In search of alternatives: Strategies for social movements to counter imperialism and authoritarianism

In May 2024, seven months after Israel’s war on Gaza began, students at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) built the first Gaza solidarity camp in the Netherlands, following the lead of their distant comrades at Columbia University and other universities across Europe and the US. The UvA’s board, backed by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, saw the police evict the camp. But the movement did not stop. The student protesters quickly and effectively built a second, bigger encampment, which became a trigger for a nationwide encampment and protest movement for Palestine supported by students at other Dutch universities, various social movements, the Palestinian diaspora, and including working-class people, especially those with a migrant background. A new anti-imperialist politics was born.

While the war on Gaza and the Palestinian Occupied Territories on the West Bank has rejuvenated anti-imperialist politics, it builds on many recent social movements in the Global South that have been at the forefront of resisting capitalist-induced authoritarianism and imperialist/expansionist politics. This includes the anti-authoritarian Milk Tea Alliance (MTA) in East and Southeast Asia, left-wing political formations and governments in a number of countries across Latin America and Europe, Black Lives Matter protests in the US and beyond, and various local and national struggles against extractive industries, capitalist exploitation, oligarchic power, and state repression.

Understanding the nature of imperialism today and the creative ways through which social movements and popular resistance push back against it is pivotal to making sense of the ravages of contemporary global capitalism and authoritarianism and offering alternative solutions.

The political and economic tensions between the US and China or other middle-level powers such as Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa (the original BRICS countries), have become common talking points in academic, media, and public discourses. Along with the BRICS bloc, other middle-power countries, such as Qatar and Türkiye have also gained global attention for presenting a diplomatic challenge to Western hegemony.

These accounts, however, fail to situate the shifting landscape of global power within the historical development of capitalism, a political-economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, exploitation of labour, and the profit motive. As a result, we are left with fearmongering and pseudo-moralistic accounts of the world, seeing rising major and middle powers as either ‘threats to liberty, democracy, and rule-based order’ or ‘saviour vanguards’ against centuries of Western colonialism and hypocrisy.

This false dichotomy is reproduced in political discourses. Many liberal and conservative accounts see the rise of China as a threat to freedom, ironically at the same time as the so-called ‘Free World’ has been actively engaging in mass surveillance, interventions of democratic processes to safeguard its political and economic interests, and support for repression of the Yemenis and the genocide of Palestinians. Meanwhile, some sections of the left and progressives more broadly hold an idealised notion of Third World or Global South anti-imperialism as inherently and eternally progressive, neglecting the contradictions inherent in these anti-imperialist political projects (or rather, states) and their frequent degeneration into mere authoritarianism.

This is why a contextual, political economy-informed reading of imperialism remains relevant. It allows us to comprehend the intersecting realms of state and corporate power, the role of the West, especially the US, in maintaining capitalism and the current form of international relations, the complicity of domestic political and economic elites in perpetuating this unjust power structure, and popular resistance against such global dominance, especially from social movements and grassroots resistance in the Global South.

A major element of imperialism, according to Lenin, is the expansion of capital and its accompanying social and political relations from the rich countries — colonial metropoles and post-1945 global powers such the US and Japan — to peripheral and underdeveloped areas — collectively known as the Third World, and later ‘the Global South’.

In its current form, imperialism relies on several mechanisms of profit extraction and coercion for national subjugation, namely transnational corporations (TNCs) relying on cheap labour for profit, political elites using authoritarian and military methods to discipline working people and their progressive politics in the name of political stability and smooth investments, and continuing alliances with old imperialist powers.

Imperialism, then, is not merely the expansion of capital and exploitation of labour by TNCs on a global scale, but rather a political project of the ruling class in imperial metropoles to constrain and undermine the sovereignty of nation-states in the Global South and to maintain their domination through economic, political, and even military means.

While economic imperialism, strengthened by domestic rule of capital in contemporary capitalist societies, continues to be the dominant feature of contemporary imperialism, it is its more vulgar, militaristic aspect that often disturbs public conscience. This military power ensures not only economic imperialism but has also cemented the power of US imperialism — along with its strategic allies — during and particularly after the Cold War.

