Imperial End Times: The Geopolitics of Class War in a Post-American World
This week I delivered a public lecture at the New Zealand Fabian Society. It was a packed house, and the folks who turned up had a range of really engaged questions, comments, and provocations. They were more amenable to my point of view than I expected.
In “Imperial End Times,” I present my theory of (nearly) everything, explaining how global war-making, far-right politics, the dehumanization of our neighbors, and domestic inequality knit together as a single story.
The lecture was live-streamed, which you can still watch here, but the cameraman accidentally foregrounded the back of some guy’s head in the audience and it made the video’s resolution quite fuzzy. But the audio is terrific quality, and I’ve released that as a special episode of the pod:
For the readers, I’ve also got a transcript below (assuming you support the newsletter). Inside you’ll find my breakdown of, well, a lot:
What multipolarity, hegemony, and primacy are—and how they relate.
Why US hegemonic decline is happening.
What imperialist foreign policy is, and how we can know it when we see it.
Why imperialist geopolitics is proliferating, and what makes Sino-US rivalry an inter-imperial rivalry.
Why we are in an age of primitive accumulation, and why the crisis of capitalism is fundamentally a political crisis.
Why imperialist foreign policy is even worse than imperial-ism and imperial order.
What “repressive capital” is, and its function in consolidating oligarchy as the corollary of permanent war.
And what we can do to fight back.