While it is true that what constitutes “the U.S. left” spans a broad spectrum, what stands out is a seeming comfort with “low-hanging fruit” analyses that pull attention away from the actual material conditions of the people. The U.S. left’s overall failure to grasp the specific mechanisms through which imperialism operates today, how neoliberalism has reconstituted the terrain of struggle, and how primitive accumulation continues to structure class relations both domestically and globally, traps political practice in reactive postures that mistake symptoms for causes. Thus there remains an inability to theorize these processes as integrated dimensions of a singular system — not differences between domestic and foreign — resulting in incoherent strategic responses.
Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism
For the most part, the U.S. left treats anti-imperialism as a moral denunciation or a foreign policy critique. There is a lack of systematic analysis of how neocolonial structures condition domestic class composition. Neocolonialism is not a softer version of imperialism or a phase that has replaced it. It is the mechanism through which the US/EU/NATO axis maintains domination as a unified structure for maintaining global hierarchy, not as a collection of separate national interests. Neocolonialism is the operative logic connecting Brussels, Washington, and the military commands that enforce a shared commitment to maintaining an economic and political order in the global south that subordinate former colonies through debt, trade rules, resource extraction and security dependence. Therefore, it is a necessity to situate neocolonialism as a precondition for understanding how the US working-class is itself integrated into and disciplined by the imperial system.
Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah defined neocolonialism in 1965 as a system in which a state is “theoretically independent” with “all the outward trappings of international sovereignty,” yet its “economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” The dollar’s reserve currency status enables the U.S. to run perpetual trade deficits, importing cheap commodities while exporting inflation and debt; an arrangement that allows the U.S. to consume more than it produces. This mechanism hollowed out U.S. manufacturing, disciplined domestic labor through the threat of offshoring, and simultaneously structured Global South economies as export platforms for U.S. capital. The debt structures that trap Global South economies in dependency also trap US workers in mortgage, student loan, and medical debt that makes them compliant.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and later trade deals were codifications of this intrinsic logic. Capital does not simply “leave” because of free trade agreements, it leaves because of strategic decisions by monopoly capital as a result of the falling rates of profits in the imperial core, making offshoring profitable and domestic production less competitive. The consequence is a U.S. working class that experiences its decline not as a product of imperial extraction but often as a loss of national privilege. Any failure to theorize this contradiction allows right-wing nationalism to monopolize the language of economic grievance, collapsing the problem to foreign competition, immigrants or China. When a factory in Ohio closes and reopens in Monterrey, the decision was enabled by a monetary system that privileges capital mobility over labor stability. When workers in Michigan are told their jobs disappeared because of free trade agreements, there remains an inability to explain that the same system which extracts value from the Global South also disciplines labor in the imperial core.
Neoliberal Dispossession and the Retooling of the Internal Colony
Globally, Structural Adjustment programs impose on populations that open economies to capital penetration while dismantling the social protections. Structural Adjustment programs separate producers from the means of production, executing the classic operation of primitive accumulation: privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. The contemporary debt structure merely globalizes and institutionalizes this logic. Every Structural Adjustment program condition (privatization, liberalization, deregulation) is a specific technique of dispossession whether dispossession of public assets, dispossession of social protection, dispossession of national sovereignty, and/ or ultimately dispossession of the capacity to resist.
As a mechanism, Structural Adjustment programs forced open Global South economies through debt leverage while dismantling every social protection. For instance, the IMF/ World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s and 1990s directly dismantled public provisions through conditionalities imposed from the outside. Domestically, wage suppression was offset by the expansion of consumer and student debt that allowed households to purchase what wages no longer covered. The for-profit healthcare system and the financialization of housing are integrated mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession that extract value from working people while producing the material conditions for indebtedness, precarity, and compliance. Although the mechanisms are different, both paths constitute a form of dispossession that disciplines labor by making survival contingent on wage income or debt service.
While perceived as a historical stage that capitalism completed, primitive accumulation is a continuous process by which public assets are enclosed, communal resources are privatized, and new labor markets are forcibly opened. As professor of Political Science Bikrum Gill distinguishes, there are two registers of primitive accumulation. The European register generates the capital-labor relation through the enclosure of common lands and the creation of a dispossessed proletariat. The colonial register, however, generates the core-periphery relation, structured upon the absolute denial of sovereignty to colonized peoples. By repressing costs in both labor reproduction and industrial production, this arrangement allows wages in the core to be suppressed while profits are realized. The colonial register extracts surplus and restructures entire societies.
