Geopolitics, imperialism and class politics today: a conversation with Raffaele Sciortino - Clearinghouse (October 2025)

Much of your work over the past decade or more has focussed on reading geopolitics through the prism of the critique of political economy. In your opinion, what unique insights into the dynamics of capital, class and the state are afforded by research carried out from this vantage point?

The scope of geopolitics, understood as a discipline, is power in space. More precisely, it concerns modern state power (modern in the sense of a generally national territorial base) in its relationship with the anthropic space historically determined by capitalist socialization. Space is a crystallization of the historical process, itself subject to change; it is an eminently social environment and a theatre of global forces, rather than a mere stake in the clash between powers. This immediately points to the existence of the State as a formation not existing in isolation, but within a system of states. Thus an international system with its relative “order” (or disorder: I will omit here the distinction between system and order from the British school of International Relations, the question of hegemonic orders in the neo-Gramscian reading up to Arrighi, as well as the “thorny” genealogy of the term geopolitics itself). And it points, therefore, to the varied dynamics of capitalist accumulation which become the Weltmarkt (or in Hegelian terms: it is born global through colonial trade as a prerequisite for industrial development which in turn “posits” the world market, creates it on the basis of the internationalization of production). But for marxists, accumulation means class relations, objective relations between classes: as an external framework of the “economy” and its social fallout, but as constitutive of the political economy through the fundamental capital-wage labour relationship. Therefore, the three terms of the equation – capital, classes, State – always go together. Thus they are not simply juxtaposed one next to the other, but are facets of the same prism. Because of this, they must be outlined [declinati] in the plural, beginning with the many capitals (a process from the abstract to the concrete). It’s another matter, obviously, to make this approach the starting point for specific and meaningful analyses and policies.

Now, with this overall vision in mind, I have tried – particularly since the 2008 crisis – to read geopolitics in parallel with the critique of political economy. That is, in terms of objectively valid (albeit inevitably naturalized) categories, for this specific interstate system corresponding to the real constitution of a differentiated “abstract global space”, corresponding to the passage of the capitalist mode of production to the stage of imperialism. As I understand it and try to practice it, the critique of geopolitics differs both from the simple critique of an imperialist ideology – obviously it is also that – or from its (post-structuralist) “deconstruction”. It also differs from a “critical geopolitics” as conceived by some marxists. In the latter case, it would be a matter of “adding” the spatial dimension, presumably neglected by Marx, whether in neo-luxemburgist terms (examples: Harvey’s “new imperialism” by dispossession, critiques of the extractivist model, etc.) or by outlining global value chains and their hierarchies. I believe instead that a hypothetical Book of Capital dealing with the theme of the State and the interstate system, envisaged in the unfinished plans of Marx’s work, would not limit itself to inserting the territorial variable into the economic-political space. Rather, it would address the concrete space-time of the capitalist mode of production in its global development – not only as a generically understood class antagonism, but as a clash between world revolution and counter-revolution (according to an undeveloped intuition of Karl Korsch and – although not in the terms presented here – of Bordiga). Here we can develop some insights from the late Marx and Engels, after the defeat of the Paris Commune. This period saw the conclusion of the processes of state unification in the West, and the first signs of revolutionary awakening from Russia to the Orient. Given this, one can say that the capitalist mode of production, by concentrating and centralizing, pushes the counter-revolution from the east (e.g. Tsarist Russia) towards the west (Great Britain and then the United States). At the same time, the social revolution (understood as an uninterrupted process from national democratic revolution to proletarian social revolution) moves in the opposite direction, from west to east. This vision of differentiated geo-historical fields, on the scale of a world space that is on the thread of time of class movements, would become the basis for Lenin’s strategy of the October Revolution.

This is why this perspective attributes great relevance and the effective paternity of geopolitics to Halford Mackinder, who wrote the seminal paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” in 19041 . This essay proposed the first general model of the relationship between global space and international politics, even though the term “geopolitical” did not yet appear. I discuss this in an essay, written with Robert Ferro, that will introduce the republication of this essay in France and Italy early next year. Mackinder maps the space and time of capitalist globalization, marked by the dialectical tensions of land/sea, Asia/West. He does this in terms of a) a general element based on power b) a play of rivalries between opposing mobilities and technologies of communication and warfare and c) for the opposition between large, tendentially autarkic economic spaces of “national economy” and ante-litteram global trade flows (systems of “political economy”). But beyond that, behind and through the clash of maritime powers/continental powers (back then, Great Britain against Germany and Russia, today the United States versus China), he identifies the true enemy: social revolution. Indeed, social revolution also unfolds across large geographical fields and historical phases. After the overthrow of capitalism proved impossible in the most advanced centres immediately after 1917, particularly in defeated and tormented Germany, the social revolution started again from the East, from Russia towards China and the extra-Western world. Having lost the possibility of anti-capitalist content, it gains in geographical extension and political and social depth through capitalist processes of national settlement and more or less pronounced anti-imperialist significance. The epoch-making result of this long process – which in the twentieth century separated anti-imperialist struggle and anti-capitalist revolution in space and time – is today the reunification of the world market and the formation of a proletariat extended to almost the entire world.

