How does the world economy actually work? What is imperialism in its classical and contemporary forms? How do wealth and power flow between regions, and what does this mean for the lives of people in the imperial core and the periphery? This theme covers colonialism, decolonization, dependency theory, contemporary imperialism, and global solidarity. It scales the analysis of How Capitalism Works up from the workplace to the world market.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.
- What was made in your country, and what was taken from somewhere else to make it possible?
- Where do the things you use come from, and who made them, under what conditions?
- Have you or your family crossed a border to survive? What pushed you, and what pulled you?
- Why are some countries rich and others poor? What story were you told, and who benefits from it?
- When you hear “we” went to war, or “we” send aid, who is the “we,” and who decides?
- Whose wars, whose debts, and whose resources have shaped your life without your say?
- What would a just relationship between the world’s peoples look like?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document). This theme touches live conflicts; name sources’ vantage points and hold the room with care.
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: where people’s families are from and what empire or migration did to those places. Watch a short explainer together (the Marxist Project’s five-minute Lenin in Five Minutes: Imperialism). Read Thomas Sankara’s short A United Front Against Debt speech aloud, or a single Tricontinental dossier. Close by returning to the opening question with what has shifted. See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and framing (empire in our own family stories; what are we studying and why). Week 2 historical: how the gap was made, using Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and King Leopold’s Ghost. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: Lenin on imperialism, then dependency and world-systems theory, with John Smith on imperialism today. Week 5 practical: debt, war, and solidarity now, using Life and Debt and the Tricontinental materials. Week 6 liberatory: national liberation and its limits, staging Fanon, Cabral, and Sankara against the anarchist critique of nationalism. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure, with the historical and theoretical work on Saturday and the practical and liberatory work on Sunday. A screening of The Battle of Algiers, Lumumba, or Life and Debt works well as a Saturday-evening anchor. See the weekend-intensive template.
Related themes
This theme connects closely to several others:
- How Capitalism Works provides the value theory this theme scales up to the world market.
- Race and Racial Capitalism shares the analysis of colonialism, slavery, and the global color line, and the work of Fanon.
- Gender, Reproduction, and the Household meets this theme in global care chains and the migration of reproductive labor.
- The State, Strategy, and Power takes up war, the military, and the state as the enforcer of the world system.
- Ecology and the Climate Crisis extends the analysis into extraction, ecological debt, and who pays for the climate crisis.
- Revolution in Power follows the states that broke from the world system, and the blockades and wars they faced for it.
- Socialism and National Liberation carries the national-liberation struggles of the Global South into the building of new societies.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.