In the 1940s, George Orwell wrote of a dystopian world dominated by three imperial powers. But this was not his fictional masterpiece ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ with its nightmare vision of human subjugation by the authoritarian elites of Oceania, East Asia and Eurasia.
As the Second World War drew to a close in 1945 and the Allies became confident of a clear and decisive victory, both in Europe and the Pacific, Orwell wrote an article for the Tribune weekly paper on the post-war settlement, one of a series of political essays that were essential reading in the 1930s and 1940s. These ranged from his savage critique of British colonialism, the betrayal of the Spanish Republic in the Civil War, where he had volunteered in the International Brigade, to the prospects for democratic socialism in the UK.
For him, the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences between Roosevelt (and subsequently Truman), Stalin and Churchill were cynical exercises in realpolitik. The world was being carved up into zones of control and spheres of influence, with the United States the dominant, imperial power, intent on maintaining a global military presence and a ‘Pax Americana’ that protected US capitalist interests.
This power struggle was initially played out in Europe where Stalin imposed a buffer-zone of pro-Soviet states to protect the USSR from further invasion. The strategic priority for the United States was control of oil and gas supplies in the Persian Gulf, up to and including the removal of democratically-elected governments through CIA sponsored and organised coups, as in Iraq in 1953.
While not represented in this initial phase, Orwell anticipated the emergence of China as the third imperial power. The country was still embroiled in a civil war between the communist forces of Mao Zedong and the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. Orwell assumed central authority would be restored, as it was in 1948 under communist rule, and that China take its place as the third continental power, drawing on extensive material resources and a mass population.
In this longer historical perspective, Orwell’s penetrating clarity on the realities of imperialism stands in stark contrast to the pretence of a rules-based, international system, so brutally exposed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine following the annexation of Crimea, Trump’s threats to Greenland and Canada, and China’s growing military encirclement of Taiwan, having already suppressed autonomous government in Hong Kong.
Orwell’s dystopia is being played out in the real world by capitalist-imperial states that share the characteristics of their fictional counterparts; a ruthless determination by elites to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of working people, the manipulation of the threat of war to justify a permanent military-industrial complex, and the ever-tightening grip of authoritarianism to protect so-called ‘national security’ against internal opposition, loosely translated as a fascist boot stamping on the faces of working people forever.
Post-war Capitalist Imperialism
Is it fair to characterise the post-war world as the triumph of capitalist imperialism? A comprehensive set of international institutions and legal frameworks have been put in place since 1945 that encourage cooperation and ensure compliance on trade, environmental standards and arms control, amongst others, all within an overarching framework of respect for human rights and national sovereignty.
The United Nations represented the pinnacle of those ambitions, with its inspirational charter calling for an end to the scourge of war and poverty. But the UN, from its very inception, represented the realities of post-war, imperial power relations. The Security Council was dominated by its permanent members, the United States, USSR, China, UK and France. Resolutions, even with clear majority support, could simply be ignored if one of the permanent members exercised its veto.
This failure is normally attributed to the ideological struggle played out between the United States and the Soviet Union through the arms race and proxy wars. Yet the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, far from ushering in a new era of peace and common security, in which deep cuts to military spending could be transferred into civil investment and international development, reinforced and extended imperialism.
The United States used the collapse of the Soviet Union to further enhance its military superiority for power projection, ranging from special operations to full-scale invasion, and to extend its global network of military and intelligence bases. Russia, after a period of economic chaos in the 1990s, when state industries collapsed and working people experienced mass poverty, rebuilt its economy through oil and gas production for international markets. Under Putin and the new, capitalist billionaire oligarchy, those revenues helped to restore its armed forces and domestic arms industries.
China continued rapid industrialisation, both through inward investment by Western corporations and indigenous growth, emerging as thr world’s manufacturing hub. While nominally a communist state, China functioned as a capitalist economy complete with a billionaire elite that exploited the country’s skilled and relatively low-paid workforce.
The United States retains a clear military dominance but, as the invasion of Ukraine so grimly demonstrates, Russia has the capacity for full-scale and sustained ground offensives, with Putin determined to reassert Russian imperialism after the humiliation of the post-Cold War collapse. China has translated its manufacturing strength into sustained investment for a technologically-advanced arms industry with the ambition of matching the United States as a Pacific power. Its carrier fleet and the construction of bases in the South China Sea provide the capacity to overwhelm Taiwan’s defences should it decide to invade.
