Death Rides Out: Imperialism in the 21st Century, by Tomáš Tengely-Evans
Camilla Royle: Why did you write the book?
Tomáš Tengely-Evans: Originally I’d planned to write a short introduction to the Marxist theory of imperialism.
I actually went to Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the First World War began, to write it. And the day after I started, Donald Trump launched the war on Iran.
So it turned into a longer book. It does go through the Marxist theory of imperialism but it also tries to apply it and update it for some of the arguments going on today.
The horrors that we’re seeing, with genocide in Gaza and other wars around the world, aren’t just down to bad policy. It’s a question of the capitalist system.
CR: You go back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but also Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding and others. Why are their ideas still relevant?
TTE: In the run-up to the First World War, Marxists were confronted by a very new situation—rival empires competing to carve up the world.
Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and others were asking what was driving these changes around the world.
There are many things in Lenin and Bukharin that no longer fit, that were over-generalised from specific things that were going on at the time. Luxemburg’s theory is different and was shown to be fundamentally flawed in many ways.
But nonetheless, the rational kernel is that imperialism is a global system of competing states. This competition is rooted in the dynamics of capital accumulation, the dynamics of profit making.
This is why what these thinkers say is incredibly important.
CR: You argue that imperialism is a system of competing states. Some on the left would say that the US is the only great imperial power. Was that a debate you wanted to address?
TTE: Yes. On two levels. When Lenin and Bukharin and others were writing, there were just a handful of advanced capitalist states in the world.
When we look at the world today, it’s a world of many advanced capitalist states.
There are still a handful of major imperialist powers at the top. But other states jockey for position and try to assert their interests at every level.
Seeing it in that dynamic way is important, because if you don’t, then you end up saying that imperialism is just reducible to US imperialism. Or on the flip side, it’s just reducible to Russian imperialism.
Today, there are people who think that China is not an imperialist power.
But if you look at the trade relations China has with the Global South, they replicate the inequalities in trade relations between the West and the Global South.
China is projecting its economic power, has reshaped the global economy and is using that as leverage in international negotiations.
Energy exports from the Middle East—or West Asia—have been reorientated towards China. It clearly is an imperialist state.
The flip side are those people who say that Russia was very bad because it invaded Ukraine and therefore we have to back Nato or the European Union.
The only way to break out of that is to ask, what’s the force that could actually take on imperialism? It’s the working class in each country fighting against its own imperialist ruling class.
CR: What debates around Palestine did you want to address?
TTE: There’s a big debate about the relationship between the US and Israel. And that’s been writ large during the war on Iran.
A section of the Palestine movement sees the war on Iran as an Israeli war against US national interests.
We have to look at what the real relationship is.
Israel remains a watchdog of US imperialism in the Middle East. From the very beginning, imperialism saw the Zionist settler‑colonial movement in Palestine as a means of securing control over a key part of the world which had oil reserves and so on.
The British wanted a “loyal little Jewish Ulster” in the Middle East with a population that will not rise up, because it’s in its interest to dispossess the Palestinians. Other regimes are more vulnerable because people can rise up.
After the Second World War, you see the US take over from the British and French as the key imperial force in the Middle East.
Israel has been massively funded and propped up by the US because it needs this loyal settler colony.
However, we’ve seen the development of regional imperialist powers in recent years, and Israel is one of them.
A regional imperialist is a power that can’t compete on a global level for hegemony—for leadership—in the way that the US, Britain, Russia and China do. But it can compete on a regional basis. You see countries striving to become what we would call centres of capital accumulation outside the historic core of capitalism.
Saudi Arabia, for example, no longer just relies on oil.
Israel is an incredibly high-tech economy. It is dependent on military aid, but it’s not dependent on economic aid from the US.
This higher level of capitalist development allows it to flex its muscles more.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump that he could get a quick victory in Iran and that there would be regime change.
Netanyahu has spread war whenever there’s been tension with the US over the genocide.
That tension with the US has existed not because the US cares about the Palestinians, but because they were worried that Israel would destabilise other regimes that are part of the US imperialist infrastructure in the region.
Israel has strained at the leash, but it’s always been able to lock in US support during the genocide precisely because the US needs Israel.
What we’re seeing now is quite a big crisis. Iran was supposed to be a war to secure US dominance. It’s actually made it weaker and it’s caused major rifts and tensions with Israel.
The US just goes over the head of Israel now. Israel’s security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, can say “we’re a sovereign nation, our policy is not dependent upon the US”.
But that’s not true. Israel couldn’t survive militarily without the US.
CR: You’ve done new research about the drive to extract rare earths and other technological developments. What role are natural resources playing in imperialism today?
TTE: There is an argument about resource imperialism. The Financial Times newspaper did this piece after Trump kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela.
It said that there was this new era of resource imperialism where big powers were just trying to nab resources.
But imperialism isn’t just about grabbing resources for that power to use itself. The US doesn’t actually need the oil in Venezuela.
But it was very convenient to grab that oil so it could starve Cuba, because it wants to stamp its control over the Western hemisphere.
Chinese dominance over the rare earth supply chain is behind Trump saying he wants to grab Greenland.
Rare earths are used in everyday things like your computer screen, but also in armaments and “defence” technologies. They are key to production and key to states being able to compete.
So it’s incredibly important for the US to have its own capacity to mine and process them. And Greenland has a wealth of rare earths.
The trouble is that China dominates every level of the supply chain. In the 1980s, it decided that it was going to pour long-term investment into mining but also processing rare earths.
Because of some of the contradictions of globalisation, the US became less able to do this. Even when the US was mining rare earths, it was sending them to China to process, then back to the US.
CR: You pose a choice between socialism or barbarism—what can socialists do to try to end the barbarism of war?
TTE: In the book I try to apply a general approach to specific situations. There’s always a tactical question about what you say in each particular war.
Take the war in Iran. I think you have to be for the military defeat of the US, but not for political support of the Iranian regime.
In Iran, there have been workers’ strikes since the war began.
Do you stand with the regime on that question? I think, instead, you have to say stop the bombing, but also that US and Israeli bombs don’t bring liberation.
There are differences between the case of Palestine and that of Ukraine.
The Israeli occupation of Palestine is a very clear example of colonialism.
You have to support the national liberation struggle of the Palestinians, while saying the armed struggle isn’t actually going to defeat imperialism. You have to look towards a broader revolt and revolution within the region.
In Ukraine, of course there’s an element of self-defence in that they were invaded by Russia.
But that’s not the dominant characteristic of the war. The dominant characteristic is inter-imperialist rivalry between the West and Russia which has torn Ukraine apart.
The general principle is that the main enemy is at home. You have to fight against your own government, because that’s what you can most effectively do. But you have to be part of trying to turn that into a global struggle against the system as a whole.
And there’s quite a strong basis to do that, if you think about the size and breadth of the Palestine movement.
But the missing element in all of these things is the power of workers. You saw glimpses of that with strikes in Greece and Italy, with Moroccan dockworkers walking out and shutting down ports to stop the flow of arms and so on.
A key task is to connect the power of these movements against war and genocide to the disruptive power of workers who can take on the war machine. They can take on and stop the profit system, which is ultimately driving what’s going on.
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