IMPERIALISM TODAY

STRUGGLE FORWARD

D. RAJA, General Secretary, CPI

Imperialism today no longer requires colonies in the traditional sense. It governs through networks of finance, data, and technology — invisible chains binding nations to the logic of capital accumulation. The world that emerged from the ashes of the Cold War falsely promised unending prosperity under the banner of globalisation and neo-liberalism. What we have instead is what Lenin would recognise immediately: “a world dominated by monopolies and finance capital, a world divided among a handful of powers for whom profit is the only principle.” The United States, having reigned unchallenged for three decades, now faces an irreversible decline in hegemony. Yet, like every empire before it, it refuses to cede its power gracefully. The unipolar world order, which enforced obedience through the dollar, NATO, and the IMF, is collapsing under its contradictions. In its place rises a multipolar configuration, represented most clearly by the BRICS bloc — a historical necessity born out of the world’s exhaustion with American diktat.

The desperation of U.S. imperialism is visible everywhere — in its sanctions, trade wars, and military encirclements.Donald Trump’s weaponisation of tariffs reveals that “free trade” was never a principle but a tactic. The U.S. now deploys economic coercion as openly as it once deployed gunboats. But while Washington can still threaten, it can no longer command. The growing cohesion of the BRICS group — now expanded to include West Asian and African powers — signals that the age of unipolarity is over. The world is moving towards a plural balance of forces, and this transition, though chaotic, carries revolutionary potential.

Marx once observed that “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production.” Nowhere is this truer than in the technological sphere. Artificial intelligence, automation, biotechnology, and digital networks promise an age of abundance — yet they deliver deeper inequality and social fragmentation. Under capitalism, technology does not serve human needs; it serves profit. The concentration of technological power in a few U.S.-based monopolies — Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft — mirrors the financial oligarchies of Lenin’s day. These firms have become the new East India Companies of the digital age. They extract not spices or cotton but data — the raw material of the 21st century — from billions of users worldwide. The wealth generated by this digital labour, produced collectively by global humanity, flows to a narrow elite concentrated in Silicon Valley.

The paradox is striking: as technology advances, the working majority becomes more precarious. Instead of reducing working hours or raising living standards, digital capitalism extends surveillance, automates exclusion, and hollows out social protections. Gig workers deliver food, code software, and moderate online content, yet remain invisible and disposable. Marx’s concept of “the reserve army of labour” finds new life in the app economy — a vast mass of underpaid workers permanently available for exploitation at the click of a button. This is the true face of what the bourgeois economists call the “digital revolution.” It is not a revolution for the people, but against them.

In the global South, and particularly in South Asia, this technological order reproduces dependency. The region’s promise of “digital transformation” often means the extension of imperialist control through technological infrastructure. Western and now increasingly multinational monopolies dictate standards, own platforms, and control data flows. The dependence on imported hardware, proprietary software, and foreign capital ensures that even when labour is local, the surplus is global. In this sense, digitalisation has not dismantled the colonial division of labour; it has deepened it.

India offers a textbook case of this contradiction. The country boasts of being the world’s IT powerhouse, the land of start-ups and software giants. Yet beneath this glitter lies a reality Lenin would have identified instantly: a capitalist structure reliant on cheap, docile labour rather than genuine innovation. The start-up ecosystem, celebrated as the symbol of “New India,” is overwhelmingly dependent on the availability of low-cost engineers and data workers, performing outsourced tasks for Western corporations. Indian technology firms serve as the back-office of global capitalism, not as engines of national transformation. The majority of their profits come from providing labour, not from developing indigenous technology that solves India’s own problems — of public health, rural infrastructure, or ecological crisis.

The result is a paradox of progress: India produces some of the world’s most skilled programmers, yet its villages lack drinking water and its cities crumble under pollution. The slogan of “Digital India” conceals a deeper truth — that technology, instead of being a liberating force, has been harnessed to reinforce existing inequalities. Platforms promising empowerment have entrenched precarity; automation threatens jobs faster than education can replace them. The ruling class, dominated by corporate monopolies aligned with global finance – international finance capital, celebrates technological triumphs while suppressing the question of who benefits. As Marx noted, “The development of productive forces is not the development of humanity as long as those forces remain the property of the few.”

Neoliberalism, which arrived in India in 1991 as the supposed cure for backwardness, has produced not prosperity but polarisation. Its marriage with Hindutva has created a hybrid order — combining religious obscurantism with corporate greed. The Modi government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat rhetoric masks unprecedented dependence on foreign capital and the decimation of small-scale industries. The labour codes, the privatisation of public assets, and the corporate capture of agriculture all flow from the same logic: make India safe for capital, not for its people. Even the much-lauded “Make in India” campaign has turned into an invitation for multinational corporations to exploit cheaper labour and weaker environmental laws.

The struggle against imperialism in India therefore cannot be separated from the struggle against its domestic bourgeoisie, which serves as the local agent of global capital. India’s participation in BRICS and other multipolar platforms opens new possibilities for strategic autonomy, but autonomy without socialism merely shifts dependency from one master to another. The working class and peasantry must define what independence means — not merely a seat at global summits, but control over national resources, technology, and labour. The Left must reclaim the idea of development itself: production guided by social need, not private profit.

Globally, the rise of multipolarity does not automatically end exploitation. It creates conditions for its transcendence — if the progressive forces of the world can unite around a socialist alternative. Lenin’s warning remains prophetic: “Imperialism would be lifeless without the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations, who help the oppressors.” The battle lines today are not between East and West, but between capital and labour, between those who monopolise technology and those whose work sustains it.

The task for the Communist movement is to transform this historical flux into conscious struggle. We must expose the new forms of imperialism — digital, financial, ecological — and build solidarity among workers across borders. We must fight for public ownership of critical technologies, for democratic control over data, for socialisation of innovation. The promise of automation and artificial intelligence can only be fulfilled under socialism, where technology serves human needs rather than capital’s profit. Marx’s declaration — that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” — must become not a slogan but a programme.

The twilight of U.S. hegemony opens a new dawn for humanity, but dawn alone is not daylight. The multipolar world will either be a battlefield of competing capitalisms or the birthplace of a new internationalism. To ensure the latter, the working class must lead. As Marx and Engels concluded in 1848, that we have a world to win. Today, that world includes the right to shape technology, to share its fruits equally, and to end the exploitation that imperialism — in all its forms, old and new — continues to impose upon humanity.