From this longer-term perspective, the Cold War, for all its ideological intensity and terrifying threat of nuclear annihilation, was a diversionary sideshow as the world descended into capitalist authoritarianism and militarism inherent in a system of competing, imperial powers.
Capitalist Imperialism and Climate Catastrophe
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an incessant narrative of capitalist triumphalism and the consolidation of neo-liberalism, with privatisation, cuts to public services and sustained attacks on trade union representation. Massive inequalities of wealth and power have grown between the capitalist elites and working people, millions of whom live in precarious conditions of job and income insecurity. Basic human needs are unmet and the terrifying scale of the climate crisis facing working-class communities ignored. The elites continue to amass further wealth through their power to extract tax cuts and expand the production of fossil fuels that are leading to an acceleration of carbon emissions and irreversible climate change.
The scale of institutional capture by neo-liberalism can be gauged by the financial crisis of 2008, itself caused by an orgy of speculation that required unprecedented levels of government intervention to bail out the banks. The consequences were higher asset values that benefited the rich and austerity programmes that punished the poor. Government debt, accumulated during the enforced pandemic lockdown, has left a legacy of interest payments to those same institutions responsible for the financial crisis and that further constrain public expenditure.
Social-democratic leaders meekly acquiesced to to the straitjacket of spending cuts and debt compliance, despite widespread opposition against austerity and clear support for alternative strategies like the Green New Deal, based on the economic and environmental benefits of public investment in the transition to a zero-carbon economy. This partly explains the disillusionment of many working people with mainstream politics, having experienced stagnant wages and declining public services, as well as the subsequent growth of support for the extreme right offering populist solutions around controls on immigration and welfare spending.
Instead of a peace dividend for working people, capitalist imperialism has led to to a global security crisis. Permanent war preparation has directed vast public resources to the military-industrial complex that should have been used for civil investment in the post-carbon economy, fuelling the escalation of conflict and the threat of a full-scale European war.
All the sophisticated, international architecture has counted for nothing except to expose the hollowness and pretence at the heart of the system. Arms control treaties have always been fake treaties. The capitalist-imperial powers never entered into any that undermined their technological supremacy, ensuring that limitations in one system would be offset by advances in others. When necessary, treaties were sidelined or abandoned if they became barriers to strategic goals. Trillions of dollars are now committed to investment in the next generation of nuclear and conventional systems, augmented by advances in remote control weapons and artificial intelligence.
Similarly, the fake environmental treaties were built on the illusion of limits to carbon emissions but he timescales are so long, into the 2050s, and the rate of reductions so small, when set against the scale of the climate emergency and the need for immediate action. Only by banning production from any new oil and gas fields could the target of 1.5% have been achieved, yet precisely the opposite is happening. We are already witnessing the consequences, a climate cascade of multiple breakdowns generating historically high temperatures and extreme weather events. The integrity of entire eco-systems to function within survival boundaries is under threat, not at some indeterminate time in the future but right now.
Capitalist imperialism’s response is best characterised as a deliberate policy of overshoot. Further and sustained rises in the levels of carbon emissions and global temperatures, are now inevitable but the emphasis is on technological solutions such as carbon capture to bring about substantial reductions at some future date, even though no large-scale systems exist, nor are likely to become operational in the next ten years However, overshoot is consistent with corporate claims of continued support for carbon reductions while expanding capacity and maximising the profitability of fossil-fuel investments over the next fifty years.
In early 2025, these longer-term objectives were masked by the Trump administration’s imposition of tariffs and the shock-waves that swept through the international trading system. Negotiations that have already led to reductions in some tariff levels are ongoing, but even if Trump achieves his main objective of repatriating manufacturing capacity to the United States, the imperialist structure of the global economy and the capitalist exploitation of working people through the international division of labour will remain basically unchanged.
Far more important than tariffs has been the consolidation of the national-security state through the executive powers of the presidency. Federal institutions have either been dismantled or severely weakened, such as environmental regulation and international aid. Trump is also bypassing congressional oversight and the judiciary, with emergency powers to suspend basic constitutional rights like habeas corpus.
Having suppressed domestic opposition, Trump’s main strategic goal will be territorial control across the whole North Atlantic region to exploit the vast fossil-fuel and mineral resources now accessible in the warming Arctic. The fact that the United States has existing security relationships with Canada and a military presence in Greenland that serve US capitalist interests, simply underlines their unacceptability, since they rely on negotiations and agreements with independent states.
