 Now, first of all, let's clear something in the media in the West and amongst living politicians in Western imperialism, in Britain, in the United States and so on. There is a constant anti-Chinese campaign. China is bad, China is doing all these bad things, which they are obviously also doing themselves. But never mind, China is very bad, China is scheming and manipulating. It's apparently paying some people in Westminster to influence politicians, as if this never happens in this country, and stuff like that. Now, this is not an anti-China talk, but this is a communist attempt to understand what China is and what role does China play in world relations. We are internationalists and we do not support our own ruling class, we do not defend the rights of our own imperialist ruling class. We want to analyze the situation from the point of view of the interests of the working class, the working class in China, the working class in the world. It is important for communists to understand world relations and where this comes from. The share of the private sector. I'm trying to use Chinese official figures, but some of these figures need to be taken... I wouldn't say with a pinch of salt that they need to be understood, because sometimes the definitions of what is a privately owned company or a mixed company or a state company is a bit complicated and doesn't necessarily correspond to what we will normally understand. But according to Chinese official figures, the private sector defined restrictively as firms with less than 10% state participation. In the first half of 2023 was about 40% of GDP. This is one figure that you can look at. But this figure was the lowest since 2019. During the pandemic and so on, the private sector has decreased a little bit and the state sector has correspondingly increased. But the private sector actually reached a peak of 55% of GDP around 2021. But I think there's not just the share, the strength, the weight of the private sector, but also it's important to look at the arrow. Where's the arrow pointing? What's the direction of the process? In 2010, the private sector defined in this way was only 8% of GDP and is now 40%, it's been 50%, and so on. According to also official figures, 80% of the industrial workforce, I work specifically in industry, 80% of industrial workforce is in the private sector. The private sector contributes 50% of exports, and exports are obviously an important part of the Chinese economy, more so than in some other capitalist countries. In 2011, when this process was still at the beginning, or starting, or had started maybe 10 years earlier or so, the Chinese minister, the spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, he said, after 30 years of reform and opening up, China has completed the transformation from a planned economy to a market economy. This was the official position of the Chinese state back in 2010. You also have to take this with a slight pinch of salt, because at that time they were in negotiations about joining the WTO, and whether China's economy should be considered a planned economy or not, and so on, for other reasons. But that gives you an idea of what the situation is. I will say that for some years now, it cannot be contested that the Chinese state defends and promotes capitalist property relations. Yes, China is a capitalist country in which the state plays a big role in the economy. This is because of its history and other factors coming from a planned economy onto a capitalist economy. Nevertheless, the state sector is used in order to defend and promote and foster capitalist property relations. What dominates in China is not economic planning, but rather the capitalist private profit motive. This is how the capitalist economy works in China. This process took over 30 years. Another interesting factor is that the Chinese capital abroad, a Chinese capitalist from other countries, played a big role in the development of capitalism in China. They were the first ones to invest in private companies, bring plants into China, and so on. But obviously, international capital also played a big role. And this was a big part of what in the 1990s was called the process of globalization, the integration of China into the capitalist market, massive investment by Western companies in China, which they originally used as a source of cheap labor. This is what they were looking for. They were looking for cheap labor in order to be able to produce cheaply. And as an aside, this played a big role for the whole period of time in keeping inflation down in the advanced capitalist countries. And this was an important part of the political and economic situation in the 1990s and beyond. Now, a question that can be asked, this is a legitimate question, is how is it possible that a backward-dominated country, as China was before the Chinese Revolution in 1949, has now become a powerful part of the world economy, a powerful developed capitalist economy? If you read Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, it says that the national bourgeois in dominated countries, in backward capitalist countries in the epoch of imperialism cannot play a progressive role and cannot carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, the national democratic revolution. But China is different because in China is not the capitalist class, the Chinese bourgeois, which has carried out those tasks, but it was the Chinese revolution