I had to make this long preamble to get to the content of your question. I would say that the main results of a re-reading of geopolitics that I have alluded to are two. First: there is what one could call the (relative) “Mackinderian invariance” at work in the international system in the era of the full development of the world capitalist system, namely the imperialist stage of which Lenin spoke. This is the relative historical persistence of the “geopolitical paradigm”. We can understand this as the strategic posture of the hegemonic global “maritime power” (in its British incarnation), dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century, towards the most important “land-based” state formations located in the Eurasian landmass, perceived as the source of “revisionist” threats to the existing power arrangements. Emerging from the intent to safeguard the British Empire, this framework then formed the basis for the US strategy of Containment throughout the Cold War. Today it serves as the framework for the clash that has opened with China (and again with Russia). Kissinger clearly stated that in the 20th century the United States fought two world wars against adversaries that could have unified the Eurasian landmass. Likewise, it is well known that NATO must fulfill the dual task of keeping Russia “out” and Germany “down” by keeping them separate (today the discourse extends to the so-called Indo-Pacific in an anti-China function). All this is the counterpart of the economic-social asymmetry between imperialist and non-imperialist formations (or those tending to become so: great continental powers seeking access to the oceans for the continuity of maritime routes). At a higher level of unification of the world market, so-called globalization was thus the latest episode of a “historically invariant” affair dominated by Western imperialism and its geopolitical paradigm. This is the bottom line that periodically reemerges in all its significance as a systemic fault line, especially as inter-capitalist contradictions sharpen, announcing the opening of epochs of transition – and, given the conditions, of revolution.

This connects with the second element: knowing how to see the dynamics of the class struggle within and as the basis of both inter-state and geopolitical tensions, so as to recover the link between war and revolution. This link was crucial, in both directions, for Marx and Engels, as well as for Lenin. By this I mean not only being able to read a major war – composed of many, even localized, conflicts – as the result of inter-capitalist and class conflicts, but also as a deepening of the systemic contradictions of capitalism, and thus a potential trigger for revolutionary processes. Therefore it is important – I would say essential for a class-based politics – to be able to identify, within inter-bourgeois conflicts, which possible dynamics are most favourable to that trigger. And this needs to be done without any “indifferentism”: to avoid misunderstandings, today this cannot mean any “tactical” support for bourgeois forces (irrespective of the current political insignificance of revolutionary forces, since this would require a thorough theoretical examination). It is evident, for example, that the outcome of the war in Ukraine will not be indifferent for the social balances and possible developments of the class struggle in the West, between rearmament, the possible loss of consensus for anti-Russian elites, the end of low-cost energy for Europe, Trump’s tariffs, etc. Likewise, the course of the ongoing clash between Washington and Beijing will be fundamental, with crucial social implications. The interest in geopolitics lies precisely in this: it allows one to read between the lines the formation of the (necessary, not sufficient) conditions for the re-emergence of revolution, however distant that perspective may still appear today.

In saying this, I do not claim to say anything new, but rather to update analyses of the present in light of the deep nodes already present for marxists in past phases. The problem is, these nodes were subsequently obliterated for many decades, particularly during the ascendancy of globalization. Now, with its crisis, they re-emerge in obviously new and in certain ways unprecedented forms. Today we see class conflicts that express themselves through modalities and along lines of development that are surprising for many. These include those (whether workerists or Third-Worldists) who were formed in the climate or in the wake of the long 1980s – but also those formed within the left radicalism that subsequently emerged after the defeat of the mass worker, the implosion of so-called real socialism, the end of the “Third World” with the apparent flattening of the capitalist world, etc.

You don’t seem to be someone who can easily be slotted into any one specific tendency or camp within the (often fractious) marxist universe. Could you say a few words about the political experiences and theoretical frames of reference that have come to inform your own outlook?

I understand the meaning of your question, but I don’t think my path is representative of a trend. I came of age politically during the declining phase of the struggles of the 1970s, marked by the defeat of the working class at the Fiat Mirafiori plant in the autumn of 1980 here in my home town of Turin. Since then, Italy too, despite its national and regional specificities – particularly a strong Catholic associationalism and the remnants of working class union organization – entered the phase of so-called neoliberalism and then globalization. These were long decades where you either gave in or had to question deeply what had happened – and from there, trace back to the crucial questions faced by the class movement throughout its history.

To make a long story short, I gravitated towards the theoretical-political current of the left communists – to be clear, more the Italian one of Bordiga than the German one of the young Lukács and Korsch. But on the organizational level, little or nothing remained in the field from those traditions. And what little there was had essentially become “indifferentist” in the sense I mentioned before, meaning obsessed with the details of the supposed symmetry between the United States and the Soviet Union, while indifferent to anti-imperialist struggles. Among other limitations, these currents never developed a theory of reformism within the working class, always reading it as external or the product of “betrayal”. In the meantime, I had the chance for dialogue with an intellectual who had been a workerist (operaismo being hegemonic in the Italian anti-capitalist left of the 1970s). Romano Alquati was the father, so to speak, of the concept of “class composition”. By that time, however, he was working on a sociological model of the acute transformations resulting from the capitalist restructuring of the 1980s onwards, which was profoundly changing the composition of the working class.

