The Empire Will Not Evaporate

Something has gone very sour in the multipolar media sphere over the last year or so. The same voices that spent two years promising their audiences an imminent, cinematic victory — the Zionist entity on the brink, the dollar finished by Christmas 2022, the "Axis of Resistance" poised to redraw the map of West Asia in a single campaign season — have flipped, almost without pausing for breath, into a keening, hysterical pessimism. Yesterday the end of Israel was coming in a matter of weeks. Today the Resistance was always a mirage, everyone was always a CIA/MI6/Mossad asset, the whole struggle is a stage play run by unseen hands, nothing can be done and the US always wins.

When what they had sold as the end of Israel turned instead into the decapitation of Hezbollah's leadership and the collapse of Syrian Ba'athism in December 2024, a number of these figures — Richard Medhurst being only the most visible — simply lost the plot in public. The whiplash is worth dwelling on, because the whiplash is the diagnosis. Triumphalism and doomerism are not opposites. They are the same politics at two moments in time: the politics of people who never understood what they were looking at.

Part of this, to be sure, can be explained by the grubbier hypothesis: that certain individuals in this milieu are compromised — paid, handled and/or blackmailed. That will be true in some cases, and it should be said plainly. But it is too easy an explanation, and too small. The bigger problem that the last two years have revealed is one of political economy. A large section of the "anti-imperialist" commentary sphere had, and has, no serious idea of what US power actually consists of. And because they never understood the thing they were fighting, they mistook every skirmish for the final battle — and mistook every defeat or setback for the end of the world.

What eighty years at the top built

The United States has been the premiere imperialist power for over eighty years. That is not a slogan; it is a material fact with material consequences. Eighty years is long enough for a whole generation of planners, bankers, officers and lawyers to shape the global flows of commodities and capital around American requirements — and to rebuild those flows again when they frayed. Bretton Woods gave the dollar its formal crown in 1944; when the gold anchor was cut in 1971, the system did not collapse but mutated into something purer: a global fiat standard resting on American debt, American finance and American force. For the thirty-five years since the end of the Cold War — since the City's Big Bang and the neoliberal consolidation — the plumbing of world capital has run into and out of New York and London.

This gives the United States powers that no aircraft carrier or superweapon can confer. It can borrow on a scale no other state can approach — gross federal debt now stands at roughly forty trillion dollars, with a deficit projected near two trillion for the current fiscal year, and the world queues up to fund it: net foreign inflows into US securities and banking ran to 184.5 billion in a single month this year.[1][2] The dollar still makes up about 57 percent of the world's declared foreign exchange reserves, with the euro a distant second — together the two imperial currencies account for over three-quarters of the total — and the dollar sits on one side of 89 percent of all foreign exchange transactions, a share that rose in the latest BIS survey.[3][4] That is what "exorbitant privilege" means in practice: a state that can finance open-ended military encirclement of its rivals out of the savings of the rivals themselves. It is not going to evaporate because of a bad quarter, a lost proxy war, or a meme going viral.

And then there is the element the media slop purveyors most consistently neglect, because they don’t understand it or they do but it defies their simplistic narrative: the comprador layer. Eighty years of primacy and thirty-five years of unipolar financialisation have installed, in virtually every country of the Global South, a local bourgeoisie whose wealth, property, children's schooling and pension arrangements are denominated in dollars and pounds, warehoused in Delaware, the Caymans and the English Home Counties, and politically committed to the preservation of the system that prices them. This is neo-colonialism in its most advanced form — extraction without occupation, rule without flags. You do not need to garrison a country when its central bank, its finance ministry, its big capitalists and its NGO sector are already oriented to Washington and London like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Anyone who thinks this machinery dissolves because a BRICS summit issues a communiqué has not begun to understand what imperialism is.

The British comparison should be written on the wall of every multipolar commentator. Britain's land empire largely ceased to exist in the 1960s. And yet Britain remains an imperialist power today — because imperialism was never primarily a matter of maps painted red. It is capital export, financial suction, arms contracts, debt bondage and the subordinate-class machinery that keeps the flows moving. The City of London did not wind itself up when the Union Jack came down over Accra, Aden or Hong Kong; it became the offshore booking office of the Anglo-American century. A system of that depth does not die on a news cycle. It will be dismantled, piece by piece, by organised class forces over many decades.