which abolished capitalism and went a long way in solving the national democratic tasks in China, which are mainly the agrarian reform with the expropriation of landlordism, and the question of national unification and national sovereignty. China, in 1990, in 2000, was not a backward country dominated by imperialism, an independent country where many of the tasks of the national democratic revolution had been solved decades earlier. And this was the basis on which capitalist development started in China. On top of this, there were other elements to this, the fact that there was a strong state, there was universal education, high level of education and cultural level, allowed China to catch up with a number of advanced technologies and so on. China as well has not only become a capitalist country, it's become a capitalist country that's changed its character in the international division of labor. It was originally, as I said, a country dominated by cheap labor and the export of cheap commodities, toys, textiles, cheap electronic goods and so on. But it is now no longer that or those sectors, those features of the capitalist economy that China was maybe 20 years ago, are no longer dominant in China, I would argue. Right now, China has moved towards a higher technology and higher wages economy. The average, let me get this right, I think it's either the average or the median. Anyway, the average wage in China today is about $1300. That disguises a lot of regional disparities. But that will make Chinese workers' wages higher than wages, for instance, in Albania, in Romania, in Mexico and in other countries where capitalists go looking for cheap labor. And that creates a number of consequences. There are now some companies, for different reasons, but one reason is wages, that are moving away from China or away from the coastal areas that are more economically developed into cheaper labor areas or into other cheaper labor economies in Asia or into other cheaper labor economies that are closer to the capitalist markets these companies want to serve. And also, sorry, yeah, $1300 a month. $1300 a month. And then the Chinese economy has adopted very advanced technologies. In some sectors, Chinese technology is ahead of other capitalist imperialist countries. Just to give one example, you know, for instance, about electronic, sorry, electric vehicles, which is a growing sector of the capitalist economy. And electric vehicles are no longer, I'm not an engineer by any stretch of imagination, but what I understand is that the most important thing in an electric vehicle is not so much the engine, but the battery, the battery and the range that this battery might have and so on. Now, there is a Chinese company called Cut-CATL. This is the largest maker of electric vehicle batteries in the world and controls 34% of the world's market for electric vehicle batteries. And it's well ahead of any other company and supplies all the major car manufacturers in the world, including Tesla, Ford, Volvo, which is obviously no longer a Swedish multinational, the multinational that's now been bought off by Chinese capital and so on. Just to give you one example and how has China achieved that? Well, by the traditional methods of a capitalist country, by stealing technology, by sending thousands of students to study in the most prestigious universities in Britain, in the United States to try to invest a lot of money in research and development campuses and basically by investing in a series of sectors that they think are sectors that are the future of capitalist economy and therefore gaining an advantage over other countries. This is also, I will say, part of the combined and uneven development, a formerly backward economy can jump ahead in certain sectors. China, for instance, has an advantage that it never had a massive car manufacturing, traditional fuel car manufacturing industry as the West has and therefore the transition to electric vehicles is much faster and this can be replicated in many other sectors of the economy. China's role in the world has also changed and I will argue that China is playing an imperialist role in the world economy and in world relations. Now, what does imperialism mean? When we talk about imperialism from a communist point of view, we don't mean the general common sense understanding of imperialism as in an aggressive foreign policy, military invasions and so on. That is part of imperialism but if you look at Lenin's definition of imperialism, the classic features that Lenin describes in his book, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, these are, I'll try to summarize, the concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it creates monopolies which play a decisive role in the economic life. Number two, the merging of banking capital with industrial capital and the creation of finance capital. Number three, the export of capital is distinguished from the export of commodities which acquires an exceptional importance. Four, the formation of international monopolies capitalist associations which share the world amongst themselves. And number five, the territorial division of the world amongst the biggest capitalist powers becomes complete. This is Lenin's definition of imperialism, the imperialist stage of capitalism. You will see that Lenin is talking about a world system. He's not trying to define one country by ticking five boxes. This is what he describes as a world system, the division of the world between the biggest capitalist powers. I will argue that China fulfills all of this in one degree or another, all of these different conditions and is now part of the world imperialist system. First of all, as I said, first of all, China is dominated by big monopolies. Chinese companies are huge and these huge companies dominate a very large percentage of the total of the Chinese economy. Just to give you one example, and these monopolies have a projection in the world economy. Just to give you an indication, a total of 135 Chinese companies figure in the Forbes 500 list of the biggest companies in the world. 