It must be said that this eclectic research – eclectic in the etymological sense of the word – was initially tied somehow to the expectation of a class resurgence: not in the short term, but at least in the medium term, without taking into account that discontinuity which later occurred. However, the processes that have reconfigured world capitalism since then have been too profound, and in the West they have transformed the left from a class-based left, whether revolutionary or reformist, into a radical or liberal middle-class left. This is closely tied to the processes of globalization, which it criticizes or contests in some aspects, but predominantly from an ethical (as is common in the pro-Palestinian movements today) and/or cultural standpoint. Of course, all this has its robust material basis in the decomposition of the Western working class, with China’s opening to the world market and its deflationary effects, the temporary submission of post-Soviet Russia, industrial relocations, etc.

Everything changed in 2008, but, the old “new left” could not or did not know how to acknowledge this, remaining tied to identity politics. Here another story begins: the US/China clash, neopopulism, war in Ukraine and Palestine, Trump, etc., etc. As you can see, I’ve spoken more about the context than about my own path, but there you go.

In a piece you recently wrote on Trump’s tariffs for the magazine Heatwave2 , you argued that “the most interesting element is the return of a deep social crisis at the heart of Western imperialism, a return that foreshadows the possible reactivation of a passive, dispersed and fragmented proletariat”. We’d really like for you to unpack this suggestive passage – could you start by talking about what you understand to be the nature of Western imperialism today?

You’re optimistic; practically no one in the West talks about imperialism anymore; at most, Putin’s Russia is designated as imperialist (even in left-wing circles). Jokes aside, as I mentioned, the radical left arrived for the 2008 crisis theoretically disarmed. The cultural critique of capitalism had long since replaced the structural critique. Even the world-systems approach, although structuralist, no longer evoked the name imperialism, having replaced it with successive hegemonic cycles. Harvey did talk about imperialism regarding the War on Terror, but linked it only to the theme of dispossession. And the Monthly Review does use the concept, but within a Third Worldist framework orphaned by actually existing socialism.

During presentations of my book on the United States and China (the Italian version was released in the autumn of 2022), I was often asked the question of what imperialism is today. Out of this, a seminar on the topic was organized here in Turin. I will try to synthesize some partial and provisional answers that we have put forward, elaborated by retracing the most significant passages of the marxist and non-marxist historical debate, updated to the present day.

First, drawing on Lenin, imperialism can continue to be interpreted as a stage (rather than a policy) of capitalism, based on the processes of the centralization and internationalization of capital (from monopolies to multinationals, to global value chains) and the primacy of the production of means of production over that of consumer goods. It should not be confused therefore with historical colonialism, even though it was spurred on by this for an entire phase. Imperialism determines the intertwined and uneven development of the world market with permanent or persistent transfers of value between firms and states, according to hierarchies defined economically by the capacity to export capital. Indeed, the prevalence of capital export over the export of commodities is a fundamental characteristic of imperialist countries, with the priority of the needs of profitability over those of realization: this is Lenin’s position against Luxemburg. Correspondingly, an inter-state system is constituted on a world scale along cycles of war and peace, as we said before. It is important to emphasize that so-called finance capital remains, to this day, linked to productive capital, although over the last fifty years the link between state money and credit money has become much more elongated, permitting the phenomenon of so-called financialization. For this reason, it’s a mistake to characterise the latter either as a systemic cycle’s “sign of autumn” (Braudel, Arrighi), or a (Keynesian) parasitic excrescence. Nor is imperialism either the “final” stage in the sense of any theory of collapse [crollismo], or one of stagnationist decline (as for the trotskyists). Rather, it contains the possibility of a relative rejuvenation of capital, in particular through its geographical relocation on a large scale after major wars (Bordiga). This doesn’t take away the fact that contradictions of all kinds tend to become more acute. This entails both the difficulties of accumulation (which, however, are not necessarily always general, extending to the entire world system) and the effects of capital exports on the exporting imperialist countries (relative deindustrialization) and on the beneficiary countries (industrial development, albeit dependent, which, from being peripheral, can rise in extent and quality under certain favorable conditions – see China). This also involves the persistence – even with long periods of latency, and sometimes even the exacerbation – of national questions. These arise not only in areas dominated or controlled by imperialist powers, but even within the latter themselves in situations of crisis (obviously with different forms and valences: Scottish secessionism can’t simply be equated with the Palestinian national liberation struggle, the emerging “sovereignism” in parts of the West is not the same as the nationalism of non-Western capitalist countries, etc.). In summary, and here lies the close connection with the issues in the first question, crises in mature imperialism tend to take on an almost immediately geopolitical form.