This politico-military dimension of imperialism has been pursued even at an astronomical military and human cost. The US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, foreign meddling in the chaotic Libyan civil war, and Israel’s opportunistic invasion of Syria after the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 are just a few examples.

Strangely, some activists, organisations, and scholars on the left, especially those residing in the West, can be so preoccupied with the domestic politics of their respective countries that they overlook the challenges faced by anti-imperialist movements in the Global South and the bleak realities of imperialist encirclement.

A recent cross-national study has vindicated the continuing relevance of classical insights on imperialism. It shows that rich countries benefit from a large scale ‘appropriation of resources and labour from the global South’ in the post-Cold War period (1990-2015), totalling approximately $242 trillion in market prices for the whole period.

The economic rise of non-Western countries and regions and the performance of high-growth economies such as the Asian Tigers and Tiger Cub economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) does not spell the end of imperialist power structures. If anything, imperialism is continually reinforced by TNCs and governments in the US and former colonial powers. For instance, Intan Suwandi’s in-depth case study of Indonesia demonstrates that economic imperialism continues to operate via supplier companies and TNCs from the Global North profiting from global labour arbitrage — wage differentials between workers in the Global North and the Global South. Workers in Indonesia and other growing economies continue to be exploited, while the TNCs make a killing.

This continuing economic plunder and military adventurism naturally engenders collective resistance. Various social movements have mounted significant challenges to global imperialism, including the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Zapatista national liberation army (EZLN) in Mexico, opposition to Western-backed authoritarian governments in many countries across Latin America and East and Southeast Asia, mass demonstrations against the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, and numerous local social movements against land-grabbing, resource exploitation, privatisation, and corporate expansion. The heydays of armed national liberation movements might have passed, but the spirit of anti-imperialism continues.

These imperialist dynamics overlap with the global turn towards a more authoritarian form of capitalism and electoral governance sustaining it — reactionary or illiberal populism. Figures like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi have won elections and right-wing populist movements of various stripes, ranging from anti-immigrant far-right political parties in Europe to Hindutva and Islamist currents in India and Türkiye respectively, have made significant political inroads.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom which blames this malaise on the deficit of democratic culture and the breakdown of elite consensus, this latest wave of authoritarian tendencies matured as a result of the unchecked power of capital, the hollowing out of participatory democratic institutions, oligarchic control of politics, and assaults on many forms of redistributive or social welfare.

Authoritarian capitalism, then, can be seen as a product of capital’s expansion from the metropole through an imperialist arrangement. Authoritarian capitalism consolidates as postcolonial states in the Global South become increasingly integrated into the global capitalist circuit. This process intensified after the slow death of social democratic and national liberation projects.

What has been at play here is not only the dismantling of post-1945 welfare state and institutions by neoliberal, free-market radicals, but also, to quote Margaret Somers, the institutional and political attacks on the predistributive power of the state and the concept of social citizenship. That is, even the very ideas that the state should prevent incipient inequalities in the first place and guarantee social rights as part of its social contract with its citizens and residents.

As a result, the economic and social gains made in the ‘golden age’ of welfare state and policies have been eroded or reversed and the democratic demand for such arrangements tamed and labelled as ‘irresponsible spending’. Moreover, the state has been refashioned according to the neoliberal imagination as a facilitator of balanced budgets (for citizens, but not for corporations and political elites), including austerity, privatisation, free trade, and a reliance on the ready supply of cheap labour.

This necessitates an outward expansion of capital and its disciplinary institutions and apparatus and the decline of the politics of solidarity with progressive political experiments in the Global South. Consequently, this changing configuration swings the geopolitical and economic pendulum in favour of imperialist interests.

This development has also led to the declining welfare of working people and the rise of authoritarian populism. In the US, for example, decades of trade liberalisation and de-industrialisation for the sake of ‘global competitiveness’ had impoverished rural communities and provided a receptive breeding ground for Trump-style authoritarian-leaning populism. Similarly, unrestrained globalisation has facilitated the success of reactionary politics of multiple strands such as Hindutva in India, oligarchy-backed Islamist populism in Indonesia, and antidemocratic libertarianism in Latin America. Despite their ‘anti-elite’ rhetoric, these currents effectively serve as vessels for authoritarian neoliberal policies.

