Let's zoom out a bit, get better perspectives. We use to believe that what make capitalism distinctive are markets, trade, and business. In reality, these practices pre-existed capitalism for thousands of years and took many different forms along the way. What makes capitalism unique is that it is in fact an economic system where production is organized around and exclusively for maximizing profit. From its very founding, capitalism has always required some kind of periphery from where it can obtain cheap labor and resources on a massive scale, suppress rebellions with impunity, and externalize costs.

We can see today, the targets are Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela, and Cuba. Previously, it was Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. It is a never-ending process of Western intervention and invasion. If we understand that the underlying structural driver is the imperatives of capital accumulation in the core, which requires interventions against sovereign-seeking states and individuals, then the ultimate solution is to transition to a post-capitalist economy.

The Anatomy of Imperialism

Capitalism's dependence on exploitation is structural. The core principle of capitalism is that growth and capital accumulation in the Western states relies heavily on appropriation of cheap labor and cheap resources, and has done so for over 500 years of capitalist history.^[1] When countries pursue sovereign economic development, they use their resources and labor to produce and consume for themselves and for other surrounding regions. This makes their resources and labor less cheaply available for capital in the core, producing severe crises for oversea capitalists.

The states currently being targeted are geopolitically sensitive in that, they are sovereign-seeking. Look at Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. What do these states have in common? They are trying to establish sovereign economic development paths. Transnational Capital forces intervene to prevent that and get them back in line.

The Israel Question

Israel's role in this arrangement is particularly revealing. The US started taking an interest in Israel in the 1960s because during that period, North Africa and West Asia saw extraordinary popular movements for national liberation and socialism. Arab nationalism and Arab socialism were very powerful, very popular movements. The US realized that by supporting and arming Israel, they could use it as a military proxy to run counterinsurgency campaigns against these nationalist and liberation movements.^[2]

Israel played the role of assassinating many leaders of these movements, repeatedly bombing Arab states and forcing them to divert resources into defense buildup rather than sovereign industrial capacity. This maintained perpetual instability in the region, preventing the rise of strong nationalist or socialist states.

The narrative that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East" is cover. The Palestinian population under Israeli control does not get to vote over the entity that controls them. That is literally apartheid. The US used apartheid South Africa in exactly the same way in the 20th century, as a proxy military force to run counterinsurgency operations against liberation movements in southern Africa, not just against the ANC and the Communist Party in South Africa, but also in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.

Iran: A Case Study

The story of Iran perfectly illustrates the pattern. In the early 1950s, Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had the audacity to say that Iran's oil resources should be in the hands of the Iranian people and developed for Iranian national development.^[3] At the time, Iran's oil reserves were controlled by the British through what would become BP. The British went to the CIA, and they ran a coup against Mosaddegh in 1953, replacing him with the Shah of Iran, a brutal dictator who governed as a stooge of Western interests for decades.^[4]

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution removed the Shah and brought Iran sovereignty, the West could never forgive Iran for this move. The revolution was not Marxist or socialist, but it was sovereign-seeking. And that is exactly why it was targeted. The Cold War was much less about an ideological battle against communism than it was a political battle against sovereign-seeking states in the global south.

The Stagflation Crisis and the Imperial Response

By the 1970s, the anti-colonial movement had reached its apex and was triggering economic crisis in the core states. This was the era of stagflation. Inflation combined with economic stagnation.^[5] Why was the West facing stagflation? Because their growth model depended on appropriation from the periphery. As the periphery began to produce and consume more for themselves, the supply price from the periphery increased, pinching off Western profits and constraining Western consumption. The core states faced a fork in the road: either accept decolonization abroad and shift to some kind of post-capitalist economy, or intervene to restore the imperial arrangements. They opted hard for the latter.

They did this through invasions and coups against sovereign-seeking states in the global south, deposing most of the leading anti-colonial governments in Ghana, Indonesia, Chile, and elsewhere.^[6] They installed right-wing dictators willing to go along with Western economic interests and imposed structural adjustment programs that prevented global south countries from using industrial policy and planning.^[7]

This maintained them in a condition of dependency, organizing their production in subordinate positions in global commodity chains, producing sweatshop output for companies like Zara and H&M, factory production for our phones and electronics, all at extremely low wages. The benefits are consumed in the core while the low wages and ecological consequences are suffered in the periphery.

The Capitalist Law of Value

The capitalist law of value is the principle that production is organized around what is most profitable to capital rather than what is most necessary for human well-being or social benefit. Consider renewable energy. We know we need to ramp up investment in renewable energy. There is massive public support for it. We have the engineers, factories, materials, and technologies. But fossil fuels are three or four times more profitable than renewables as an energy source, even though renewables are cheaper.^[8] Capital flows to the more profitable option.

The same logic applies to affordable housing, public transit, and other necessities. When capital chooses between affordable housing and cruise ships, it flows to the more profitable one. This is what Eugene Debs meant when he said socialism is simply the extension of democracy into the realm of production.^[9] The fundamental feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally undemocratic. Production and finance are organized around producing what is most profitable to capital rather than around what is most necessary for human well-being.

