The ‘neoliberal period’, from around 1980, saw wide-scale and rapid development of the productive forces across what used to be known as the ‘Third World’. This led to widespread expectations and perceptions that many regions were catching up to the development level of the rich countries. However, the income statistics tell a very story. Not only is the Third World not catching up with the income of the rich countries, it is falling further behind. That is the case for almost all of the so-called developing countries individually and also for them as a whole – including China. Besides the Cold War exceptional cases of South Korea and Taiwan, no Third World nations have either joined the small club of rich countries or even come close to doing so. The rich countries today form almost entirely the same club that has dominated the world economy for over a hundred years. Not only is the gap between the richest and poorest societies growing, today almost every country in the world, including 98.5 per cent of the global population, are concentrated in states that are either rich or poor – but mostly poor. There are no large, truly ‘middle-income’ countries. This polarisation of the whole world into rich and poor countries increased throughout the neoliberal period and the relationship between the two groups remains unchanged.

Monopoly capital, in Lenin’s sense, involves the transfer of value from non-monopolies to monopolies, as well as among monopolies and among non-monopolies. It does not negate Marx’s theory of value as Sweezy, Amin, Shaikh and Smith all argue. Rather it applies Marx’s law of value to monopoly conditions. The amount of extra surplus value accruing to an individual monopoly capital (i.e. that above the average rate) is determined by the degree of monopoly that capital possesses. The degree of monopoly is fundamentally determined, in the most important spheres, by the degree of domination in the labour process. Therefore, the degree of appropriation of other capital’s surplus value is determined in the labour process also. Hence there is a clear parallel between monopoly competition and the way Marx showed that capital can gain above-average profit in pre-monopoly conditions – by its superior labour productivity.

One typical feature of the contemporary world economy is the growing importance of state support to private capital – particularly for large corporations. Contemporary Marxist writing tends to overlook state support given in the production process itself, instead emphasising fiscal and financial support, state repression and state military roles or its legal and regulatory functions. The state’s role is too often separated from the labour process itself. Yet, the modern state plays an indispensable leadership role in both the reproduction of labour power and what Marx called a ‘revolutionising of the means of production’. Imperialist states, and especially the United States, are the driving force of technological change. The US Department of Defense and Department of Energy in particular have been largely responsible for the basic technologies used to revolutionise the production process after the Second World War and into the digital age. State support is also crucial for the largest Third World capitalist firms. This is particularly so in the most developed Third World societies. The ideal Third World state – from the point of view of the imperialist countries and their monopoly firms – aims not to organise and subsidise the development of new competitors, but to actively facilitate the penetration of foreign direct investment and to promote complementary forms of economic development and production within its territory. That is to say, production that uses its competitive advantages, principally cheap labour. In the most developed Third World societies this also involves direct state involvement in creating the conditions for production – albeit at a lower technical level than in the rich countries.

Neoliberal monopoly-dominated ‘free trade’ represented a more advanced form of domination and exploitation compared with earlier eras. Many of the most profitable corporations specialised in particular labour processes within an overall world division of labour. Almost all specialised in one type of labour: sophisticated labour. While the separation of capital into monopoly and non-monopoly groupings predates the neoliberal period, during it, production processes were more vigorously divided into two opposite labour types – what we might call ‘ordinary’ and ‘sophisticated’ labour. Independent firms were tasked with carrying out separate stages of the production process even for a single product, sometimes thousands of kilometres apart. The two types of labour stand in contrast to each other technically and, flowing from this, in terms of the income they can generate. Simple labour processes are more easily replicable, while sophisticated labour is far less so. Simple labour processes therefore cannot, by definition, be monopolised as such. Sophisticated labour, also by definition, always possesses a monopolistic characteristic, as such, to one degree or another. Non-monopoly firms are assigned, or left to compete for, simple and well-known labour processes. Through these they can gain only non-monopoly profits. The monopolies control high-end, specialised and scientific labour. On this basis they can gain the high, monopoly profits that investment in such labour processes also demands.