The next phase of capitalist imperialism is now clear. Under the pretence of a national emergency, the United States will invade Greenland and possibly Canada. In turn, Russia will consolidate its control over eastern Ukraine, while China will invade Taiwan. There will be further expansion of fossil-fuel production and even higher levels of carbon emissions threatening catastrophic consequences for working-class communities.
Domestically, the priority will be further tax cuts for the elites and the dismantling of public services. Military spending will continue to rise and the powers of the national-security state will be extended. Political opponents will be characterised as the enemy within and arrested.
The UK and Capitalist Imperialism
In ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Orwell relegated the UK to a function, ‘Airstrip One’, devoid of a national identity, an offshore launch-pad for military strikes by Oceania against Eurasia and East Asia. The reality in 2025 is much worse. The British state supplicated itself for access to US nuclear weapons technology, not only ballistic missiles that are leased from the United States, but also warhead and submarine designs. In return, the United States has free access to UK territory for its armed forces and intelligence-gathering. Across the country, what are nominally UK bases, are under the control of the US Air Force and National Security Agency. All are sovereign US territory, run as dollar economies, supplied from the United States and on which no UK customs duties, nor any income taxes are raised.
Perhaps this is best symbolised by the giant NSA electronic spy base, Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, part of a global system that monitors and intercepts all forms of communication, both satellite and optical fibre transmissions. The intelligence is then passed onto the NSA headquarters at Fort Mead, near Washington, to assist coordination of military operations.
The UK has always subordinated its security policy to the United States, as in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and, more recently, Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people. But it is now part of a military machine that threatens countries with which the UK has long-standing and peaceful relationships like Canada and Greenland. Not only is the UK an airstrip but also a spy base for a hostile regime intent on harming our friends and there is absolutely nothing the British state can do to stop it.
This is full-spectrum subservience, in which the UK political and military elites cling onto the mythical special relationship and the delusion of status as a global power. In reality, the country’s high-technology armaments are an insignificant appendage to US power projection. The blue-water carrier fleet, with its attendant nuclear submarines and surface vessels, can only be deployed as supplements to US battle fleets in any credible scenarios like conflict with China. Yet, because of their baroque technological complexity and expense they have left a massive burden on public spending and a generational opportunity-cost of lost government investment in the civil economy.
To demonstrate its loyalty, the UK has also been one of the strongest advocates of increasing arms spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP, or even higher. As the Starmer government launches its defence review, a sustained propaganda exercise is underway, that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed Europe’s longstanding vulnerabilities, in order to legitimise further militarisation of the economy.
At its heart is the myth of a post-Cold War peace dividend enjoyed at the expense of military decline, dependency on the United States for European defence, and the ‘hollowing out’ of the armed forces. Collectively, the leading European Nato members, UK, France and Germany have spent, on average, over double the Russian arms budget, even before the new rounds of increased military expenditures were announced. During austerity, the Conservative government protected funding for the main nuclear and conventional equipment programmes, at a time when other areas of public spending faced substantial reductions, such as the 30% cut to local authority expenditure that led to substantial job losses and the slashing of vital public services.
Reductions in the size of the army were made but the consensus across all the major parties was that technological advances provided superiority against any potential adversaries, even ones with large, conventional forces. All that the commitments to further increases in arms spending by the UK and other European members of Nato have done is to expose the hypocrisy of austerity economics. The very same leaders who have implemented deep cuts to civil investment and welfare spending as the price to pay for stabilising government finances, are now prepared to abandon those constraints and debt ceilings in order to fund the military.
The Starmer government is also peddling the economic impact of arms spending as beneficial, providing skilled employment and technological innovation. The UK has always been a major arms producer, as well as arms exporter to some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. But overall employment has declined by two-thirds since the 1980s, through corporate takeovers, rationalisation and plant closures. There are a small number of areas with specialisms in arms production, such as Barrow-in-Furness for nuclear submarines, but even here employment has fallen significantly.
Arms spending increases will involve some new capacity for munitions but the employment impact will be small as the bulk of spending will focus on existing sites for established programmes like the nuclear submarine fleet. The imperative, as always, will be to maximise the profits of the major arms companies like BAE Systems through arms exports, fuelling global militarism and insecurity.