This economic warfare on labour has a corrosive effect on popular democracy. In European democracies, political parties including social democratic ones, have become disconnected from the wider public — politicians are increasingly a professional political class with their own self-interests and divorced from their constituencies. Intellectuals, backed by big corporate lobbies, have concocted analytical justifications for deeper neoliberalism and oligarchic interests at the expense of democratic procedures, as can be seen in the US, Latin America, and Indonesia.

When this elusive control of democracy is insufficient to deter popular resistance, then political and economic elites will resort to repressive measures to save their neoliberal design and their interests. This is what authoritarian capitalism looks like.

Being aware of these intersecting historical processes of imperialism and authoritarian capitalism can help working people and progressive social movements to avoid two types of fallacies. First is the fallacy of vulgar anti-imperialism or ‘campism’, seeing the world through a simplistic, romanticised binary of the imperialist First World versus the eternally progressive Third World, where factors such as domestic politics, the state of democracy, and class composition and relations within these two blocs are glossed over. The consequences of this fallacy can be fatal: in the name of anti-imperialism, it is possible to provide uncritical support for ‘anti-Western’ authoritarian states, such as Russia and Syria, and even worse dismiss popular struggles, social movements, and those campaigning for socialism, greater democracy, and social rights in these states. This includes the Russian Marxist intellectual Boris Kagarlitsky, a noted critic of the far right and Putin’s authoritarianism, and Kurdish forces who fought the totalitarian Daesh terrorists and launched the Rojava revolution.

The second fallacy is that of inter-imperialist rivalry. This thesis argues that the current contour of international politics is a reflection of inter-imperialist rivalry between the West and China and Russia. This is also a form of simplistic thinking since it equates political and economic expansion of rising and middle-level powers, whether democratic or authoritarian, with past experiences of imperialist powers. Acknowledging the human costs of such expansionism should not make us lose sight of the horrifying records of Western imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, it shows a lack of understanding of what the integration into the global capital circuit and international order means for a major economic power such as China and maverick authoritarian middle powers such as Türkiye and Qatar, which includes strategic restraint, the need for new markets, international legitimacy for their domestic populations, and preserving the self-interests of the ruling elites.

Building on diverse socialist traditions, the activist-scholar Promise Li describe this simultaneous process of confluence and conflict of interests between the US-led Western imperialism and an assortment of expansionist, sub-imperial, and emerging powers as ‘antagonistic cooperation’. While acknowledging the enduring influence of Western imperialism, Li and his interlocutor Federico Fuentes also point out the contradictions within the loose coalition of challengers to the US-led international order and the many social antagonisms that this coalition engenders, such as political repression at home and the environmental and social costs of its foreign investments.

This reading of contemporary imperialism is innovative and much-needed for analytical and activist reflections. However, social movements and activists on the ground do not always have the luxury to wait. Sometimes, they need to act at critical moments and in less-than-ideal geopolitical conjunctures. This includes seizing opportunities presented by rifts within this antagonistic cooperation and using resources from states which compete against US and Western dominance.

Take the examples of China and Qatar. China has abandoned its policy of supporting revolutionary movements, benefitted extensively from its integration into global capitalism, and introduced an extensive mechanism of internal repression of dissent and minorities in the name of domestic political and economic stability. Yet it has never engaged in foreign colonial adventures, military interventions, and ‘state-building’ projects practised by several of the former colonial powers and the US. Walden Bello notes that China largely maintains a strategic defensive military posture, avoids an arms race and only has one foreign military base in Djibouti.

Moreover, the negative impacts of China’s foreign economic investments, especially on labour rights, local community wellbeing, and the environment, are not the outcome of state-backed corporate expansion and militaristic/authoritarian control in the classical mode of imperialism.

First, despite its recent technological advancements, China’s geo-economic rise remains dependent on foreign capital via ‘the globalization of production via Western TNCs’. This shows the limits of China’s economic ambition and expansion and differentiates its development with that of existing imperialist powers in the Global North. To call China ‘imperialist’ in a Leninist sense is, therefore, a misnomer.

