The US is an empire. Is it the only empire?

A new essay by John Bellamy Foster strawmans Marxist skeptics of the emerging world order.

John Bellamy Foster, writing for The Monthly Review, warns us about The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left. Well into the piece, however, it becomes clear that he’s taking aim at a very different position:

The interimperialist argument today depends on presenting the People’s Republic of China as an imperialist (and straightforwardly capitalist) power in the same sense as the United States…

So are these leftists denying imperialism? Or are they arguing for a more expansive understanding of imperialism — one that implicates countries like China as well? These are very different positions! One suggests a wholesale rejection of the Marxist tradition, while the other simply signals a difference in interpretation.

This sort of rhetoric is unfortunately common, in my experience, among the intellectual tendency JBF speaks for here — that which sees the United States as the sole hub of imperialism in this world. As I’ve argued elsewhere, that perspective only accounts for a narrow and quite controversial theory of imperialism in the Marxist tradition; but read someone like JBF and you will come away with the impression that their is the only theory of imperialism that traces its origin to Marx and Lenin.