On this basis, and keeping in mind the Mackinderian invariance we discussed, we see from the end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th century the configuration of successive international orders/disorders, passing through two world wars. marxists of the past grappled with this theoretically and politically, defining its characteristics and situating them along the spectrum of inter-imperialist unity/rivalry and reformism/revolution. This is well known, but it is important to note two things. Firstly, that the imperialist countries are (with the exception of Japan) all Western. Secondly, that a major rupture occurred after the Second World War, when the situation shifted from one of intra-Western inter-imperialist conflict to the clear superiority of US imperialism. Simultaneously, there was the consolidation of capitalist (or capitalist-tending) state and socio-economic setups resulting from the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It is interesting that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the US facing military (Vietnam), economic (the initial effects on trade and the balance of payments) and socio-political difficulties (Black revolts, labour indiscipline, student, youth, and women’s movements), an important debate arose among Western marxists such as Ernest Mandel and Martin Nicolaus3 . This concerned a possible resurgence of inter-imperialist conflict between the United States, the European countries and Japan. Conceptually, it revolved around the relationship between the export of commodities (the revival of Germany and Japan) and the export of capital (United States), obviously without any insurmountable barrier between the two forms. Poulantzas expanded this discussion to the question of the new nature of the European bourgeoisies, which had become, in his view, “internal” to US imperialism, and to the corresponding form of the state. Alongside this, an important debate developed on the role of money (Suzanne de Brunhoff, the journal Primo Maggio, etc.)4 . And so I believe that the facts from the 1970s and 1980s onward (the decoupling of the dollar from gold, Sino-American rapprochement, and then Reaganomics, the Second Cold War, globalization, etc.) have confirmed the qualitative superiority of US imperialism over the rest of the West. This was so in a) economic terms (with more refined financial and monetary forms of command over globally produced value and with control over the key segments of global value chains) b) politico-military terms (Germany, Japan, and Italy being semi-sovereign states after WWII) and c) cultural and media-related terms.

None of this is to deny the resurgence of German imperialism (reunification, industrial resilience, centralization of the European Union and productive chains, economic projection towards China and Russia, resistance to the US assault on the Euro with the sovereign debt crisis in Europe in 2010-2012). On the other hand, almost as a nemesis of the victory of the Western bourgeoisies over the mass worker, we are witnessing the rise of China, the relative recovery of a pulverized Russia under Putin, the formation of BRICS, etc. Here too, the 2008 crisis represented a turning point, but with a divergent path – at least so far – between the growing autonomous trajectory of China and Russia moving away from the US, on one side, and a further step in the subordination of the rest of the West to Washington, on the other. This is particularly so following the war in Ukraine (see the breaking of Germany-Russia trade links imposed by Washington). In any case, we are now facing the evident crisis of the “Pax Americana”. This is an ordinative crisis that is shaking US super-imperialism and which has produced, among other things, the Trumpist reaction internally and the war in Ukraine externally.

In this regard, I will conclude with two questions. The first: is this crisis of the US order also a general worldwide crisis of capitalist accumulation, or is it rather the product of an overall rebalancing of international economic and power axes to the detriment of the West (the discussion on multipolarism)? In any case, even under the second hypothesis, deeply disruptive contradictions would open up, whose signs we are already seeing, starting from the fact that the United States will not resign itself to passing on the baton. Second: are the United States in irreversible decline? Today, almost everyone believes this, and most fear it given the predictable destabilizing effects. This theme had already been raised in the 1970s in debates amongst marxists and non-marxists alike. At the time, those arguing for decline prevailed. But then we saw how that turned out! I for one do not believe it’s correct to characterize the current US criticalities in terms of irreversible decline. First, because a revitalization cannot be ruled out; second, because it does not adequately take into account the overall reconfiguration of imperialist domination since the 1970s. In the meantime, the United States has increasingly become indispensable for the allies and rivals alike of the entire system. As a consequence, a change of hegemony able to restart the system itself becomes difficult, if not impossible. At the same time, the US’s “positional rent” is becoming increasingly burdensome, and not only for its enemies. This factor, more than a vague decline, could lead to the sharpening of international tensions – it is already doing so. This raises the possible opening not only of a general, comprehensive crisis involving major wars, but also of anti-systemic revolutionary opportunities that have been absent for a long time. In short, as Lenin rightly argued, for capital there is never a situation without any way out whatsoever. And yet, without indulging in illusions of an automatic collapse [illusioni crolliste], it could be that a new revolutionary era is dawning (albeit not in the short term), with concrete revolutionary situations (although not necessarily with an anti-capitalist outcome). The future is becoming interesting again.

Your 2024 book The US-China Rift devotes many of its pages to examining China’s impressive rise on the global stage. In a useful summary of the Italian version of that book that appeared at the website Carmilla online, Fabio Ciabatti argues that in all this, you “believe neither in the Chinese road to socialism nor in its possible victory”.5 Briefly, how would you characterise the emergence of contemporary China, and how does your approach differ from other marxist explanations, both in terms of class analysis and drawing political conclusions about the PRC’s significance?

On this point too, there is a risk of reductionist simplifications. China’s impressive and accelerated rise can be fundamentally explained by two massive processes:

1. A democratic and anti-imperialist peasant revolution (a revolutionary Jacobin populism under the banners of socialism, corresponding to the dislocation of the social revolution from West to East, as I mentioned before). This unlocked the development of the productive forces of a bimillennial civilization that had fallen prey to Western and Japanese imperialism, through dynamics of intense class struggle.

2. The opening to the world market. This was due to the interplay between, on the one hand, the development of social relations in the countryside and industry following the exit from the “heroic” maoist phase, and on the other hand, the geopolitical needs of US imperialism for an exit strategy from Vietnam and the economic criticalities of the late 1960s that we discussed earlier. This in turn brought the Sino-American rapprochement of 1972 (transforming the USA-USSR-China “strategic triangle”, which would lead to the weakening and eventual implosion of the Soviet Union).