Second, China’s foreign investment and hunger for resources are an outcome of state-led outsourcing of domestic economic development involving varied state and private actors and companies with different levels of compliance with labour and environmental regulations.

In other words, the preference for domestic stability, the presence of competing development actors with different interests, and the relative dependence of post-Mao Chinese governments on foreign capital put a significant limit on capitalist, state, and party elites with imperialist interests in China. The lasting legacy of Maoist/leftist moral economy and political ethos in China’s labour and social movements also puts a brake on the expansionist drive of some sections of the Chinese elites.

Another curious example is Qatar, which occupies a different position than China in its dialectics of antagonistic cooperation with the West. Qatar is a maverick middle-level power while China is a rising dominant power with a socialist history. Yet, just like China, Qatar has its own share of antagonisms with US imperialism and global capital.

While it can be seen as just another petrodollar Gulf State with an authoritarian government and a problematic human rights record, with the largest US military base in the Middle East, Qatar’s support for Al-Jazeera has also broadened the scope of political debates in the Arab world and beyond, and provided an alternative media channel through which social movements and anti-imperialist causes can voice their aspirations. The importance of this role can be seen by the channel’s coverage of the Arab Spring and Israel’s war on Gaza and the creation of its US subsidiary, AJ+, a social media-based news channel with a left-leaning slant.

Qatar’s past diplomatic crisis with other US-allied Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt also suggests its own geopolitical and foreign policy preferences, which were used by Islamist and popular movements during the Arab Spring.

In short, Qatar’s self-interested moves do not represent a break from contemporary imperialism, but they can mitigate its excesses. Qatar’s decision to prohibit the US from using its military base to attack Iran is a telling example of such restraint. Moreover, its role as an active broker in the ongoing ceasefire process between Israel and Hamas has proven its salience as a tactical alternative to imperialist geopolitics.

These states’ geopolitical manoeuvring effectively serves to check contemporary imperialism. The geopolitical rivalry between them and the West offers opportunities for progressive social movements and their constituencies. This should not be controversial; for decades, these movements have strategically used funding from Western donors channelled through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the Global South. This strategic engagement can also be applied in tactical working relations with these ‘buffer states’ and their resources to challenge Western imperialism without becoming apologists for ‘anti-Western’ authoritarianism.

The following sections highlight the creative ways social movements across three regions use in advancing their goals amidst this new contour of imperialism.

Case study 1: Unexpected alliances and networks in the Palestine solidarity movements

Let us begin with the latest case of anti-imperialist social movements: the Palestine solidarity movements. In response to the genocide, a broad, popular pro-Palestine and pro-peace alliance was immediately formed and consolidated, comprising a wide range of groups: leftist political organisations, progressive social movements, unions and workers from different sectors including students, anti-Zionist Jews, LGBTQ+, Muslim communities and Palestinian organisations and diaspora. The movement has followed a multi-pronged strategy pushing for a permanent ceasefire and Palestinian liberation, including mass mobilisation, diplomatic efforts, and media operations. These elements, in an ad hoc manner, support and reinforce each other and create unexpected, uncoordinated alliances between different groups, states, and networks. It has involved street demonstrations but also institutions of symbolic, intellectual, and material importance for Israel and its Western backers: the universities. This tactic has shifted public opinion, delegitimising the myth of Israel as a bastion of liberal and intellectual freedom, and severing institutional, financial, and military ties supporting its occupation and war crimes.

Just like the pulling out of US troops from Vietnam and the boycott of apartheid South Africa, this pressure from below has pushed key countries such as South Africa and Colombia to express strong support for the Palestinian cause, as shown in the former’s historic genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It has even pushed several European countries such as Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Belgium to speak up for Palestinian human rights.

One could argue that this is a repeat of the anti-WTO protests, when radical anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements momentarily joined force with Global South states and succeeded in stopping the advance of a neoliberal trade agenda. International condemnation of Israel at the United Nations General Assembly is supported by almost every Global South nation.