Marx exposes the illusion of will as the driving force

None of the forces we are analysing here are new. That is the embarrassing part. The classics of our movement dealt with exactly this psychology — the substitution of wish for analysis, of timetables for materialism — at its very first appearance.

In September 1850, Marx broke with the Willich–Schapper minority of the Communist League over precisely this question. The minority wanted revolution now, on demand, powered by sheer enthusiasm. Marx's reply, recorded in the minutes and later reprinted in his Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne, should be engraved over the door of every podcast studio in the multipolar sphere:

They regard not the real conditions but a mere effort of will as the driving force of the revolution. Whereas we say to the workers: 'You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power', you say on the contrary: 'Either we seize power at once, or else we might as well just take to our beds.' … Like the democrats you substitute the catchword of revolution for revolutionary [5]

There is the whole phenomenon in one paragraph, a hundred and seventy-five years ago. The catchword of revolution substituted for revolutionary development. I invite readers to take notice the other pole of the same phenomenon: "either we seize power at once, or else we might as well just take to our beds." Victory on a deadline, or despair. That is exactly the oscillation we have watched — the Hollywood story with a release date, and then, when the release date passed, the declaration that the cinema was always empty.

Marx returned to the point at the height of the Paris Commune. To those demanding guarantees before committing, he wrote to Kugelmann in April 1871:

World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favorable chances.[6]

The slop media economy runs on precisely the demand Marx is mocking: infallibly favourable chances, guaranteed outcomes, a revolution that arrives on schedule and never loses a battle. A politics that can only function on that condition is not a politics; it is infotainment at best. Then when the product fails to deliver — when the enemy proved to have reserves of strength that no amount of wishful histrionics can remove — the product's salesmen had no framework left except conspiracy and collapse.

The long war in the classics

What would a historical materialist framework have said instead? Roughly what the founders of scientific socialism said, every time they faced a defeat.

Marx, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, drew the contrast that should be the epigraph of every serious anti-imperialist publication:

Bourgeois revolutions … storm more swiftly from success to success … but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions … constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible.[7]

The opponent rises again more gigantic than ever. That is not pessimism; that is the sober description of what it means to fight the most powerful ruling class in human history. Marx expected the enemy to recover, to draw new strength from the earth like Antaeus. The Communards he defended knew the same: the working class, he wrote in The Civil War in France, "have no ready-made utopias"; they know that "they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men."[8] Transforming circumstances and men — the struggle changes the strugglers. A movement built on release dates cannot survive that process, because it has never prepared itself for it.

Engels, at the end of his life, drew the tactical conclusion. Surveying half a century of insurrectionary hopes in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, he wrote:

The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are fighting for, body and soul. … But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required.[9]

Long, persistent work. Not a viral clip; not a countdown to dedollarisation; work — organisational, theoretical, educational — it is work that will be measured in decades.

Nobody understood the tempo of defeat better than Rosa Luxemburg, and nobody has ever written a better antidote to the doomerism now being marketed as hard-headed realism. In Reform or Revolution, answering Bernstein's fear that the proletariat might take power "too early," she wrote:

The socialist transformation supposes a long and stubborn struggle, in the course of which, it is quite probable the proletariat will be repulsed more than once … these 'premature' attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions of the final victory.[10]

Repulsed more than once — and the repulses themselves are part of the road. The forward march of the proletariat "on a world historic scale, to its final victory is not, indeed, 'so simple a thing,'" she added, quoting the Brumaire passage above and insisting it remained true after fifty years of scientific socialism.[11] And in her last article, written in January 1919 with the Spartacus rising crushed, her comrades murdered or in flight, and her own death hours away, she produced the single greatest statement of revolutionary duration in our literature:

Revolution is the only form of 'war' – and this is another peculiar law of history – in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of 'defeats.' … The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! … 'Order prevails in Berlin!' You foolish lackeys! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons,' and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be![12]

Read that against the spectacle of commentators announcing the final bankruptcy of the Resistance because a front collapsed. Luxemburg wrote that surrounded by her own defeat — and she was right, and the men with the rifle butts are all in the ground, and her words outlived their “order”.