135, the United States and Japan. The United States has 136, Japan has 41 in the list. So China has more or less the same number of huge companies in this 500 top list. And this has now been the case for some years. I'm talking about the Forbes 500 list for the year 2023. Finance also dominates the Chinese economy and there's a fusion between finance capital and industrial capital that's very marked in China. The four largest banks in the world, there's different ways of measuring size. It's say in the amount of deposits, value of capitalization, number of workers. But by one measure at least, China possesses the four largest banks in the world. The industrial and commercial bank of China, the China Construction Bank, the Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China. These are the four largest banks in the world and they play a big role in Chinese economy. They also play a big role in the world economy. China also exports capital for some time now. This has been a process. If you look at the graph of the Chinese export of capital, it goes like this. Sorry, it goes like this. Up, up, up, up. From approximately 2005, particularly after 2010, and it's now very, very high. Of course, there are certain things that have been happening in the last two or three years, the COVID pandemic, the lockdown and all of this, which have distorted some, the disruption of world trade, supply chains and so on. This has disrupted some of these patterns. But up until that point, the curve was very upwards. Just to give you an indication. Oh, here it is. China's outgoing foreign direct investment began to rise after 2000. The annual flow of China's outward foreign investment jumped from 2.7 billion US dollars in 2002 to 196 billion, let's call it 200, 200 billion US dollars in 2016. That's in the space of about 15 years. It multiplied by 100. I'm not a maths expert as you can see, but it seems to me that this is multiplication by 100. I'll just give you some other figures. These are figures of the top 10 countries and regions in the world as sources of outward foreign direct investment, stock and annual flow. This is figures for 2015. The source is the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. In 2015, in terms of stock, I accumulated foreign direct investment. The USA was at the top with 23% share of the global foreign direct investment stock. China was number eight at only 4.4%. But Hong Kong, which is accounted separately, was fourth at 5.9%. In terms of total stock, I accumulated foreign direct investment over a period of time at the point of 2015. But in terms of flow, the money that goes out every year as a foreign direct investment, the US in 2015 was still number one with 20% share of the total global foreign direct investment flow. China was number two with 10%, a half of China, half of the United States. Hong Kong was number nine with 3.7%. If you look at Hong Kong to China, that makes about 13.7%, 13.6%, which is not that far from the outward foreign direct investment for the United States at that point in 2015. Of course, foreign direct investment is a very misguiding category. Some of this money is then stashed in tax havens in the Cayman Islands, in the Seychelles or in other tax havens like this. But quite a lot of this does go into foreign direct investment, mergers and acquisitions. We have seen China pursuing very aggressively. Perhaps aggressively is not the right word. It's the word the Western imperialists will use. Very strongly promoting investment of Chinese companies in buying and investing in other countries in all sorts of things which I will go into in a minute. China's foreign aid expenditure. This is also another form of imperialism because we know foreign aid is not really foreign aid. It's about getting political clout. It's about getting countries dependent on your foreign aid and so on. Foreign aid was a very small amount in China, but it's growing very fast. The last figure I could find was for 2003. This is a long time ago. But at that time China was using in foreign aid 2.3 billion US dollars. Sorry, sorry, I'm getting this wrong. It says here from 600 million in 2003 to 2.3 billion in 2016. Now 2.3 billion puts China in the range of medium-sized capitalist countries like say Belgium or Australia in terms of spending in foreign aid in inverted commas. Yes, I think these are the figures for export of capital. I will go a bit more into this in a minute. Monopolies, we already set, finance, we already set. And then finally there's this question of the division of the world between the main imperialist powers. And China is now part of this. It's quite clearly part of this. If you probably heard of the road and belt initiative, also known as the New Silk Road, what's that mean? China is attempting