To account for these epochal results in a marxist way, one can apply “Occam’s razor”: if I can explain them in terms of capitalist development, albeit in forms different from Western capitalism (see the agrarian question), then I don’t need to bother with socialist categories. Obviously, this is so on the condition that I read the individual elements within the framework of the worldwide dynamics of accumulation already dominated by imperialism. After all, no one today denies that in China there is wage labour, commodities, money, and capital! What is under discussion, rather, is the role of the state and the Communist Party in accumulation and in maintaining socio-political equilibria. Here I will limit myself to two observations. In general terms, there is no capital without a state, which can sometimes assume a direct economic role. The peculiarities of the Chinese path are linked to the long history of the Asiatic mode of production and its clash, first with European colonialism and then with imperialism. These clashes prevented a Western-style modernization led by a genuine national bourgeoisie. Hence the surrogate function of the party-state based on peasants and workers. This has itself undergone multiple transformations (maoism, dengism) that have modified its social base of reference, while placing China today in a favorable position compared to the West in terms of political and social cohesion and the capacity for strategic direction of accumulation.

Secondly, the class relations in Chinese society, which are very complex, are tending today, pushed by the workers’ struggles of the last decade, towards a social democratic-style compromise between the party-state, entrepreneurial forces, and the working classes. This is all the more so because social cohesion is fundamental for Beijing in the confrontation with Washington. This means that emerging Chinese nationalism, as a reaction to US aggressiveness, must also seek an anchor in the working class and the salaried middle class (if you like, this is the political flipside of the trade-union consciousness of the Chinese masses today).

It is here that the way we consider the possible evolution of world imperialism and China’s insertion into it becomes crucial. I will simplify this into two main options. In the first – which is not mine – China is already imperialist; therefore, the USA/China clash is inter-imperialist in nature, and anti-Western nationalism is merely a maneuver to divide the international proletariat. Then there is the second option: that to date, China is not yet imperialist. This would be due to the prevalence of a “mercantilist” productive structure based on commodity exports, and the lack of monetary and financial levers already capable of competing with the dominance of the dollar (which does not negate that capital export has taken off in the last fifteen years after the 2008 crisis, for example with the New Silk Roads, while meeting stiff opposition from the US and EU). In my opinion, China is in the phase of reappropriating a part of the profits hitherto transferred to the West in order to invest them itself, and thus climb the global value chains both technologically and economically. If this is so, then the Chinese challenge is not a hegemonic one (as in the first option), but rather one of “resistance” (to be clear: of a capitalist, not anti-systemic nature) to US aggression, with the aim of renegotiating the world order.

This has important implications, which I can only hint at here. In fact, the dual dynamic of China’s rise and the US strategy aimed at industrial revival (reshoring) opens the prospect of a decoupling between the two poles that have underpinned globalization until now. In other words, to deglobalization, hence an upheaval of all global systemic arrangements. (Regarding Russia, I would only add here for the sake of clarity that it lacks even the minimal elements to speak of imperialism in the marxist sense. This does not negate that Putin’s Russia has inherited from the Soviet Union a residual nuclear military force, and the capacity/necessity to act as a buttress/sounding board [sponda] for the Global South’s growing impatience with the West – two fundamental factors that Western imperialism cannot forgive it for). I don’t believe, however, that a stable multipolar system is possible as a substitute for the Pax Americana, even if the efforts to achieve it are positive. I say “positive” in the sense that they destabilize world capitalism, putting the hub of Western imperialism in difficulty. All this cannot fail to call into question the internal social equilibria within China (and the US, as we are seeing) – and, more generally, class relations on a world scale.

The US-China Rift argues that the development of a contemporary “anti-Americanism” is essential for prising open the possibility of a global post-capitalist future. Can we imagine a communist anti-Americanism that avoids the pitfalls of previous anti-imperialisms?

Two intertwined processes are underway, relating to the internal ramifications of geopolitical dynamics. On the one hand, in non-Western countries, we are witnessing an emerging anti-Americanism that cuts across working classes and middle classes. This is eroding (with exceptions, such as Milei’s Argentina) the previous pro-Western leanings of broad social and youth sectors. The terrain here is obviously interclassist, but it is crucial to understand that it is a terrain of real contradictions that cannot be ignored from the perspective of an international proletarian class recomposition. On the other hand, we are witnessing a social and political crisis in the United States, perhaps unparalleled in its past, even if talk of civil war is excessive. This crisis sets the stage for a weakening of the strongest link in the imperialist chain – unless it recovers along the line of Trumpism, the outcomes of which are still uncertain.

Finally, in Europe, the rift is deepening between (fervently anti-Russian) “globalist” elites and bourgeois sectors, and social sectors of the impoverished middle class and proletariat, which are increasingly impatient with the fallout of globalization, but also increasingly worried about Washington’s economic moves (including sectors of national small capital). This remains a confused picture, but one tending towards a break with the stagnation of recent decades. The mobilization of the Yellow Vests in France a few years ago signaled this. The war in Ukraine contributes to all this: a war of anti-NATO preventive defence by Moscow to protect its deterrence capacity. This has not only brought the theme and fear of war back to European populations accustomed to decades of imperialist peace, but is also producing internal divisions. For example, Germany itself – until now a bastion of European stability – is today caught between increasing subordination to the US order and a more autonomous economic projection towards China, and this is true both among bourgeois sectors and the broader population. And it is producing a divergence among European states themselves, even if they are currently united by the need not to lose the US military umbrella. Thus, in Europe too, the theme of anti-Americanism is beginning to emerge, obviously with very different connotations compared to China, Russia, and the rest of the non-Western world.

