Post-Imperialism
Discussion
Nel Bonnilla on why there is no unified vision for a post-imperialist world
Nel Bonilla:
"Our current situation looks much closer to elite‑competitive multipolarity than to any anti‑imperialist version. This is not because the specific infrastructure that existed during the Cold War—Bandung, the Non‑Aligned Movement, the Tricontinental Conference—that made even an embryonic anti‑imperialist multipolarity possible has largely disappeared.
It is precisely against this loss of institutional tissue that Lenin’s theory of imperialism becomes so instructive. For Lenin, dismantling a global and imperial system of extraction was never just a matter of changing the distribution of power among states; it required a three-fold foundation: a shared political horizon, an organized transnational force, and mass movements capable of structural change. Today, all three of these components are missing.
There is, first, no shared vision of a post‑imperial world—no common horizon around which states and movements might converge. The dominant language now is “civilizational diversity” and sovereignty. This is important for resisting Western lecturing, but it says nothing about how societies and economies might be reorganized at another level. It is a vocabulary of coexistence and rightly so, but it is not of transformation.
Gone, too, is anything resembling an international network that could coordinate strategy across borders in the way the Comintern once did. Today’s forums—BRICS, the SCO, the G20—are interstate coordination clubs, while the alternative institutions that do exist, like CIPS or the BRICS Bank, are complementary to the world market, not replacements for its underlying logic. More precisely, no parallel infrastructure is being built on a non‑capitalist and, hence, non‑imperial basis.
And the third absence is perhaps the most consequential: mass movements with transformational power and political awareness. During the Cold War, ordinary people were mobilized—however imperfectly—into organizations that linked local struggles to a global horizon. Today, international outreach is overwhelmingly elite‑to‑elite: academic exchanges, trade delegations, and diplomatic communiqués. Meanwhile, for the broader public, the digital sphere produces a kind of “hyperpolitics”—a spectacle of inevitability and triumphalism that feels like political engagement, yet, citizens become spectators cheering for their geopolitical team, replacing the labor of organization with the illusion of participation. (Still, I’m thankful such spaces still exist at all.)"