Article – 2 March 2026
Eduardo Salgado Reyes, Editor SolidarioGB
Abstract
This article examines the fundamental contradictions inherent in global capitalism through a Marxist-Leninist lens. It argues that the root cause of contemporary systemic crises—from financial meltdowns to ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and escalating great-power conflict—lies in capitalism’s insatiable drive for perpetual accumulation within a finite system. This growth imperative generates chronic overproduction, which in turn necessitates imperialist expansion, financialisation, and the strategic deployment of identity-based divisions to fragment working-class solidarity. The analysis focuses particular attention on the emerging geopolitical confrontation between the NATO-led Western alliance and the expanding BRICS coalition as rival blocs competing for dwindling resources, markets, and spheres of influence. While this inter-imperialist rivalry creates new strategic openings, the final consequence of capitalism’s crisis is not merely economic collapse or environmental catastrophe, but a humanity shattered into warring factions, unable to recognise its common enemy.
1. Introduction: The Machine That Cannot Stop
There is a fundamental truth about capitalism that its apologists dare not speak: the system cannot stop growing. It is not designed to, it cannot be reformed to, and it will destroy itself and much of the planet trying. This is not a matter of political opinion but of structural analysis. Capital is not merely wealth; it is wealth in motion, value forever seeking to expand itself. As Marx understood, competition provides the impulse for capitalist expansion, and the most potent strategy in that competitive struggle is to increase productivity through technological advance.
The result is a machine that must produce without end—even when the planet is bursting at the seams, even when workers have nothing left with which to buy what they have made. This is not a bug; it is the operating system. And it is driving us toward a precipice.
2. The Contradiction of Overproduction
2.1 Production Without Purpose
The classical Marxist tradition grasped what bourgeois economics deliberately obscures: crises are not aberrations but necessary expressions of capitalism’s inner contradictions. As Lenin noted, drawing on Marx’s insights, “in the capitalist society, it is unavoidable that sometimes—because of the violation of the correct relation between the different branches of industry—an excess of products appears.” This overproduction is not a surplus of genuine wealth—it is a surplus of commodities that cannot be sold because the masses who need them lack the means to purchase them.
The perversity is staggering. We produce more food than ever, yet hunger spreads. We build more housing than ever, yet homelessness explodes. We generate more clothing, more technology, more everything—and the response of capital is not to distribute, but to destroy. Surplus production is burned, ploughed under, or dumped, because to give it away would undermine the prices upon which profitability depends.
2.2 The Limits of Markets
Marx located the limits for any given innovation in the size of the market. Industrial expansion creates both the need for more raw materials and the need for larger markets for its products. The natural consequence is to internationalise capitalism. Capitalists destroy the handicraft industries of backward countries with their cheap products and force them into the production of raw materials. In this way, as Marx described, a “new international division of labour” springs up, converting one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a chiefly industrial field.
But this expansion merely postpones the inevitable. Eventually, the entire globe is incorporated, and there remain no new markets to conquer. At that point, overproduction becomes permanent and structural.
3. Imperialism as the Response to Overproduction
3.1 Lenin’s Analysis
Lenin carried this theme further, demonstrating that competition—the driving engine of capitalism—was being replaced by monopoly. The development of monopolies controlling raw materials, prices, and production through the gigantic scale of firms, combined with banks that had formed links with industry to create a system of finance capital, fundamentally altered capitalism’s operation.
Through the export of capital—contrasted with the earlier pattern of exporting goods—this system “divided up the world” economically, accompanied by a political division through colonial domination. Lenin identified this imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, finding it parasitic and replete with contradictions: the oppression of cartels, the rising cost of living, and the ever-sharpening conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production.
3.2 Contemporary Imperialism
Today, this analysis remains devastatingly relevant. The transformation of capitalism into its highest stage is, as Lenin insisted, the product of irreversible economic processes. The crisis-ridden nature of the capitalist production system requires the formation of monopolies and cartels, which increasingly lose their temporary character as aids to overcome specific crises and become the dominant form of the organisation of production. The socialization of production advances enormously—but the mode of appropriation remains private. Powerful financial oligarchies gain the capacity to bend societies and governments to their will.