In short, the focus of my argument is that the internal and external weakening of the US pivot is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for a future revolutionary class revival. It is not sufficient because anti-Americanism remains an interclassist and national terrain. Everything will depend on whether it acts as a vector for social and political destabilization in the heart of the West, or for a realignment of some sections of the proletariat behind certain factions of the bourgeoisie – those that emerge victorious from the reshuffling of globalization or from a future world conflict, analogous to the post-World War II consolidation under the banner of democratic anti-fascism. In this regard, it is important to clarify that a distinction must be made between, on the one hand, the possible material paths of class recomposition and, on the other, the political program of Communism. Under current historical conditions, the latter no longer foresees any possible anti-imperialist alliances of the proletariat with factions of the national bourgeoisie in any geo-historical camp. The issue pertains rather to one of the probable terrains of geopolitical, political, and social conflict that, under given conditions, could favor the reunification of the communist program with the proletarian class struggle.

You and Robert Ferro had an article published online recently by Endnotes6 that seeks to reformulate discussions of “the state” at the level of the world market in terms of a “system of states”. What does this mean for an understanding of imperialism, as well as – to take one crucial case – the connections between how actors such as the current White House administration are working to restructure the US state form on both the domestic and the international front?

In extreme synthesis, the article starts from the inherent nature [internità] of the state within the capital relation, seeing it as an indispensable organizer of the enlarged reproduction of a mode of production that has a tendency towards imbalance. The state’s role is to contain self-destructive tendencies and overcome barriers created by capitalist accumulation itself. In the transition from the abstract to the concrete, from capital in general to many individual capitals, there is a parallel transition from the state to the system of states. This system acts as the organizing activity for the world market and its geopolitical space – a hierarchically structured organization that is never guaranteed once and for all. This implies the state’s active intervention at all levels of the system, both internal and international. This is obviously so to the extent of the existing balance of power between different national capitals that interpenetrate unevenly in the world market, as well as due to the constraints of internal class relations. These are all contradictory movements. Geopolitics is the concentrated form of these movements.

And so we come to Trump. We have seen that the USA remains the dominant power of the world market, entrusted with the regulatory function that is now in great difficulty. An ordinative crisis is always linked, directly or indirectly, to a crisis in the extraction of surplus value – an insufficiency of it relative to capital, which thus becomes over-accumulated. The US experienced a first crisis of this type in the 1970s. That crisis was overcome through the so-called neoliberal turn (widely supported by the State) and the subordinate integration of China into the world market through globalization and the unipolar moment. Today we are in a second, profound crisis, signaled by the first major shock of 2008-2009. This can be read in a general sense as the boomerang effect of globalization. On the one hand, this entails the recovery (or attempt thereof) by China and other non-Western economies of a share of the profits previously monopolized by Western imperialism; on the other hand, there is the relative deindustrialization of Western countries (to varying degrees). From this follows an internal social deterioration that can only be partially (and not indefinitely) compensated for by financial and monetary mechanisms and by politico-military dominance.

Now, as summarized in the aforementioned article for Heatwave, the Trump administration has responded to this overall situation by overturning the previous globalist economic strategy and attempting an internal regime change regarding the state apparatuses linked to the previous course. Importantly, this is not just pressure from above, but also from below, from sectors of the middle class and proletariat who are resentful of the negative fallout of globalization – a reaction based on positions of defensive economic nationalism and growing impatience with US military projections abroad. For Trump, then, it is about taking a step back on the diplomatic-military plane, acknowledging the current inability to subdue Russia and China both militarily and economically simultaneously. This is done in order to take two steps forward on the plane of coercive economic diplomacy (tariffs, dollar devaluation, restructuring of foreign debt, sanctions, etc.). The strategic goal is a revival of domestic industrial production in high-tech and military sectors. Thus, a strategy for a post-globalization international order is being prepared, albeit in a non-linear way that could fail. The obstacles are enormous, both on the domestic and international fronts (resistance from China and Russia, chaos in the Middle East, etc.). Two aspects of these developments are extremely interesting and, in some ways, surprising. The first is the attempt to graft a neo-mercantilist logic (the export of commodities) onto an imperialist economic structure still centred on the export of capital and the US dollar as world currency, while simultaneously trying to block or limit their disarticulating effects on the domestic industrial and social structure. The second is the unprecedented return of a “national question” in the form of a populist reaction from impoverished (and not only white) sectors, in an ambivalent mixture of nationalism and neo-reformist demands that had been dropped by the old New Deal-era reformism. In distorted and confused forms, this could be the signal of profound upheavals in the class structure at the heart of world imperialism.

In the late 1970s, Romano Alquati emphasised the importance – at least in Italy – of the proletarianisation of growing numbers of middle class layers for the process of class recomposition, bound up with the increasing subsumption of “intellectual labour” to capital. Is it fair to say that some of your writing in the last decade (for example, addressing what you have called “neo-populism”) suggests a much more ambivalent reading of this relationship between the working class and middle classes in crisis? What do you see as the potentials as well as the dangers of all this?