to spend a lot of money into doing what? Into securing shipping and trading lanes for its export products. Trading routes, also securing sources of energy and raw materials for its hungry industrial development. And also securing fields of investment and chaining a whole number of countries to its area of influence through the export of capital, through investment and so on. And this quite clearly has led China into an open conflict with the United States. And we can see that on many different aspects. There's now the beginning or elements of a trade war between China and the United States, which started at the time of the Trump presidency, but which has continued with the Biden administration. It's not a partisan policy. It's a capitalist ruling class of the United States policy. And you have seen incidents of this. For instance, the United States lobbied Britain very strongly not to allow Huawei into the bidding for 5G infrastructure contracts. And why is this? Because right now Huawei, which many of you might think as a maker of cheap mobile phones, Huawei is now one of the main players in 5G infrastructure in the world. This is a very sharp development of technology and China is at the top in this technology. And there's other cases of this. United States is lobbying Brazil very hard not to allow Huawei in. Was it Canada arrested some Huawei executives? And all of this is nothing to do with industrial espionage or worrying about the white hole mobile phones being listened into by China. There might be an element of that, but it's basically the competition between different capitalist companies. And incidentally, this also proves another point. Some people 20 years ago, so they were arguing that imperialism didn't exist anymore. What we had was empire, a one world conglomerate of companies that dominated. No, no, no. Imperialism does exist and is divided in between different warring and competing imperialist powers. And China defends the interest of Huawei and the United States defends the interest of Boeing and the European Union defends the interest of Airbus in the world market by any means necessary that they are available at the disposal. Now, okay, this is a set brings brings China into conflict with the United States. This is very clear. And this conflict is manifested on many different fields. Right now, China right now, China is not using military power to secure its imperialist interests so far, I will add. And that makes some people say, oh, but the Chinese investment in Africa is friendly investment. It is not like imperialists that organize military coups and so on and they send gun boats and this and that. Yeah, that is true. But that doesn't make Chinese investment of a different characteristic as imperialist investment from other from other countries. China is not using military power to exercise its imperialist interests abroad because it's not able to yet. Right. China is still much weaker than the United States in military terms, though it's catching up in a whole number of areas. The United States has built its military power all around the world for a very long period of time and so on. So China is using mainly finance diplomacy and so on. However, it has to be said that China has already built a military base in Djibouti. Djibouti is obviously a very important choke point for international trade at the mouth of the Red Sea. And several of the harbors that are being built or have been built through the Roten Belt Initiative have a jewel or potentially have a jewel military civilian use. Part of this is U.S. propaganda, but part of this is also potentially true. And the classic pattern is the following for Chinese foreign investment in different countries. A Chinese state-owned bank lends money to country A. Country A then uses this money in order to carry out some big infrastructure projects, an electro-generating power dam, hydro-electrical power station, railway, the improvement of the capacity of a harbor to offer service to bigger ships and so on. And then this infrastructure project is usually carried out by Chinese infrastructure companies, Chinese civil construction, railway construction companies. Chinese companies then operate this set infrastructure project. For instance, a Chinese railway company operates the railway, a Chinese harbor, a Chinese kosco for instance, or other big Chinese harbor companies take over. And then in exchange for this investment, which is in the form of a loan, which means this country is now in debt with China, in exchange for this, this China gets rights to the exploitation of minerals or other natural resources, preferential trading in soybeans or meat and other things like this. And these infrastructure projects, interestingly, link the raw materials that this country possesses to harbors from which they're going to be shipped to China. These projects are then put as collateral for this debt. If this country, as it often happens, defaults on its debt, then the Chinese get full control of these infrastructures that have been built. And this all builds debt and political leverage and creates a relationship which cannot be described in any other way that there's between an imperialist country and a dominated country. And this is happening everywhere. It's happening in the whole of Africa, in Latin America, in many Asian countries. And I can give you many, many examples. For instance, amongst other things, China has developed