The simple truth is that the UK has always prioritised military capital spending over civil investment at considerable cost to the economy. If the UK had carried out a sustained programme of public investment in renewable energy through offshore wind farms, it could have already brought to an end its dependency on overseas gas supplies. In terms of employment, this indigenous manufacturing base would have included wind turbines, nacelles that house the gearing systems, and the electrical cabling equipment, all providing skilled work for hundreds of thousands of people and benefiting regions that had suffered from de-industrialisation since the 1980s. This would have been a major contribution to the country’s economic and environmental security, rather than the false security of military subservience to an authoritarian regime.
Anarcho-Syndicalism and Working-Class Politics
In 1936 Orwell volunteered for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Like thousands of others from Europe and the United States, he believed that the struggle to defencd the Republic against the nationalist forces led by Franco was vital, not only for the future of democracy in Spain, but to defeat the rising tide of fascism and militarism around the world.
His section of the International Brigade was led by Spanish anarcho-syndicalists from the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), one element of the broader Republican movement that included parliamentary socialists and communists. For a brief period in 1937 a nascent form of anarcho-syndicalism emerged in Republican Catalonia and Valencia. Private estates were taken over for communal production of food, while workers in the cities controlled factory production. Orwell was one of the few foreigners to witness this spontaneous, democratic revolution by millions of working people, and was deeply moved by the sense of liberation and common purpose.
But the strains imposed by maintaining the war economy, at a time when the nationalists were making advances with support form fascist Germany and Italy, proved intolerable. The defeat of the Republic in 1939 brought the experiment in anarcho-syndicalism to a brutal end. Hundreds of thousands were rounded up and executed by the fascists and many more were forced into exile. Orwell, himself, came very close to being killed but returned to England and wrote ‘Homage to Catalonia’, his personal experience of the Civil War and the political lessons learned.
Anarcho-syndicalism has a strong, historical lineage both in Europe and the United States, emerging from the explosion of radical, working-class politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike social-democratic parties focused on parliamentary representation, its supporters called for revolutionary change because of the immense power that capitalist elites held over both the economy and governments.
At its heart lay the principle of workers control achieved through mass industrial action and general strikes, leading to the common ownership of the means of production. Anarcho-syndicalists contrasted this form of direct, economic democracy with Bolshevik communism in the USSR that rested on a cadre of party ideologues and state suppression of the independent, workers soviets in the early years of the revolution.
Anarcho-syndicalism was also avowedly anti-imperialist. The major European powers and the United States had accumulated colonies across the world and created the momentum for an imperial arms race that led to the First World War, Anarcho-syndicalists opposed the war as serving the interests of the capitalist elites and called for international working-class solidarity against imperialism and the carnage of modern warfare.
Lastly, there was a strong, environmental critique of capitalism that focused on the quality of urban life for working people in the rapidly expanding conurbations, with poor housing, adulterated food and terrible pollution leading to disease and premature deaths. Common ownership of the means of production was intended to radically refocus production capacity on working-class priorities for social housing and public health improvements.
Anarcho-syndicalism went into decline during World War One as radical politics split broadly into support for communism or social democracy. Under Stalin, the USSR descended into a brutal form of dictatorship that suppressed any form of opposition. In the West, parliamentary and associated municipal socialism became a major political force. The Labour Party, under Attlee, swept into power in 1945 on a wave of popular support for radical change and an end to the poverty and mass unemployment that blighted the UK in the 1930s.
Substantial improvements were achieved in the quality of life for working people through council house programmes, a national health service and major investment in nationalised industries. But the essential framework of a capitalist economy was left intact, alongside high levels of military spending. Social democracy proved incapable of defending those gains against the rising tide of neo-liberalism, as public services came under sustained attack through privatisation and cutbacks, along with severe restrictions on trade unions and workers rights.
An Anarcho-Syndicalist Security Policy
Major structural changes, such as the growth of the service sector, financialisation, automation and the international division of labour, have transformed the global economy since the early forms of industrialisation. But the essential qualities of anarcho-syndicalism as a critique of capitalism and as a framework for working-class, economic democracy, remain as powerful today, if not more so.
All the destructive elements of capitalism – the massive inequalities of wealth and power, imperialism, and environmental collapse have combined to threaten any hope of material progress for working-class communities. A future, anarcho-syndicalist society still offers a transformative, anti-capitalist alternative based on economic and environmental security.