In the 1980s, Romano Alquati developed the category of the “hyper-industrial” to describe the tendential extension of specifically industrial organization to the entirety of human activities. This was alongside the growing externality of knowledge, which is increasingly subsumed by capital and objectified in its means. This theoretical development is particularly interesting today in relation to a) the industrialization of so-called services b) the problem of their productivity in capitalist terms c) the theme of the growing commodification of human activities aimed at extending wage labour and (partial) proletarianization, and d) the replacement of what was once called intellectual labour. All of this has sometimes been interpreted as the constitution of a “total capital” (privileging the theme of abstraction rather than that of alienation), with certain analogies to the radical critique of the French post-1968 milieu. Furthermore, for Alquati the hyper-industrial tends to generate a hyper-proletariat, also in the sense of your question. This hyper-proletarianization has also sometimes been read in a linear way, as the disappearance of the middle classes and the immediate proletarianization of intellectual labour. However, in my view, neither of these implications is necessary. The processes of capitalist subsumption are never definitively accomplished and complete (Alquati himself emphasized the importance of “residues” and informal dimensions which partly escape that process). Nor do all the barriers between the middle classes and the proletariat collapse. This is true neither from the point of view of concrete labour, nor from the point of view of valorization (this latter dimension being one on which Alquati suspended judgment, so to speak, awaiting better times for a resumption of collective discussion) – and even less so in terms of political dynamics.

Jumping to the question you pose, the situation in the West over the last fifty years – albeit within differentiated national frameworks – has not seen a linear “revolutionary” proletarianization of the middle classes in the sense of a quantitative reduction of the latter. Instead, they have undergone a transformation dictated by processes of restructuring work organization, the internationalization of capital, and the expansion of public service employment. While the proletariat shrank in industrial production, at least in relative terms, it increased in so-called services. Even less has an alliance between the working class and “progressive” middle classes been realized in the forms and with the content envisaged by the reformist left. The latter, instead, gradually positioned themselves on the terrain of neoliberal globalization, in parallel with the aforementioned material and ideological changes. Now, after the 2008 crisis, and focusing on Western countries, we have witnessed interesting dislocations, both within the differentiated spectrum of the middle classes and in their relations with various proletarian sectors. A part of the former began to give voice to grievances and impatience with the negative fallout of globalization, now visible even to those who might have benefited from it until then. After an initial reaction from sectors closer to the institutional left, including “aspiring middle-class” students (see the vote for Obama and the Occupy movements), whose mobilizations remained without outcome and without responses from the political establishment, a more rancorous and “plebeian” reaction from sectors of small capital, old and new middle strata, took over. Their discontent also gave voice to the dissatisfaction of proletarian sectors, particularly the less “protected” and more “precarious” ones. This spawned the so-called “populist moment” which, depending on the situation and its prevailing social composition, assumed “Yellow Vest” or sovereignist forms. In this first phase, which lasted roughly until the COVID crisis, perhaps the most interesting aspect was the (possibly definitive) crisis of the link – already severely tested in previous decades – between the working classes and the political left, both liberal and radical. This does not mean that these proletarian sectors have completely lost their previous reformist demands. But not finding them in a left undergoing a genetic mutation, they have sought them on different grounds and in search of new types of political representation. The expressions of this have been ambivalent, and it could not be otherwise in a context of great political confusion: demands for state action to defend small capital and labour after decades of privatizations and liberalizations; denunciations of the “corruption” of politicians and financiers; criticism of the complete openness of borders to immigrants, coupled with demands for regulation against cut-throat competition between workers, etc. The left read all this as a racist, if not fascist, backlash – without seeing that in this mixture, sometimes with decidedly reactionary traits, “reformist” demands for the defense of labour from the savage processes of capital internationalization were also stirring.

We are now seeing further signals in this direction, due also to the deterioration of the West’s position in the global geopolitical and geo-economic framework, signals that indicate a possible second phase of what I have called neo-populism. This second phase appears to be characterized by a greater importance of social and economic themes compared to the first phase, whose unifying element was the critique of political elites. It is thus more oriented towards the needs of the working classes rather than just the impoverished middle classes. As far as Western Europe is concerned, it leans towards positions of impatience with the American ally, if not outright anti-Americanism. While it would be too lengthy to discuss here, this also affects ambivalent attitudes towards the European Union as a prospect for a united and strong Europe – a prospect which remains unrealised and, on the contrary, is increasingly a vehicle for submission to Washington, from the war in Ukraine to tariffs. The transition from the first to the second phase was already signaled by the important Yellow Vests movement in France in 2018-2019, which unfortunately was interrupted by the COVID crisis. The ambivalences and dangers of these processes lie entirely in their interclassist terrain – inevitable under the given conditions and not simply the result of manipulation from above – in a phase of diminishing expectations and without an alternative, anti-systemic perspective of some kind. Therefore, this neo-populism, which is a typically Western phenomenon (and not to be confused with other historical cases), could be a vehicle for a neo-reformist revival of the working classes, albeit on a defensive, national terrain: just as it could lead, in the absence of clear class-based developments, to a war of all against all.

In a 2020 conversation with Nick Dyer-Witheford, you spoke of “creating a general movement that, in starting from a particular terrain, is able to make one specific problem vital for the broad spectrum of the exploited”.7 Is this how you still understand the process of class recomposition? If so, are there any pointers yet today to the surfacing of that “one specific problem”?