As George Liodakis argues in his analysis of contemporary totalitarian imperialism, we are witnessing a dialectical supersession of classical imperialism, characterised by the emerging divide and conflict within world capitalism between western NATO forces (US, EU, et al.) on the one hand, and the rising bloc of the BRICS countries on the other . This is not merely a continuation of old patterns but a new configuration shaped by the deepening crisis of global capitalism.
4. The Inter-Imperialist Rivalry: NATO versus BRICS
4.1 The Material Basis of Conflict
The fundamental driver of contemporary geopolitical confrontation is not ideological or cultural—it is the competition for dwindling resources, markets, and spheres of influence in an era of chronic overproduction and ecological limits. As one political analyst observes, Washington is no longer competing through ideas or diplomacy but through force: “Militarism is now replacing democracy… it’s about militarism and the expansion of American imperialism” . The dispute over Greenland, the war in Ukraine, the tensions in the South China Sea—all signal a broader contest over strategic resources.
The warning is explicit: “If America discovers that they have a demand or a shortage of a sitting mineral… he’s definitely going to take military action” . This is imperialism in its rawest form—the direct application of military power to secure the material inputs upon which capital accumulation depends.
4.2 The Military Balance
The confrontation between NATO and the expanded BRICS coalition (now including Indonesia and Iran as of 2025) reveals a complex military balance that reflects the underlying economic and demographic shifts in global power :
Active Troops and Manpower: The expanded BRICS alliance commands a massive active force of over 5 million troops. China and India alone contribute nearly 3.5 million soldiers, while the addition of Indonesia and Egypt adds substantial numbers. NATO’s 32 nations field approximately 3.3 million active personnel .
Defence Budget Disparity: NATO holds a dominant financial lead with collective defence spending exceeding $1.4 trillion in 2024-25. The United States alone accounts for roughly $935 billion—double the combined spending of all other NATO allies. BRICS nations spend significantly less in nominal terms (estimated at around $480 billion), though purchasing power parity allows them to produce equipment at much lower costs .
Nuclear Arsenal: Russia possesses the world’s largest verified stockpile of nuclear warheads (approximately 5,580). Combined with China’s growing arsenal (600) and India’s 172 weapons, the BRICS bloc controls over 6,350 warheads. NATO’s nuclear assets total approximately 5,560 warheads, maintaining strategic parity and mutual deterrence .
Land Power: BRICS nations hold a decisive numerical advantage with China leading at 6,800 combat tanks, Russia at 5,750, India at 4,200, and Egypt contributing 3,620 .
Air and Naval Power: NATO retains undisputed supremacy in advanced combat aircraft and open-ocean naval projection, with 11 US nuclear supercarriers enabling global power projection. BRICS focuses on coastal defence and regional control .
This military configuration reflects the broader strategic reality: NATO maintains technological and financial superiority, while BRICS possesses demographic mass, raw industrial capacity, and geographic spread across the Global South .
4.3 The Economic War
The military confrontation is inseparable from the economic war being waged through sanctions, tariffs, and financial warfare. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s demand that India, China, and Brazil halt Russian oil imports—backed by US threats of 100% tariffs—reveals the extent to which economic coercion has become a primary weapon of imperialist strategy . China’s response captures the essence of the conflict: “We categorically oppose all illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction. Coercion and pressure cannot resolve fundamental issues” .
The stakes are immense. India saves more than $11 billion annually by purchasing discounted Russian oil. European countries, despite their rhetoric, still purchase 19% of their natural gas requirements from Russia . The attempt to choke Russian oil exports—which account for 15% of global supply—would spike international crude prices by an estimated 20-30%, demonstrating that the imperialist powers are prepared to sacrifice global economic stability for strategic advantage .
4.4 De-dollarisation and the BRICS Challenge
The rise of BRICS represents a direct challenge to the financial architecture of US imperialism. Trump’s characterization of BRICS as an “anti-American” group reflects genuine concern over de-dollarisation threats . The fact that the Russian economy has survived nearly four years of sanctions and military conflict is seen as “a direct affront to the supposed power of economic sanctions and Western plans to weaken the nation” .