China's Alternative Model

China's economic system is designed differently, and it is doing a remarkable job at allocating capital toward social goals. China installs more renewable energy capacity every year than the rest of the world combines. It is the largest producer of electric vehicles, batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels.^[10]

How is China able to achieve this when these are not highly profitable sectors? Because China has public control over the financial system. China can direct public and commercial finance toward what is most necessary for their national development objectives rather than only toward what is most profitable to capital.

China has a large state-owned enterprise sector responsible for about a third of GDP, which means China can always do production regardless of profitability if that is the objective.^[11] The Communist Party of China is not ideologically homogeneous, inside it, there are people more on the capitalist side and more on the socialist or communist side, with constant debates between them. Since 2012, particularly under current leadership, things have moved in a much more socialist direction.

A banker at China's biggest investment bank explained: when they make investments, profit is probably only number three or number four on their list of priorities. Their main priority is to produce what is necessary for alignment with China's national development plans.

China's development model is also enabling delinking for other global south countries. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese investment in infrastructure for international trade gives global south countries opportunities to obtain necessary technologies and producer goods on more favorable terms, allowing them to escape unequal exchange relationships with the core states.^[12]

Delinking from Imperial Exploitation

The concept of delinking, in its clearest formulation, comes from Egyptian economist Samir Amin, who wrote about it in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.^[13] His argument was twofold: delinking does not mean autarky or becoming an isolated economy, it is about delinking from exploitation by the imperial core. And it is about delinking from the capitalist law of value. It's curiously contradictory to see where Egypt currently sit.

The global south has extraordinary productive capacities. It is rich in resources, labor, factories, and technologies. But it does not have sovereign control over those productive capacities. Largely, Transnational Capital does. Its labor and resources are mobilized around producing sweatshop goods for the West rather than hospitals, schools, and sanitation systems for its own population.

Delinking means overcoming the capitalist law of value domestically and delinking from the imperatives of capital accumulation on a global scale so that production is organized around national development and human needs rather than what Transnational Capitalists want produced. BRICS and other multipolar economic formations are helping accelerate this process by removing dependence on the petrodollar, the IMF, and other Western financial institutions, though these initiatives have their own contradictions and are not explicitly anti-imperialist or socialist formations.

The Path Forward

The ultimate solution requires a post-capitalist transition. This means:

1. Universal public services system where key things people need like healthcare, education, childcare, affordable housing, public transit, energy, etc. are decommodified and publicly provisioned.
2. Public finance system that aligns finance and investment with people-determined objectives rather than letting commercial banks above governments determine how to direct finance flows.
3. Horizontal workplaces where workers determine what they produce, whether through worker ownership, worker management, or community ownership. The Mondragon Corporation in Spain, one of the country's largest companies, is entirely worker-owned and managed.^[14]

The evolution is already in place, from Red, to Teal Organizations that operate with self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose as their core principles. Rather than traditional hierarchical control, these organizations distribute authority through self-managing teams where decision-making is decentralized and anyone can make decisions within their area of responsibility.

They emphasize creating environments where people can bring their whole selves to work rather than wearing a professional mask, and they treat the organization as a living system with its own purpose rather than a machine to be controlled by top leadership. Examples include Buurtzorg in healthcare, Patagonia, and FAVI in manufacturing, which have demonstrated that this model can achieve remarkable results, higher employee engagement, better customer outcomes, and stronger financial performance while fundamentally restructuring the relationship between labor and capital.^[15]

With this different forms of production, you can have different levels of decentralization. National high-speed rail needs central planning. Beer, watches, and chairs can be produced by private firms in the market. The key is that those firms should be self-managed by the people in horizontal structures, not vertical. There many examples around the world of worker self-management and recovered businesses that have shifted from the traditional hostile models of to structured Workers' Buyouts (WBOs) supported by legal frameworks and European funding, particularly in Spain. While Argentina remains the historical epicenter, and its movement currently faces significant political headwinds.

We have extraordinary productive capacities to solve the issue we currently have, between imperial violence, ecological breakdown, mass human deprivation and others. If production was organized around human needs and ecological planning, we could very easily resolve the human crisis we face. It is purely the logic of capitalism and the law of value that perpetuates these problems.

It's time to change and bring a different world into being.

References:

1. Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Windmill Books, 2017) ↩

2. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press, 1999) ↩

3. Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) ↩

4. Mark J. Gasiorowski, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse University Press, 2004) ↩

5. Michael Roberts, "Stagflation and the Crisis of Capitalism," Next recession blog, 2022 ↩

6. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004) ↩

7. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton & Company, 2002) ↩

8. International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2022 ↩

9. Eugene V. Debs, "The Issue," Appeal to Reason, 1904 ↩

10. International Energy Agency (IEA), Renewables 2023: Analysis and Forecast to 2028 ↩

11. World Bank, "China's State-Owned Enterprises and Industrial Policy," 2023 ↩

12. Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Windmill Books, 2020) ↩

13. Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (Monthly Review Press, 1974) ↩

14. Mondragon Corporation Annual Report, 2023 ↩

15. Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014) ↩