Here, some diplomatic manoeuvres of China and Qatar also played a role. China maintains consistent support for the two-state solution and recently brokered a unity deal between Hamas, Fatah, and 12 other Palestinian factions for national reconciliation and Palestinian statehood. Meanwhile, Qatar has served as a mediator in the ceasefire negotiations, and the release of Israeli hostages in return for the release of Palestinians detained in Israel, with a specific leverage as it has provided refuge to some of the Hamas leadership. Needless to say, we should be aware of the limits of Chinese and Qatari foreign policies. China has deepening economic and military ties with Israel, while Qatar hosts the US Al-Udeid Air Base.

Effectively, there is sometimes a convergence of interests, if not visions, between the grassroots movements for Palestine and peace in the Middle East with the more progressive sections of state elites in key Global South and several European countries, China, and Qatar. This, coupled with the popular support in the Middle East for Palestine and even the guerrilla operations of many armed groups fighting Israeli and US forces, consolidates a broad alliance of social movement and state actors, albeit in an uncoordinated fashion.

Aiding this is the collective media resistance against Western imperialist narratives and the Hasbara propaganda. Despite the blatant pro-Israel bias in major Western news outlets and lavish funding for the Hasbara campaign whitewashing Israel’s war crimes, Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza has been an important counterbalance in this information battle as a media giant that can match the coverage and resources of its Western rivals.

Case-study 2: Anti-authoritarian movements in East and Southeast Asia

In East and Southeast Asia, we see an example of how social movements confront authoritarian capitalism and its transnational expansion. The most recent wave is the Milk Tea Alliance (MTA), a loose network of anti-authoritarian/pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Myanmar, which was active from 2020 to 2021. Youth-driven, this alliance combined mass mobilisation and massive online presence to defy different types of authoritarianism: Chinese party-state authoritarianism in Hong Kong and Taiwan, military-backed royalist despotism in Thailand, and the military junta in Myanmar. There is a strong transnational dimension and exchange of norms and practices within this alliance.

But there is also a longer history of anti-authoritarian movements in East and Southeast Asia, whose narratives have a long-lasting influence and have been committed to counter authoritarian capitalism/developmentalism and the imperialist power structure supporting it. Consider, for example, anti-Marcos and anti-Suharto movements in the Philippines and Indonesia, the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, and the many cases of agrarian justice, land rights, and anti-dam protests, labour strikes and struggles, pro-democracy activism, and even progressive religious mobilisation in the region. These movements highlighted the complicity of international capital and its support from the West as well as the international financial institutions in propping up authoritarian rule and its domestic capitalist supporters in the Philippines and Indonesia. Though implicit, the spirit of anti-imperialism was present in these past anti-authoritarian and social movement mobilisations.

Today’s anti-authoritarian movements in the region used various political strategies from mass mobilisation to online campaigns and pop culture. They also innovated new tactics. Hong Kong’s protesters, for example used black umbrellas and shields to ‘block rubber bullets and police batons’, organised roving rather than stationed occupations of targeted areas, and experimented with counter-surveillance of police informants, and coded communications.

The MTA’s demand for greater democratisation posed a serious challenge to authoritarianism in East and Southeast Asian states, including China. By doing so, it disrupted these governments’ antagonistic cooperation with Western imperialism and opened the way to push for a more progressive politics beyond electoral democracy, such as the popular control of capital.

Sadly, in the face of the repressive apparatus of the Chinese government, this movement was crushed and its leaders were recently jailed or went into exile. Nevertheless, its creative tactics in confronting police violence could be applicable and more effective for social movements operating in less repressive environments.

The limitations of these movements have also been rooted in their poor awareness of the role of international capital and imperialist dynamics in perpetuating authoritarianism in the region, which has allowed them to be hijacked by opportunistic Western elites and simplified as an affirmation for the (neo)liberal project. It is unfortunate, for instance, that some Hong Kong dissidents, in their opposition to Chinese party-state authoritarianism, seek inspiration from a sanitised version of ‘the liberal West’, even to the point where they embrace the Trumpist reactionary project. This historical and analytical myopia weakens the dissidents’ capacity to challenge a major pillar of the authoritarian development model in East and Southeast Asia, namely the complicity of Western imperialist and capitalist interest in maintaining such model.

In addition, four years after the alliance burst onto the regional political scene, its major demands continue to be centred around electoral democracy and human rights protection. While important, the packaging of these demands can be detached from labour and the broader call for social justice and democratic class struggle.