D. Raja, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India, articulates the significance of this moment: “The unipolar world order, which enforced obedience through the dollar, NATO, and the IMF, is collapsing under its contradictions. In its place rises a multipolar configuration, represented most clearly by the BRICS bloc—a historical necessity born out of the world’s exhaustion with American diktat” .
4.5 The Three Wars of NATO Imperialism
As Pepe Escobar observes, the contemporary imperialist offensive encompasses three overlapping wars: Europe versus Russia (no longer proxy but direct confrontation); the Empire of Chaos versus Iran in West Asia, with Israel as both proxy and lead actor; and NATO versus China, already decided in strategy if not yet in direct engagement .
Yet the deeper reality is even more significant: “the scam is much bigger: it’s NATO’s war on BRICS” . The attempt to threaten India, China, and Brazil directly, to disrupt BRICS connectivity and corridors, and to maintain Western dominance through force reveals the essential nature of the conflict—imperialism defending its prerogatives against the rising challenger.
5. The Ecological Wall
5.1 Capitalism’s Metabolic Rift
The growth imperative collides not only with market limits but with the biophysical limits of the planet itself. Contemporary Marxist ecology identifies a metabolic rift—the disruption of the fundamental material exchanges between humanity and nature. Capitalism treats the earth as a limitless quarry and an infinite waste dump, but the planet is neither.
The results are unmistakable: climate collapse, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, topsoil depletion, freshwater scarcity. These are not environmental problems in the narrow sense—they are the ecological expression of capitalism’s drive for perpetual accumulation. As Ying Chen notes in her analysis of ecological imperialism, the Western climate consensus itself has become a mechanism for perpetuating imperialist relations, imposing costs on the Global South while protecting the privileges of the core .
5.2 Resource Wars as Ecological Imperialism
The competition for resources between NATO and BRICS is simultaneously a competition for the remaining ecological space of the planet. Every lithium deposit, every rare earth mineral, every source of fresh water and arable land becomes a strategic asset in the inter-imperialist rivalry. The militarisation of the Arctic, the conflict in the South China Sea, the scramble for African minerals—all are expressions of capitalism’s ecological crisis.
The concept of ecological imperialism captures this dynamic: the advanced capitalist powers externalise the ecological costs of their accumulation onto the periphery, while simultaneously securing access to the resources that accumulation requires. The rise of BRICS does not automatically transcend this logic—it reconfigures it, creating new centres of ecological demand and new peripheries of extraction.
6. The Strategic Deployment of Division
6.1 Managing Contradiction
Here we arrive at the most perverse dimension of capitalism’s crisis management. The system’s inherent contradictions—extreme wealth for a few alongside immiseration for the many—contain the potential for unified class-based resistance. If the exploited majority recognised its common enemy, the edifice would tremble.
The response is divide and conquer, elevated to an art form. As capitalist social order functions like a Hydra, a many-headed dragon, the strategy of capital is to ensure that any challenge to one form of oppression remains isolated from challenges to others. The beast survives by ensuring that its heads cannot be cut off simultaneously.
6.2 The Weaponisation of Identity
The narratives deployed are many: race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, culture. Each is a genuine site of human experience and, often, of real oppression. But under capitalism, these identities are also weaponised—amplified and manipulated to fragment the working class.
Rather than focusing on a billionaire’s tax avoidance, different groups are pitted against one another over social issues. The working class is divided along racial lines, with one segment told their jobs are being taken by another, rather than both recognising that their jobs are being offshored by corporate decisions. Anger about economic precarity is redirected toward marginalised communities—immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities—who are scapegoated as the cause of social decay or economic hardship.
This is not to deny the reality of identity-based oppression. On the contrary: it is to recognise that capital exploits these oppressions, deepens them, and deploys them as weapons against working-class solidarity. As Lenin understood in his writings on the national question, the struggle against oppression in all its forms is integral to the revolutionary project—but it must be understood within the framework of class struggle, not as a substitute for it.
6.3 False Consciousness and Hegemony
The concept of false consciousness remains essential here. In Marxist terms, false consciousness means accepting one or another version of the bourgeois myths: that capitalist society is just, that it rewards merit, that it is the best possible system. When workers embrace the divisions offered them—when they prioritise racial or national identity over class solidarity—they are exercising a consciousness shaped by the ruling class’s ideological hegemony.
