I’d suggest that we’ve just about reached the limits of imperialism. It will be with us for some time, still. But it cannot sustain itself for much longer. Not to say it’s decline will be smooth or pretty. And it could always be rebuilt, although the planet would likely not survive it.

Capitalism is cracking apart under the weight of it’s own contradictions. Such as the US having the power to instruct Europe to deindustrualise and implode, backfiring and strengthening the Ruble, etc. This would not have been possible even a hundred years ago – Britain, then, for example, might have had the power to force it’s dependencies to destroy themselves, but not multiple advanced capitalist core states all at the same time. No state, back then, could have done to the whole of Europe what the US has done this last year.

The difference between now and earlier epochs is that today there are powerful socialist forces in place to prevent a return to unipolarity (once multipolarity is ‘complete’). Socialist thought is also more popular than it might seem according to ‘official’ sources. We’ll soon be at the stage where liberalism not only cannot offer solutions but cannot give the appearance of offering solutions, either.

Once the world fully pivots away from the US and the global north loses easy access to all the things that make living relatively affordable, even liberals in the global north will have to start answering the question of how to sustain their quality of life without socialism. The stark reality will start to destroy the Anglo-European exceptionalism that goes hand in hand with chauvinism.

This is an optimistic assessment, I admit. But it’s either this, nuclear war, or climate catastrophe. And we probably aren’t surviving the latter two, so there’s no point worrying about what that would look like (unless we’re worrying about it so as to prevent it).

Unipolarity and western hegemony was only possible so long as the west had dominance in industrial production and technological advances. They acquired this lead due to colonialism and imperialism wrecking other countries’ productive capacities (most notably India and China which used to vastly outproduce Europe before the industrial revolution) and extracting wealth from the global south while keeping it underdeveloped. However as the rate of profit of industrial capital in the imperial core declined they were forced to start exporting capital to the periphery. In the short term this restores profitability to the imperial core in the form of neoliberal financialization but in the long term this lets the periphery catch up in terms of industry and technology. This is what we have seen happen with China and what will happen with the rest of the global south as well provided it can assert its independence to pursue rational economic policies and mutually beneficial trade relations that lead to real development. This is the opposite of the process that occurred before WW1 where the colonial subjugation of the global south prevented such development and when industrial capital in the imperial core was just entering the monopoly phase.

I think the biggest difference between now and the 1900s is that this time, one of the geopolitical poles isn’t competing. That is, it’s not invading, not inciting revolutions, not creating monopolies, not making countries pick a side. Plus it has the relative security of having basically the entire planet relying on its production, especially the other poles.

I’d argue that the multipolarity of the past was destroyed by the profit drive of capitalist superpowers. But there’s no reason why socialist multipolarity would lead to the same global infighting.

Here is also a roadmap of the idea of moving toward socialism through multipolarity: https://internationalmanifesto.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/through-pluripolarity-to-socialism-a-manifesto-final.pdf

Imo this is absolutely mandatory reading for any socialist or communist in the current era.

I do not know what you mean by ‘socialization’ of production. If you meant democratization or decentralization of production, then it is becoming possible with the rising power of Russia under Populist Putin and China under Xi Jinping which allow former European colonies to gain development through other means than bootlicking foreign free riders with imperialist agenda. Donald Trump also did move America away from the American government’s monopoly over the global public sector with the conflict between conservative elites and metrpolitan elites in the USA.

Also, the current centralized modern bourgeois nation-states arise from free riding and forced dependencies on states and institutions from Western Europeans and Western European emigrants who use the very government intervention by Western European emigrants that they complained about to oppose government by colored people; I do not see how the centralization of capital is from socialization as much as it has to do with authoritarianism by Western European diaspora.

The Western European empires and countries of Western European emigrants gain their success through the plunder of resource, industrial technology, fruit of the labor by colored people, and horticultural skills from enslaved colored people that allow them to become great power in the global scale. They then maintain their uni-polarity through the destruction of the civilization of the colonized people and the credit thief of what is left of the civilization from the people that they colonized.