It is often assumed that in describing imperialism as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’, Lenin thought the system would imminently collapse. Alternatively, he is believed to have viewed the specific forms of imperialist rule in his own time – like colonialism or inter-imperialist war – as essential, permanent characteristics of imperialism. Starting from these caricatures, the dramatic changes that have taken place since Lenin’s time are assumed to so thoroughly rebuke his ‘highest stage’ that no further evidence is needed to reject his theory entirely. It is further assumed that the concept of capitalism’s highest stage is Lenin’s own. In fact, it is in Marx’s Capital, volume 3. The concept does not mean capitalism has stopped developing. Rather, with the advent of joint stock companies (later ‘trusts’ and today multinational corporations), private property had become the property of associated owners – that is, social property, but still privately owned. The only possible further development (and that able to resolve the contradiction of now collective private property) was, Marx argued, establishment of ‘the property of associated producers, as outright social property’ – socialism. Imperialism showed that Marx’s concept had come fully into being. It further demonstrated that the convergence of industrial with banking capital brought about the formation of monopoly finance capital as the unified capitalist form encompassing large businesses in all areas. On the basis of Marx and Lenin’s concepts it is possible to critique the contemporary Marxian ‘financialisation’ analyses, which falsely separates the financial sector and businesses from the rest of capital.

The starting point for Chinese technological development is essentially the same as for any other Third World society – relative scientific underdevelopment in most areas compared to the rich, imperialist countries. Lack of basic research and scientific knowledge (at least outside of the military sphere) is proving to be an insurmountable obstacle to Chinese attempts to upgrade the technological level of its production processes. Even designated priority areas, such as the Chinese-built midsize passenger airliner, the C919, demonstrate the extreme limitations and dependency of Chinese high-technology production. The so-called trade war has also shone a light on severe Chinese weakness in what is perhaps the key strategic technology today – microchips. While China produces some microchips domestically, these are not the high-end chips needed to manufacture advanced products, such as Huawei’s top-shelf phones or top-of-the-line 5G telecommunications infrastructure. The trade war has further uncovered China’s inability to respond to US aggression with any technology bans of its own – as might be expected if China were the rising technological power house that so many commentators appear to believe. The historical transition from British hegemony to German power and then US hegemony was associated with the independent development in those countries of revolutionary new technological advances. There appears to be no such technological leadership associated with contemporary China despite for several decades now being the largest producer of and market for many important goods and services.

The rapid pace of technical change means that technical superiority in any given labour processes is an inadequate basis for long-term economic domination over competitors. Over time, every process becomes more commonplace and ceases to be advanced in relation to competing producers. Reproduction of dominance by any given section of capital requires constant involvement in innovation of new technology through the systematic organisation and acceleration of research and development. In this context, competition between capitalist firms tends to shift from the sphere of production to the sphere of research, development and other preparation of the conditions for production. The highest and most important of these conditions is the development of the labour force and especially of highly skilled labour of all types. In Late Capitalism, Mandel observed that, in the conditions of modern imperialism, competition between countries moves tendentially from the sphere of production to the sphere of social reproduction. However, Third World societies experienced colonial subjugation and continue to be excluded from the benefits of humanity’s common social development. Where a given society’s level of development is not equal to the rich, imperialist countries, that society is forced into a process of production and reproduction on a qualitatively lower level than the imperialist states and cannot compete with them. This inequality is reinforced because national development and the development of advanced science can never be adequately built upon a productive foundation specialising in the simple labour processes assigned to Third World countries within the contemporary global division of labour.