Western Marxism, in its retreat from economic materialism, has sometimes treated ideology as autonomous, as if ideas rather than economic conflicts are what lead to revolutionary change. But the materialist position insists that ideology, however powerful, remains anchored in the economic base. The task is not to abandon class analysis for cultural politics, but to understand how culture and ideology function within the class struggle.
7. The Revolutionary Challenge: Navigating Inter-Imperialist Rivalry
7.1 The Strategic Question
The emergence of inter-imperialist rivalry between NATO and BRICS poses a strategic question for revolutionary forces. How should the Left position itself in relation to this conflict? The answer requires careful theoretical and political clarity.
George Liodakis offers essential guidance: “Referring more specifically to the emerging divide and conflict within world capitalism, between western NATO forces (US, EU, et al.) on the one hand, and the rising block of the BRICS countries on the other, we take a critical stance against those (left-wing) commentators or political currents, which consider this conflict as a typical inter-imperialist rivalry and argue for the need of taking an equal distance from the opposite poles of this rising confrontation” .
The crucial distinction is this: while revolutionary forces should not, by any means, identify with the BRICS coalition, the “equal-distance approach” is theoretically mistaken and politically dangerous. The reason is straightforward: “a multi-polar world would be a more favorable condition for a communist perspective” . The concentration of imperialist power in a single hegemonic centre represents the most consolidated form of capitalist domination. Its fragmentation into competing centres, while not ending exploitation, creates spaces for manoeuvre, opens possibilities for national liberation struggles, and weakens the capacity of capital to coordinate its global offensive.
7.2 The Primacy of Class Struggle
Yet this strategic orientation must not become opportunism. Liodakis continues with the essential qualification: “What is more essentially argued is that, independently from the emerging two poles of geopolitical confrontation, there is an urgent need for a transnational class struggle (from below) towards communism, and that the fundamental capital-labor contradiction and the social question should be prioritized as against any national (or capitalist block) contradictions or national liberation struggles. As historical experience has asserted, the opposite prioritization will always work against social emancipation and the prospect of communism” .
The working class cannot entrust its liberation to any faction of capital—whether headquartered in Washington, Brussels, Beijing, or Moscow. The BRICS formation, however much it positions itself as a challenger to Western hegemony, remains a coalition of capitalist states pursuing capitalist interests. Its rise represents a reconfiguration of imperialism, not its transcendence.
6.3 Digital Imperialism and New Forms of Exploitation
The technological dimension of contemporary imperialism demands attention. As D. Raja observes: “Imperialism today no longer requires colonies in the traditional sense. It governs through networks of finance, data, and technology—invisible chains binding nations to the logic of capital accumulation” . The concentration of technological power in a few US-based monopolies—Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft—mirrors the financial oligarchies of Lenin’s day. These firms extract not spices or cotton but data—”the raw material of the 21st century”—from billions of users worldwide .
For the Global South, this technological order reproduces dependency. Dependence on imported hardware, proprietary software, and foreign capital ensures that even when labour is local, the surplus is global. Digitalisation has not dismantled the colonial division of labour; it has deepened it .
8. The Final Consequence
8.1 A Shattered Humanity
What emerges from this analysis is a picture of crisis at once total and intimate. The system’s contradictions are not merely economic—they are ecological, social, psychological. The consequence is not just climate collapse or the next financial crisis, but a humanity broken into pieces.
Consider the situation: there is too much stuff, too much debt, too many people designated as surplus. The planet burns, pockets are empty, and the pot of popular anger boils over. But instead of the surplus population uniting, they are set killing one another over race, gender, or flags. This is the final perversion: not just a scorched earth, but a people so fractured that they no longer know who their enemy is.
8.2 The Enemy Above
The enemy, of course, remains above—counting their money while the scaffolding burns. The financial oligarchies, the monopolists, the imperialist ruling classes who throttle all who do not submit to them. They do not care whether workers fight over race or nationality; in fact, they prefer it. Every blow struck between workers is a blow that does not reach them.
9. The Revolutionary Alternative
9.1 Diagnosing the Weak Link
If Lenin’s analysis of imperialism remains valid, so too does his method for identifying possibilities of rupture. The concept of the weak link—the point at which capitalism’s contradictions are most acutely concentrated—remains essential for revolutionary strategy. In the early twentieth century, that weak link was Russia. Where is it today?