Neoliberalism retools and deepens the domestic colonial relationship, serving as the governing rationale that legitimizes and reproduces an internal colonial political economy. For Africans in the U.S., in particular, the colonial relationship within the larger society is a domestic replication of the global dynamic where a metropolitan core exploits a peripheral nation anchored in the capitalist mode of production historically forged through slavery and primitive accumulation, continuing to rely to the super-exploitation of Black labor and predatory extraction of wealth from Black communities. This racialized core- periphery dynamic is intensified by neoliberalism through policies such as financialization, privatization, deregulation, and cuts to public services, heightening reliance on predatory institutions (payday lending, subprime mortgages, check cashing), expanding the carceral system as a labor revenue mechanism, and accelerating gentrification and displacement. In addition, the Black Misleadership Class manages the internal colony on behalf of the capitalist ruling class, NGOs, charities, lobbying firms and unions, redirecting oppressed strata into reforming the state rather than organizing for power against it, reframing the national question as inclusion within the existing order, and erasing the struggle for land and sovereignty. The U.S. left is, therefore, assigned to misdirect anti-imperialist politics with issue-based, reactive politics and not confront this neocolonial administration and the primitive accumulation it sustains, ultimately unable to build a coherent revolutionary project.
The Unity of Neoliberalism and Empire
The rise of anti-democratic politics in the West is a logical result of neoliberalism that actively replaces social collective obligation with market rationality. Under the logic of neo-liberal capitalism, social interactions are best when dictated by the market, and thus all are filtered through (or reduced to) capital. Even as the prominent anti-imperialist analysis centers the U.S. and the collective West as the coordinators and enforcers of imperialism, it does not show how core and periphery are co-constitutive, with the U.S. military and economic warfare as the conditions we live in. So the U.S. can bomb an area and force the new nation-state that assumes control over the geographical location to institute neo-colonial structures, which then get balkanized along the lines of sectors created by capital. In the rebuilding of that nation after a national struggle, raw materials are expropriated and labor power is exploited to rebuild what the U.S. destroyed through bombing campaigns. This is primitive accumulation: dispossession, the separation of producers from the means of production, and proletarianization.
The political and ideological superstructure in the U.S. (the state, its laws, its courts, and the dominant cultural narratives) is a governing apparatus for maintaining colonial and class domination, managing popular discontent while protecting capital’s prerogatives. The congressional threats of citizen revocation, the expansion of the surveillance state, and the criminalization of protest are the structural features of a state that has reorganized itself to serve capital in conditions of declining legitimacy. For instance, The State Department’s memorandum entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism and the NSPM-7 target any expression of opposition for imperial action. These are public demonstrations of the state’s coercive capacity, and it is directly connected to the same apparatus that manages the monetary architecture described above. These are the economic (and military) mechanisms used to discipline labor, suppress resistance, and enforce compliance. Thus, neoliberalism and imperialism are not separate phenomena but integrated strategies for reorganizing class relations in the U.S. and crushing anti- colonial struggles.
The current standing of the U.S. left reflects a genuine search for a line that connects anti-imperialist analysis to domestic organizing, however misguided it may be. The Trump regime’s strategy of reformulating imperialism using mechanisms of primitive accumulation and monopoly capital, to drive capital to the western hemisphere and maintain U.S. hegemony as a response to Chinese economic influence, is being achieved through a combination of military force, economic coercion, and structural power of dollar hegemony. These mechanisms continue primitive accumulation and imperialist domination resulting in a system where neoliberalism at home and imperialism abroad both serve to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of monopoly capital and financial elites at the expense of colonized peoples both within the U.S. and across the Global South.
Without a shared theoretical framework that names the material mechanisms binding the U.S. working class to the structures of global extraction, any left movement will remain fragmented by the very system it seeks to overturn. The task is to build structures of power that contest how imperialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism constitute the conditions of struggle.
References:
Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. Columbia University Press.
Burden-Stelly, C. (2023). Black scare / Red scare: Theorizing capitalist racism in the United States. The University of Chicago Press.
Gill, B. (2025). The political ecology of colonial capitalism: Race, nature, and accumulation. Columbia University Press.
Nkrumah, K. (1965). Neo-colonialism: The last stage of imperialism. Thomas Nelson & Sons.