The initial stage would be a public-sector investment programme to achieve key targets for self-sufficiency in renewable energy, social housing, utilities, public transport and food production. The objective is a zero-carbon economy over a ten-year timescale and an indigenous manufacturing and agricultural base providing skilled employment and improved quality of life for working people.
This, in turn, will generate the resources for the further democratisation of the economy, where local communities can take full control on future priorities for investment. These may include local energy-autonomy through renewables backed up by battery storage, and much greater emphasis on recycling and repair to reduce the material throughput of the economy.
Autonomous, anarcho-syndicalist communities can then progressively withdraw from global, capitalist supply networks and from the military-industrial complex. The ultimate objective is a world of smaller, working-class commonwealths that offer an alternative political framework to capitalist imperialism.
The UK could play a significant role during the transitional period. All US bases would be immediately closed down and US military and intelligence personnel removed. Nuclear weapons and carrier fleets would be dismantled and all arms exports terminated. The remaining armed forces would be restructured on anarcho-syndicalist principles into a people’s militia. Firstly, a specialised engineering corps providing logistic support, both domestically and overseas, to help restore essential services during environmental crises and then to assist recovery.
Secondly, an armed people’s militia. As part of an international brigade, it could support guerilla-war campaigns by working-class communities against capitalist-imperialist occupation, targeting military and civilian headquarters, with the objective of making the territory ungovernable until a negotiated settlement is reached.
Working-class Security without States
Orwell transformed his fears of a post-war imperialism into a fictional dystopia, not as a prediction but as a warning. Like millions of people he hoped for a democratic-socialist future, after the mass unemployment of the 1930s and the terrible sacrifices of the war. But those hopes have been dashed and we have a form of double-think, the reality of a global, capitalist-imperialism against the fantasy of a rules-based, international system.
Instead of reconstruction for working people, we have the accumulation of wealth by a capitalist elite. Instead of a durable peace we have a permanent military-industrial complex and the real threat of war between the main imperial powers, Instead of sustained, public investment in the post-carbon economy, we have institutions whose main function is to maximise corporate profits in new oil and gas production, leading to climate catastrophe.
If anything, Orwell underestimated the sheer scale of cosmic destructiveness that capitalist-imperialism has unleashed. The ultimate objective is an authoritarian, militarised state combining territorial expansionism with internal oppression. All to protect elite power while the planet burns and working-class communities are destroyed, either through war or through environmental breakdown and societal collapse.
Across the world, hundred of millions of working people oppose the capitalist and militarist world order and, as with previous generations, look to a transformative political vision. Anarcho-syndicalism offers that revolutionary change from production for private profit to economic democracy and workers control.
The existing system of large, capitalist-imperial states and their subordinates is an artificial construct that emerged from early forms of industrialisation and imperial competition, requiring mass armies and manufacturing capacity for modern warfare. Internal colonisation and territorial acquisition were legitimised as essential for defence against other powers.
Since then, extraordinary efforts have been made by elites to fashion national identities and unifying narratives around a common language, civilization and, usually, religion. History is one of shared sacrifice through war and the constant need for vigilance and military strength against external and internal enemies.
The class nature of those hollow narratives is being exposed by the ever-widening wealth inequalities between the capitalist elites and working people and the direct impact of environmental breakdown on the quality of life for working-class communities. Whether the crisis is experienced as an accumulation of yearly droughts that lead to food and water shortages, or cataclysmic floods and hurricanes that overwhelm the defences of major Western cites, it will be working people who pay the price.
The contrast will be made between the failure to protect against the existential crisis of climate change while preserving the national-security state. The very same elites that call for sacrifice will be the ones accumulating further wealth from fossil-fuel extraction and the military-industrial complex, while protecting themselves from the full impact of climate change in their luxury fortresses and on their private islands.
Just as the architecture of capitalist-imperialism was constructed, it can be deconstructed and replaced by workers commonwealths. This will be an incredibly dangerous period of class struggle, where the full force of the national-security states will be brought to bear through mass arrests and imprisonment.
Orwell’s clarity of vision is desperately needed today, as capitalist imperialism fuels the flames of war and environmental catastrophe. Like the thousands of other volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, he recognised that the fight against fascism and authoritarianism was a life-or-death struggle and drew inspiration from previous struggles, against overwhelming odds, to defend working people from oppression. The choice for our generation is the starkest of all. Destroy capitalist imperialism now, or face your own destruction.
Steven Schofield
May 2025