The answer is not simple. Capitalism has globalised, and its crises are global. Yet certain formations concentrate its contradictions more sharply: the Global South, where ecological destruction and imperialist exploitation intersect most brutally; the former industrial heartlands, where deindustrialisation has created surplus populations; the ecological sacrifice zones, where communities breathe poisoned air and drink poisoned water.
The multipolar configuration of contemporary imperialism creates multiple weak links, multiple points of potential rupture. The task of revolutionary strategy is to identify these points and to forge the connections between them.
9.2 The Unity of Struggles
The capitalist social order is like a Hydra. Try to cut off one head, and the others will kill you. The only way to kill the beast is to cut off all its heads at once. This means that the social revolution must grow to encompass not merely the economic means of production, but the entire mode of social life—including its familial, sexual, racial, national, gender, and authority roles.
This is not to dilute class struggle but to deepen it. The working class is not a homogeneous mass of identical individuals; it is composed of people with different experiences of oppression, different histories, different identities. A revolutionary movement that ignores these differences will fail. But a movement that treats them as ends in themselves, that fails to unite them in a common struggle against capital, will also fail.
9.3 The Metabolic Restoration
The positive vision that emerges from this analysis is one of metabolic restoration: the re-establishment of sustainable relations between humanity and nature, and between human beings themselves. This requires abandoning the notion of nature as private property, replacing it with a conception of nature as social trust. It requires a future-oriented ethic that considers the needs of generations unborn. It requires the construction of social forms based on community and solidarity, replacing the atomised, competitive relations capitalism imposes.
This is, in essence, the communist vision: not a utopia of perfect abundance, but a society of genuine wealth—wealth measured in human flourishing, ecological health, and social solidarity, not in the endless accumulation of commodities.
10. Conclusion: The Choice
The machine cannot stop growing. That is its nature. But humanity can choose to stop the machine.
The alternative is not reform—capitalism cannot be reformed to respect ecological limits or human needs, because its fundamental drive is accumulation without end. The alternative is revolution: the conscious, collective transformation of society by the associated producers, bringing the productive forces under democratic control and orienting production toward use rather than profit.
This is not a prediction; it is a necessity. The contradictions are too deep, the crises too severe, for half-measures. Either humanity will overthrow the system that is destroying it, or the system will complete its work of destruction. There is no third way.
The question is whether we—the surplus populations, the environmental proletariat, the working class of the world—can recognise our common enemy before it is too late. Can we see through the divisions they have planted among us? Can we unite across the trenches of race and nation and identity that they have dug? Can we look up from the crumbs we fight over and see the fire consuming the scaffolding above us?
The inter-imperialist rivalry between NATO and BRICS creates new dangers and new opportunities. It does not change the fundamental task: the transnational class struggle from below towards communism, the prioritisation of the capital-labour contradiction over all national or capitalist bloc contradictions. The multipolar world may offer more favourable conditions for this struggle, but it cannot substitute for it. The liberation of humanity remains the work of humanity itself.
The answer to that question—whether we can unite across the trenches they have dug—will determine everything.
References
- Sputnik Africa, “US-EU Rift Creates Strategic Openings for BRICS, Political Analyst Says” (January 2026)
- Liodakis, George, “Implications of Contemporary Totalitarian Imperialism for the Communist Perspective,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology (Brill, 2024)
- WION, “BRICS vs NATO countries: Who is more powerful? Military comparison” (January 2026)
- The Economic Times, “US-Nato’s threat to Russian oil buyers masks a bid to check China and corner the arms market” (July 2025)
- Raja, D., “Imperialism Today: The Struggle Forward,” The Left Chapter (November 2025)
- Escobar, Pepe, “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? NATO’s wars,” Strategic Culture Foundation (July 2025)
- Flank, Lenny Jr., Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Marxism, Capitalism, and Their Relation to Sexism, Racism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism (Red and Black Publishers, 2007)
- Foster, John Bellamy & Clark, Brett, “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” Socialist Register (2004)
- Lenin, Vladimir I., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)
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