THE DUST HAD barely settled after the US attack on Venezuela, and the seizure of its oil industry, when Donald Trump was imposing an oil embargo on Cuba, threatening war on Iran and demanding the US takeover of Greenland.

This is naked imperialism – red in tooth and claw. The claim that the United States stands for democracy has been exploded abroad. But likewise democracy is disappearing fast at home in the US, with the executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE in Minneapolis. At the time of writing, six other people – all immigrants – have died in ICE custody so far this year, on top of the 32 last year.¹

The USA is getting closer to Dimitrov’s characterisation of fascism as the “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”² Behind the big oil, gas minerals and ‘defence’ companies, who stand to gain from this naked imperialism, are institutional investors like State Street, BlackRock and Vanguard, as internet searches will show. Those companies also have significant stakes in Big Tech, which is embedded with the military and involved in the deployment of a massive techno-surveillance state in the US.³

So much for “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. But was the United States ever free, democratic and exceptional? Was it destined to spread the values of liberty and democracy globally? In our lead article here, Stephen Scott exposes that myth. The article is a long read, but we print it in full because of its timeliness in the current situation. Going right back to the founding convention in 1787, the author shows that the Constitution was written by wealthy white men to defend their interests against the poor, and chief among those interests was slave ownership.

“From early on,” he says, “an elite colonial land-grabbing class … contrived its own attitudes and perspectives – those which served it best,” exploiting the unfree labour of indentured servants, African slaves and Native Americans, all of whom – as well as women – were then disenfranchised by the Continental Congress. This elite class was inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, and in both the South and the North gained from that “peculiar institution” of slavery, the former through direct exploitation, and the latter through bank loans to the slave owners.

As Stephen also shows, the ideas that sustained the notions of race and a class-stratified slave society were birthed and developed together, the concept of ‘whiteness’ not existing until about 1613, but thereafter being used, along with a bogus early ‘race science’, to underpin a racialised stratification in early American thought. It took the Civil War to end slavery, and even after that was over “Divisions [maintained] amongst the lower classes, throughout the South, served as a powerful and effective hegemonic tool of supremacy.”

The US has never come to terms with its past, and white supremacist views are very much present today in its attitude to former colonial peoples in Latin America, and in secretary of state Marco Rubio’s ‘new colonialism’ vision expounded at the Munich Security Conference on February 14.⁴

Stephen Scott’s article is followed by two shorter articles commenting on recent actions by the US. Indian Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik characterises this as a “gangster phase” of imperialism, but says it cannot last for long, because “The people of the world, especially of the Third World who have been victims of imperialism, will not allow themselves once again to remain in thraldom to imperialist domination.” Marc Vandepitte says that “the historic dominance of a single superpower, the US, is visibly crumbling” and that “Washington and the Western allies are desperately trying to reverse that trend” because “maximum profit and the maintenance or expansion of Western transnationals, tech companies and financial institutions … is at stake,” and this is “the clash of the 21st century.”

Marc points out that Rubio is “a pronounced China hawk” who considers that “the power struggle between the US and China will determine the entire story of the 21st century.” Many European governments, including our own, will take the same view. To sustain that position, an entire industry of anti-China propaganda has been built up on both sides of the Atlantic. In his article here, Mark Blacklock exposes the activities of that nexus in Britain.

The following contribution, by Arnaud Bertrand, focuses on China from a different perspective. A speech by Chinese president Xi Jinping was widely quoted in Western media, because he explicitly called for the Yuan to “possess global reserve currency status”. But, as Arnaud explains, they have missed the point, because the speech wasn’t about challenging the dollar. Rather, it was about the role of ethical finance under socialism and internationally, building “a financial system that the world has decided to trust.” That is the real power struggle between the US and China.

Three more articles complete this edition of CR. Richard Clarke defends Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 against detractors, and maintains, like Eric Hobsbawm, that it emerges “with flying colours”. Then Ruth Pitman looks at the application of the categories of dialectical and historical materialism in Marxist-Leninist education. Finally, in his ‘Soul Food’ column, Nick Moss introduces us to the terrific writing of worker-poet Matthew Rice.

Our next edition is planned to be devoted to the centenary of the 1926 General Strike and Miners’ Lock-Out.

Notes and References

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/28/deaths-ice-2026-.

2. G Dimitrov, ‘The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International’, in The United Front, Lawrence & Wishart, 1938, p10.

3. https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-06-05/how-the-us-is-turning-intoa-mass-techno-surveillance-state.html. 

4. Morning Star, 16 February 2026, https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/rubio-gives-green-light-new-era-us-european-colonialism.