The neoliberal period reconfirmed global polarisation between rich and poor societies. It made the central mechanism of Third World exploitation explicit – unequal exchange in trade. Hence, it has been possible to arrive at a simple and empirically verifiable outline of the economic foundation of contemporary imperialism. Marxists long contended there is no satisfactory application of Marx’s law of value to the international economy, nor a contemporary Marxist theory of imperialism. Few imagined what the neoliberal period proved: the resolution of both theoretical problems lay in the fusion of Marx’s law of value with Lenin’s theory of monopoly finance capital. The resulting concept of non-monopoly capital and elaboration of its role and relationship to monopoly capital flows from Lenin’s work. As capitalist property, monopolies ultimately rely on commodity production for the market and hence can never create a world where all production is monopolised. In the neoliberal period non-monopoly capitalist production was expanded, integrated into the global division of labour and drawn into a world market dominated by the monopolies. Differentiating between monopoly and non-monopoly is superior to other explanations of global polarisation because it simultaneously explains the forms of development of production in the Third World, the different dynamic in the imperialist world and the relationship between the two poles. That is, it characterises Third World and imperialist economies with reference to the inner life of their own societies. At the same time it explains the conditioning of those economies and societies by their situation in imperialist capitalism as whole.

It is the overwhelming view, among mainstream commentators, that China is rising in a way that is somehow imperialist or ultimately will challenge the monopoly on wealth and power of the existing rich countries. Similarly, most First World Marxist writing sees China as either a ‘new imperial power’ or developing in that direction. However, there is no well-known Marxist attempt to detail or analyse how they believe such a historically unprecedented transition could occur and how China has supposedly transformed from being the largest Third World country to a new imperialist power. The most common argument given amounts to reviving Warren’s position: that all capitalist economic growth (GDP growth) leads to advanced capitalism. In that view, a lot of economic growth – as has occurred in China – would bring about very advanced capitalism, and therefore capitalist imperialism. Conflating the spread of capitalist commodity production with the idea of building an advanced economy (or a new imperialist country) is the principal contemporary manifestation of Marxist adaption to capitalist economic doctrine as articulated in Warren’s Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (1980). Against this view, China experts like Ho-fung Hung, Sean Starrs and Peter Noland are far more cautious and articulate fundamentally different views of China’s development and prospects.

The substantial posse of Marxist writers and academic specialists who have for decades declared Lenin’s Imperialism as wrong and antiquated could be expected to have unearthed and popularised countless errors and misjudgements from the book. Yet no such list appears to exist. In place of one, various caricatures of ideas that do not actually appear in Lenin’s book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism keep getting repeated. Two common caricatures are that Lenin viewed colonialism as a necessary form of imperialist domination and that Imperialism is overly fixated on the ‘export of capital’ (that is, foreign investment). The first is supposed to show that Lenin’s work is irrelevant now that colonialism is over. The second was supposed to show the same. Even though foreign investment has now bounced back, the label still sticks. However, Lenin emphatically rejected the idea that export of capital is the central question in understanding imperialism. This is evident both from the text of Imperialism itself and also from arguments Lenin made in the Bolshevik party and elsewhere about how to understand imperialism. Similarly, Lenin explicitly argues both in Imperialism and elsewhere – such as against Bukharin – that colonialism is not a necessary feature of imperialist domination. On this question Lenin makes a whole series of insightful observations on national independence, national struggle and anti-colonialism that were later proven correct by the national liberation movements and political independence after the Second World War.

The existence of economic, political or military conflict between the United States and China is believed to indicate that China is a rising threat to US domination. However, the United States and other rich countries historically have engaged in the most belligerent conflicts and warmongering with many Third World societies, including those far weaker than contemporary China. The ‘trade war’, which is an economic attack on China by US imperialism, aims to secure and strengthen imperialist claims to value brought into the world economy by Chinese labour. The battle is not over which country will be dominant but the degree to which the United States and other rich countries can continue to exploit China. China’s rapid economic development over the last several decades has changed the conditions of this exploitation, and forced the rich, imperialist countries to adjust their posture. Chinese policies such as the Belt and Road Initiative or its military posture do not represent serious or credible threats to the dominance of the rich countries. Rather, the idea that they do originates as a justification for imperialist attacks on China.