This touches somewhat on the theme of the previous question as well. Without rehashing the reasoning – which so far is still only at the level of a series of hypotheses and some descriptive confirmations – I will recall two elements to summarize our discussion. First, the geopolitical form that every serious economic-social crisis tends to assume; second, the confused, even desperate, search for a neo-reformist path by sectors of the proletariat to which the left, in its entirety, is no longer able to respond. Therefore, based on this, and limiting myself to Western countries, I would say there are two potential grounds for recomposition: the tendency towards general war, and reindustrialization. The first is becoming increasingly evident as a knot to be untied in a not-so-distant future. Here the crossroads that are opening up – obviously I’m simplifying – will be between two paths. One involves the working classes taking on the burden of defending the “democratic West” against “autocracies”. The other entails positively taking up the “reformist” challenge coming from China and the Global South for a rebalancing of wealth, which will not be possible without an overturning of the class structures between proletarians and bourgeois. The second element here, the reversal of the industrial delocalization processes of recent decades, is beginning to appear to ever broader sectors of the proletariat and middle classes as the necessary condition for a recovery of direct and indirect wages, without which a further downward spiral in general living conditions is inevitable. This second terrain of contention – which may seem minimal or even reactionary to those nostalgic for 1968 – contains within it potential for class recomposition. Then again, it also contains the danger of the proletariat being co-opted into state policies that present themselves as defensive, but end up exacerbating both international relations and the relationship between native and immigrant proletarians (see Trumpism). A lot will depend on how these two grounds, the “external” and the internal one, combine in proletarian action.

In 2018 you and Emiliana Armano published a book-length interview in Italian with Loren Goldner exploring his perspectives on global class struggles since the 1960s: that book will soon appear in English.8 What did you learn from your encounter with Loren, and what do you see as his legacy?

My friendship with Loren spanned roughly the last fifteen years of his life (I first met him in person in 2008). I am left with the regret of losing a friend and comrade, and for the few opportunities we had to meet face-to-face. Despite, or perhaps even because of this, our dialogue was assiduous, free from the barriers one might expect from a long-standing and authoritative internationalist militant like Loren. One of his characteristics, in fact, was his desire to continuously learn from experiences and discussions, despite or because of his well-grounded positions, which matured from the combination of North American and European experiences and situations, both before and after 1968. This is also why I am pleased that his interview is being published in English as well.

Loren’s thinking – all of it – deserves thorough reconsideration. He was like a volcano of ideas, ranging from Renaissance Neoplatonism to the process of the North American proletariat’s constitution, from fictitious capital to the critique of postmodernism, from the interpretation of Melville to the attempt to revitalize the lessons of the left communists, and much more. I can say that the fundamental stimulus I received from this encounter is to think in terms of total social capital: not as an abstract category of Wertkritik (which has lost the dimension of class struggle), but as a perspective from which to read the concrete unfolding of inter-capitalist and class dynamics (which are never pure). Furthermore, Loren had long identified the importance of geopolitics, old and new, having analyzed the Great Game renewed by US Containment, and linked this to the dominance of the dollar. I cannot speak about this with a clear mind here. But surely one of his most important legacies – and work should be done on this – is, in my opinion, the attempt to reconcile the two diverging tendencies of the “German” (starting from Luxemburg) and “Italian” communist left, without thereby abandoning the revolutionary contribution of Lenin. Only the future will tell if this intuition can contribute to the theoretical reconstitution of the party of tomorrow, which will no longer be of this or that tendency, but simply anti-capitalist.

Finally, what projects are you working on next?

I would like to complement the reconstruction of the trajectory of world imperialism with that of the closely intertwined formation of the proletariat across its national sections and its international “encounters”, including its political expressions, both reformist and revolutionary. As I may have already mentioned, developing a theory of reformism seems important to me in order to de-mythologize the proletarian class and, conversely, to avoid disappointment in it and the abandonment of the anti-capitalist perspective. Similarly, following an intuition of Korsch, historical materialism needs to be applied to marxism itself. But I realize that this is a task that is not only beyond me as an individual, but one that would only make sense and be possible within a revival of collective marxist discussion. Perhaps some signals, however contradictory, of a re-mobilization of the proletariat could provide an impetus in this direction. We shall see.

• 1https://ndisc.nd.edu/assets/422105/mackinder%201904%20heartland%20article%2017%20pages.pdf
• 2https://heatwavemag.info/dossiers/tariffs/sciortino_052225/
• 3https://viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/old-new-questions-theory-imperialism-1975/
• 4https://monoskop.org/images/1/1a/Marx%2C_Money_and_Capital._An_Interview_with_Lapo_Berti.pdf
• 5https://www.carmillaonline.com/2023/03/29/no-non-e-legemonia-cosa-ce-in-ballo-nello-scontro-tra-cina-e-stati-uniti/
• 6https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/robert-ferro-raffaele-sciortino-prolegomena-on-the-system-of-states
• 7https://projectpppr.org/populisms/ou4s4qbth74ibed4kkd1njv72pg40c
• 8Revolutions in our life. Four interviews with Loren Goldner (forthcoming with Kersplebedeb).