Lenin built strategy on the same foundation. The world revolution was never, for him, a simultaneous event: "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism," he wrote in 1915, and the socialist revolution "should not be regarded as a single act, but as a period of turbulent political and economic upheavals, the most intense class struggle, civil war, revolutions, and counter-revolutions."[13] A period — with counter-revolutions included in the price. Nor did victory in one place cancel the problem: even after seizing power, the proletariat "remains for a long time weaker than the bourgeoisie, simply because of the latter's extensive international links."[14] There, in three words — extensive international links — is the entire machinery the slop purveyors failed to see: the comprador networks, the dollar plumbing, the century-old web of finance and force that confronts every struggle in every country. And Lenin's conclusion was not despair but method: "The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skilful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between the enemies … Those who do not understand this reveal a failure to understand even the smallest grain of Marxism, of modern scientific socialism in general."[15] Political activity, he reminded the ultra-lefts, quoting Chernyshevsky, "is not like the pavement of Nevsky Prospekt" — not broad, straight, level and swept clean. It is mud, detours, trenches, reversals.[16]

Neither doom nor deadlines

The decline of the US imperialist bloc is real — relative decline is visible in every dataset that matters, from industrial capacity to the slow erosion of the dollar's reserve share — but decline is not collapse, and a declining empire with forty trillion dollars of borrowing capacity, eight hundred bases and a comprador class in every nation is still the most dangerous beast on earth. The long struggle for liberation has only just begun. That was always true; the only people surprised by it were the ones who had sold their audiences a comforting story rather than providing them with a real analysis.

What is required of us is neither doom nor deadlines. It is the patient construction of forces that can last: media that tells the truth about the enemy's strength because the truth is the only basis of strategy; organisations that can survive defeat and learn from it rather than disintegrate into recrimination; and an audience educated in what the struggle actually is as Luxemburg put it in the Junius Pamphlet, the conscious, active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its methods of war, against the alternative of "the collapse of all civilization … a great cemetery."[17] Socialism or barbarism, on no guaranteed schedule.

The doomers will keep selling despair, because despair — like triumph — monetises. Let them have their hysterics and fits of rage that the algorithm suspiciously promotes. The rest of us have work to do that will be measured in decades, and we should say so, plainly, to everyone who will listen: this will take a long time, it will pass through defeats that feel like endings, and we will win anyway.

Always remember.

I was, I am, I shall be.

References

1. US Department of the Treasury, Treasury International Capital (TIC) data for February 2026 (net foreign acquisitions of 184.5 billion), press release, 2026.

2. Joint Economic Committee, National Debt Dashboard (total gross national debt 39.8–40.0 trillion as of August 2026); Treasury quarterly refunding documents (FY2026 deficit projections 2 trillion).

3. IMF, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER), Q1 2026 — US dollar share 57.13%, euro 20.03%: https://data.imf.org/

4. Bank for International Settlements, Triennial Central Bank Survey, April 2025 — the US dollar on one side of 89.2% of all FX trades: https://www.bis.org/statistics/rpfx25_fx.htm

5. Karl Marx, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne (1853), ch. I: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/revelations/ch01.htm

6. Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 April 1871: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_04_17.htm

7. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), ch. I: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

8. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), Third Address: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

9. Frederick Engels, Introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1895): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/03/06.htm

10. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1900/1908), ch. VIII, "Conquest of Political Power": https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch08.htm

11. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, ch. X, "Opportunism and Theory in Practice": https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch10.htm

12. Rosa Luxemburg, "Order Prevails in Berlin" (14 January 1919): https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm

13. V. I. Lenin, "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe" (1915): https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/23.htm

14. V. I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), ch. VIII, "No Compromises?": https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htm

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid. (quoting N. G. Chernyshevsky).

17. Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915): https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/index.htm