There is no magic money tree – the ‘rescue packages’ aim to rescue a rotten system, and won’t work.

This article assesses the two recent historic events in Britain: the exit of Britain from the imperialist bloc known as the European Union (EU); and the crushing electoral defeat of the Labour Party. Neither Brexit, nor Labour’s defeat, can be understood in isolation from the other.

Why is it that just 1p of a £2.50 cup of coffee goes to the farmer who cultivated and harvested the coffee beans?

The Brexiters’ fantasy of a virile Britain freed from the straitjacket of EU regulations are crashing against harsh reality: Britain’s dependence on the European market compels it to maintain close alignment with the EU. But if it is ceases to be a member of the EU, it will have no seat at the ruling table.

“Capitalism/imperialism is extremely proficient at externalizing the costs of its destructiveness, making other peoples and future generations suffer the consequences of its marauding nature but it is not immune from “blow-back” effects. For example, the climate crisis poses a major political challenge to imperialism because it strongly suggests that system change is necessary if we are to avert climate change.”

“The chief constraints confronting imperialism are those that arise from capitalism’s own internal contradictions, and these manifest themselves in the systemic crisis.”

With the notable exception of the Monthly Review school, recent studies of financialization by avowedly Marxist and left-Keynesian economists attempt to theorize it in isolation from the transformations that have taken place in the sphere of production, especially the globalization of production processes and their large-scale relocation to low-wage countries.

“The liberal/mainstream notion of imperialism that permeates…bourgeois political opinion proceeds from the elementary observation that the various empires that have existed during the past three millennia share one obvious characteristic, namely territorial conquest accomplished through military force.”

To fully appreciate the exquisitely excruciating crisis which the British state has landed itself in consider the fact that if Britain wants to get out of Europe it must surrender part of its sovereignty over Northern Ireland—and not only this, since there must be a border between Britain and the EU, this border must be drawn between Britain and the whole of Ireland!

Extreme rates of exploitation in the Global South is a palpable, directly observable fact. We don’t need a theory to know this but we do need a theory if we are to understand what we can see and work out the consequences that flow from it.

When David Harvey says “the historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries has largely been reversed over the last thirty years,” his readers will reasonably assume that he refers to a defining feature of imperialism, namely the plunder of living labour and natural wealth in colonies and semi-colonies by rising capitalist powers in Europe and North America. Indeed, he leaves no doubt about this, since he prefaced these words with reference to “the old categories of imperialism.” But here we encounter the first of his many obfuscations.

John Smith argues that prominent Marxian theorist David Harvey is an imperialism-denier who uses his considerable prestige as a prominent Marxist theoretician to miseducate his readers on the nature of contemporary imperialism.