, subimperial, and other intermediate countries provide an outlet for the contradictions of imperialism to be mollified — at least for the foreseeable future.

That said, we must not downplay the antagonistic part of this cooperation. Catastrophic wars of national oppression still erupt, as Palestinians, Tigrayans, and Ukrainians have witnessed in recent years. Karl Kautsky’s theory of ultraimperialism, which sees the capitalist system developing into a peaceful period of “a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race,” remains false.46 Lenin and Bukharin’s dictum still rings true: socialists must staunchly organize against our own countries’ imperialistic tendencies, no matter how economically connected or disconnected they become. But for now, objective conditions prohibit us from drawing a strict definitive line between rivaling imperial blocs as different state capitals continue to overlap. The increased integration of state-owned enterprises into global finance reinforces an unprecedented level of intercapitalist collaboration and economic interdependence — but one that is more unstable than ever. This reality reflects a dynamic that neither interimperialist rivalry nor Kautsky’s ultraimperialism can fully account for. Indeed, global economic integration still existed in salient forms during the First World War, but mostly just contained within geopolitical camps, which historian Jamie Martin calls “strained interdependence.”47 However, the rise of neoliberalism has developed a level of interdependence that endures even across rival state blocs, thus undercutting the possibility of open interimperialist warfare witnessed in the first two World Wars.

So, we must consider how new overseers of the imperialist world system dictate new terms for how these antagonisms take shape, amidst entrenched interdependence between states and firms. Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh shows the interconnections between the West and Russia, despite Putin’s colonial invasion of Ukraine. While the West has looked to build links with Azerbaijan to tap into its oil resources as an alternative energy source to Russia, Azerbaijan has also deepened links with Russia to import its gas to keep up with this demand. Turkish imports of Russian crude oil also reached an all-time high late last year, with a Russia-Turkey gas hub in the works.48 It is doubtful if the drop in Russia-Turkey trade this year, thanks to pressure from US sanctions, would persist, especially with the deal signed last year between Russia’s Lukoil and Azerbaijan’s Socar to enable the Turkish STAR refinery to expand production. Turkey’s balancing act rests on the country’s hopes to benefit from playing different sides by laundering Russian gas to the West as “Turkish gas” (thus bypassing US sanctions). US ally India now imports 40 percent of its crude oil from Russia — a 1000 percent increase since Russia’s war on Ukraine started in 2021.49 Such links are particularly notable in the case of Israel. While the United States undoubtedly remains the decisive sponsor of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, as Michael Karadjis observes, “the main culprits” who are keeping Israel’s oil and coal supply running to maintain its war efforts are those countries that “have been publicly critical of Israel’s actions, including BRICS members Russia, Brazil, Egypt and China.”50

Israel’s ongoing genocidal onslaught on Palestine is a sharp reminder that the current iteration of antagonistic cooperation does not erase the existence of the core-periphery relation that structures imperialism, but maintains it with new actors and dynamics. Marini and Mandel’s amendments to models of dependency provide a crucial starting point for understanding this. Their framework registers how the semiperiphery unevenly combines core and periphery aspects. On the other hand, an orthodox core-periphery model does not account for this unevenness outside of core economies. An adequate understanding of today’s economy precisely rests on this differentiation among the periphery and semiperiphery economies, as they can now cultivate increasingly autonomous spheres of influence without challenging US dominance of the world system. While the United States remains Israel’s staunchest ally and military supplier, Israel’s trade with China has skyrocketed in recent years. Upon Israel’s genocidal leveling of Gaza, China has rightly pressured Israel for a ceasefire, but nonetheless, still reaffirms the two-state solution. As Israel has looked to diversify its political and economic allies, China balances its deep commitments to both Israeli and various Arab bourgeoisies by endorsing a highly compromised vision of Palestinian sovereignty. In response to the Houthis’s threats in the Red Sea in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, China responded by pressuring Iran to rein in the Houthis.51 The point is not that China plays just as disastrous of a role as the United States in the genocide in Gaza, but that, at decisive moments, it helps to uphold the global imperialist order, rather than upending it as a genuine counterweight to empire. The antagonistic cooperation of the world system accommodates rivalry without fully disrupting the ruling class’s collective drive toward global capital accumulation. Contemporary antagonisms in the world system have only reconfigured the terms in which global accumulation continues, without positing alternatives for a more democratic and liberatory social order.

Resisting antagonistic cooperation

Antagonistic cooperation requires constant upkeep and reinvention through new techniques, as capitalists still struggle to recover profitability and productivity in the face of overaccumulation.52 However, the constant denominator of each phase of imperialism remains the same: the active suppression of proletarian power. Geopolitical antagonisms may — but not necessarily — create better conditions for struggle. POLOP helps us understand how the bourgeoisie of subimperial countries can deepen exploitation in their own countries as they grant concessions to anti-imperialist and progressive forces in movements from below. Countries that play a subimperial or lesser imperial role from the perspective of value transfer in the world system may also express imperial modes of domination by other means, like resource imperialism in their own internal colonies.53 Thus, effectively building a global movement to challenge capital that links proletarian forces from the core to the peripheries demands a clear understanding of how imperialism functions today.