Case-study 3: The Latin American left’s strategic engagement with China

Finally, the left in Latin America shows an example of how progressive social movements can strategically seize opportunities from geopolitical competition, in this case US–China rivalry. Looking towards China for alternative sources of foreign investment reduces Latin American countries’ dependence on US political and economic power, delinks the region from the US imperialist grip, and could be used to fund broadly socialist-inspired economic programmes.

The option to pursue Chinese foreign investment facilitated the electoral path pursued by leftist movements in Latin America, famously known as the ‘Pink Tide’. Combining left-wing populism with different degrees of socialist and social democratic economic policies, this political articulation pushed for a range of anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist economic projects, ranging from extensive social welfare programmes, attempted the nationalisation of major economic enterprises, and alternative financial institutions such as Bank of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and BRICS’s New Development Bank.

The implementation of these schemes has clearly been a complex and tough political and technocratic process and faced considerable criticism, but delinking and improving the productive force of the economy was nevertheless a necessity for left-wing forces to seek to advance a socialist programme and democratisation in a region dominated by Washington and with a history of US-backed dictatorships. As noted by Ivo Ganchev, Chinese trade, investment and loan deals provided alternatives to US-led financial institutions for Ecuador and Bolivia, marking a significant break with with US-led economic imperialism. It also contributed to a revitalisation of the spirit of South–South cooperation during the high tide of the decolonisation period.

Obviously, not all types of Chinese investments can be seen as fundamentally benign. Records have shown that Chinese capitalist enterprises have questionable labour and environmental rights records. Nor does Chinese capital guarantee a greater democratisation of the economy, especially the means of the production, by labour. There is a need to critically assess and ensure how relationships with China benefit working people, while acknowledging that the task of building non-capitalist, humane alternatives is a gruelling one.

Since the first wave of the ‘pink tide’ governments, there have been setbacks such as the victory of reactionary forces in Argentina and Ecuador and the crisis in Venezuela that has trapped popular sectors between Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarianism and US imperialist coup plots. There are, however, still important lessons to learn and new opportunities in the second wave of the ‘pink tide’, notably in Brazil and Mexico.

The story of today’s geopolitics is still a story of a US-led, Western international order, but one that increasingly faces challenges from other contending states and popular movements. Recent shifts in global politics, economy, and military power, marked most recently by the broad popular opposition to the Western-backed Israel’s war in Gaza, seem to confirm this assessment.

The rise of potential state challengers to US dominance does not necessarily mean the ushering in of a new progressive era. Nevertheless, it represents opportunities for social movements to challenge Western imperialism. These varied sub-imperial, emerging, and expansionist states may in practice be tied into the dialectic relations of antagonistic cooperation with the old imperial centre and authoritarian rule, but under certain circumstances, they might share the same interests as the working people’s.

This is a convergence of interest, if not values, between their foreign policy orientation and the anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal goals of many social movements in the Global South. Without having to become apologists for authoritarianism, these are exactly the opportunities that social movements should seize to advance their goals and effectively confront imperialism.

The Palestine Solidarity Movement, the East and Southeast Asian Anti-Authoritarian Movements, and the Latin American Left have all resisted authoritarian capitalism and/or imperialism. Some of their strategies and tactics are still in their infancy and full of contradictions, but they provide reference points for future actions and policies. Equally important, these movements have shown, with varying degrees of clarity and success, the links between domestic despotism and imperialism or the rule of international capital.

The current conjunctures of global geopolitics might also open up opportunities for a broader transnational solidarity, as exemplified in the solidarity statement of anti-Putinist Ukrainian activists with the Palestinian people.

The major challenge ahead, however, remains the task of dismantling economic imperialism. The three examples of social movements we have highlighted have mainly focused on opposing the political power of imperialism and authoritarian capitalism. What is more difficult is to challenge and provide alternatives to the economic power of imperialism, especially in increasing the productive force of Global South economies, establishing alternative international development financing schemes, and democratising workplaces in large-scale enterprises. These must be some of the future tasks for any progressive social movements with an anti-imperialist orientation.