An inadequate understanding of imperialism can lead to dangerous political errors in the work of socialist internationalism. On the one hand, subscribing to an orthodox model of interimperialist rivalry that overestimates the decline of US hegemony risks downplaying the enduring force of the US empire in containing avenues for struggle through a variety of means, from its military capacity (evidenced in the genocidal destruction of Gaza) to its soft power through non-governmental organizations, human rights organizations, among other institutions. For one, while Ukraine has every right to defend itself against Russia’s colonial invasion, pro-Ukraine solidarity groups on the left must do more to disentangle its struggle for self-determination from NATO — an imperialist formation that has harmed many communities across the world.54 As Gilbert Achcar writes, socialist support for Ukrainian self-determination is not unconditional: we must “oppose anything that might tilt the balance toward turning this war into an essentially inter-imperialist one.”55 On the other hand, underestimating the role of intermediate, regional, and lesser imperialist powers in maintaining the imperialist system amidst US hegemony can lead to a problematic illusion that such forces represent an alternative to imperialism. Such a belief has induced some to apologize for or ignore the crimes of such states against their workers, national minorities, and other democratic movements.56 Groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, for example, have uncritically supported reactionary regimes that peddle anti-imperialist rhetoric, like the Syrian and Nicaraguan governments, even as they brutalize dissidents in diverse opposition movements by pigeonholing them all as lackeys of US imperialism.57

Understanding the world system’s antagonistic cooperation can expose the ideological fictions, like the so-called “New Cold War,” mustered by rivaling imperialists and other regional hegemons. This could provide opportunities for socialists to articulate links between struggles that do not falsely champion any one capitalist state as a stalwart of anti-imperialism or democracy against another. Rather than endorsing the threatening agenda of such states — exemplified by the uneven degrees of militarization of the Indo-Pacific by the United States and China, socialists can target sites of collaboration between capitalist powers that persist despite their antagonisms. For example, the Palestinian Youth Movement’s “Mask Off Maersk” campaign pressures Maersk, the world’s largest shipping and logistics company that plays a pivotal role in facilitating trade for most major geopolitical actors, to cease arms shipments to Israel.58 The Chinese diaspora-led Palestine Solidarity Action Network has developed a campaign against Chinese state-owned companies like Hikvision that are complicit in Israel’s surveillance of Palestinians, while promoting ongoing boycotts and actions against Western firms for Chinese-speaking audiences.59 Such efforts invite Sinophone communities to join with others to recognize the intersections of US and Chinese power in their mutual economic support of Israel’s apartheid state, thus expanding the scope of the BDS movement and Palestinian solidarity struggle in the United States. In another case, the Counter-Summit against the IMF and the World Bank in Marrakech in 2023 gathered over 170 grassroots organizations from the global North to South. It released a comprehensive set of demands that “reject all forms of oppression, domination, imperialism, and foreign military interference that threaten peace and national sovereignty, whatever their origin (French, American, Chinese, Russian).”60 Recent mass protests emerging from cost-of-living crises for working-class communities in Argentina, Sri Lanka, and Kenya all implicate their regimes’ dependency on both US-led and Chinese institutions to varying degrees. These movements are based on the correct understanding that complicity between various imperialist and other hegemonic formations facilitates global capitalism. A renewed antiglobalization movement building on such existing struggles is possible and necessary, as it can address interdependent roots of social ills, and provide opportunities for international solidarity and struggle that refuse to sacrifice the struggles of one people against oppression for another.

Far from undoing the neoliberal world order, the capitalist class innovates new terms for maintaining and reforming globalization. Theories of imperialism must account for economic barriers that prevent a clean break in today’s geopolitics. Indeed, the sphere of politics can act autonomously in relation to that of economics. But, we must also not underestimate how the persistence of tendencies that maintain globalization still plays a crucial role in determining the limits of politics. Moreover, understanding such dynamics can expose new sites of global working-class and anti-imperialist solidarity against ruling elites who strive to contain these possibilities in their rivalry and cooperation. Thus, the struggle against Western imperialism demands expanding our horizons to target the innumerable ways Western imperialist institutions and other imperialists are entangled. Supply chains, public-private partnerships, the portfolios of Blackrock and Vanguard, international climate agreements between national bodies, and the IMF — such actors can be crucial sites of struggle. From Blackrock’s neoliberal post-war reconstruction plan for Ukraine to jointly owned enterprises between US and Chinese state capital, there are many opportunities to develop an internationalist horizon from existing regional movements. Working-class struggles have already made crucial nodes of antagonistic cooperation visible in recent years. It remains for the left to build organizations and political strategies to further articulate them as salient sites of revolutionary struggle.

Promise Li is a socialist from Hong Kong and now based in Los Angeles. He is a member of Tempest Collective and Solidarity, and has been active in higher education rank-and-file union work, international solidarity and antiwar campaigns, and Chinatown tenant organizing.