a string of investments in harbors around the world where they think are crucial for the shipping lanes. And if you look at the map, you will be surprised. I was surprised when I looked at the map. Let's put it this way. I don't know if you're going to be surprised or not. But China has now control or investment. In some cases, it's a small investment, 10% share, 30% share. In other cases, it's a dominant position in all the main shipping lanes around the world. The Malacca Straits, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, then obviously they have this big harbour in Sri Lanka. Then there's the water harbour that they built in Pakistan, which also means that there's going to be a land connecting routes through Central Asia. Incidentally, all of this also bypasses China, which is a traditional enemy of India. It is a traditional enemy of China in the world relations. And then from Guadar, you go to Djibouti, the harbour that I mentioned before, which is built and owned by a Chinese company. Then on the other side of the mouth of the Red Sea, there's the port of Aden, which is also invested by the Chinese. On the Mediterranean side, you have port Said in Egypt, in the mouth of the Suez Canal. The Haifa harbour in Israel, then you go to the port of Pireus in Greece, which is wholly owned by a Chinese company, Costco. Then you go to some of the harbours in the north of Italy. The harbour in Valencia in Spain. The port, I think it's called the Europort in Algiers in Morocco. Then you go all the way up to the port of Bilbao, the port of a number of ports in France, but also Dunkirk and Nicolaiv, which are now obviously not very useful. But they have investments like this. Then also on the Pacific side, China has investments in the port of Los Angeles and the port of Seattle, the two of the biggest ports of the Pacific coast. It's now building a port in a new harbour in Chiang Kai in Peru, which is going to cut the time that the trading takes between China and South America by 5 to 10 days. So that just gives you an idea of what they're trying to do. They're trying to secure shipping and trading routes, which is not an evil thing. It's plotting and skimming is the behaviour of an imperialist country that wants to secure its interests in the world. I'll give you one example. For instance, in Zambia, Zambia is a landlocked country in southern Africa, which is very rich in copper. So the Chinese have invested, they have rights for the extraction of copper. Zambia is now heavily indebted to China. The Chinese have now built and renovated a railway line that connects the mines in Zambia to the Dar es Salaam harbour in Tanzania in order to extract copper, also other important minerals for development of new technologies. And guess what? The Chinese are building the Tazara railway line, which will connect... Sorry, the Tazara railway line is the other one that I just mentioned, but they're building another series of other railways that will connect the Indic Ocean coast with the Congo, one that goes through the connects Rwanda, Malawi, Burundi with Uganda, another one that connects Kenya with Djibouti and so on. The idea of this is to extract this, to provide the proper, fast way of extracting these raw materials from these important areas of the world. Nairobi to Mombasa, Addis Ababa to Djibouti, and there are many other examples like this in Ecuador is heavily indebted with China, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, etc. The same thing is happening in the whole of South America. Now China has become the main, about two years ago, China became the main trading partner for the whole of South America. And this is quite damaging from the point of view of the interest of US imperialism. US imperialism has always, for 200 years, about 200 years ago this year, the Monroe Doctrine was enunciated and the Monroe Doctrine says America for the Americans, which basically means the America is the backyard of US imperialism and no other imperialist powers will be allowed to have any say in the whole of America. Well now you have China, which is the main trading partner with the whole of South America, particularly countries like Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. All these countries, what's the character of this trade with China? The character of this trade is that China purchases raw materials, copper, beef, pork, oil, gas, lithium, soybeans, contributing by the way to the deforestation of whole regions of South America and sells manufactured goods, machinery, transport equipment, manufactured goods and chemicals are the main items that China exports. At the same time China invests money in Latin America through foreign direct investment. China has bought the electricity grid in many of the Brazilian states and Chinese companies, Chinese privately owned car companies, electric vehicle companies, BYD and what's the other one, Great Wall Motors have now bought two big car plants in Brazil, one that was formerly owned by Ford and one that was formerly owned by Volkswagen or General Motors, I'm not totally sure. Two Western imperialist companies have left Brazil and this has been taken over now by two Chinese companies that are going to build electric vehicles. Incidentally, the world's largest manufacturer of electric vehicles is now BYD although these figures are a bit of a trick because BYD produces both pure electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles while Tesla, which is the main competitor produces only electric vehicles so it's not the same by same comparison but it's up there. Okay, so I'd say that this demonstrates the fact that China is an imperialist country and this has certain consequences and certain implications. Some people say that this is a positive feature. The role that China plays in the world economy is a positive feature because this means that we now have or can hope for a multipolar world that is no longer dominated by US imperialism and therefore this is a better thing that the peoples of the world, particularly in the oppressed countries now have a free room to develop but this is, I don't want to use a strong word but this is completely wrong because there is no advantage for the working class in advanced capitalist countries or in dominated capitalist countries that instead of the world being dominated or mostly dominated by one imperialist country which in any case wasn't the case before but the US clearly played a much more dominant role in the past say 20 years ago than it plays now instead of that now we have different imperialist powers fighting for control over different countries this doesn't improve the situation of the working people, the poor peasants and the poor people in the oppressed nations of the world it doesn't, it just means there is more conflict, there are more regional wars between the two of them if anyone attended the talk yesterday about the situation in Africa and French imperialism you can see that clearly, that is not an improvement the workers of the world, their interest is to fight against all imperialist powers, not to fight so the different imperialist powers balance each other off it is true however that the fact that China now plays a bigger role in the world economy allows certain countries around the world to try to balance one power against the other and change slightly their allegiances I'm coming to an end and change their allegiances, for instance we have seen a whole number of countries that were in the past very close allies of the United States, or let me rephrase that they were basically puppets of the United States, they were completely dominated by the United States countries like Turkey or Saudi Arabia or even Brazil for instance they now in the world politics are trying to play a more independent role it doesn't mean that Saudi Arabia has cut off its links with the United States no, they're trying to play China off against the United States in order to gain a bit of an advantage for themselves this is not beneficial for Saudi Arabian workers, we're still under the yoke of a semi feudal reactionary monarchy many of them are foreign immigrant workers in conditions of no rights and very low wages and high exploitation but this means that Saudi Arabia is able to, for instance in the conflict in Ukraine it's clear that Saudi Arabia has been leaning towards helping Russia keep oil prices up and trading with Russia in oil, there are other factors in this the fact that now the United States is almost self-sufficient in terms of oil which was in the case in the past, there's other factors but clearly if you were watching the world this year you realize that there was a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran that was brokered by China and this means that the United States are no longer playing a dominant role in the Middle East as they were able to play in the past the other thing we need to say is that this process has certain limits we're not saying that China is growing, it's influencing the world, it's growing it's a role as an imperialist power, it's growing and at some point it will overtake the United States and become the main imperialist power in the world we're not saying that, why we're not saying that? because this process has certain limits which I think the China's economy is more or less now reached China's economy has been for many years heavily investing in gross capital formation building machinery, factories, industries and is now facing a classic capitalist crisis of overproduction it can produce too much still, too many cars and too many of everything they can't sell at any place and it's a classic crisis of capitalism it's also a crisis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall the same amount of investment in machinery and technology in China there's no longer produced the same amount of GDP growth as it did in the past it's still growing but it is not the same as in the past and also there are some other factors there's a factor that the Chinese and the US economy are extremely interconnected and therefore there are US companies in whose interest it is not that there is a trade war like for instance Foxconn is a huge industrial enterprise in China that builds most of the Apple phones that people use in the West they are not interested in a trade war obviously and there are many other Western companies that are invested in China that are playing a restraining role from time to time Western capitalist leaders going to China for the trade conference and so on trying to return to normal diplomatic relations and so on this is another reason but finally the United States as a world imperialist power its role has declined but its decline is still a relative decline not only is it still the biggest economy in the world sometimes people say oh but China has already overtaken the United States as the biggest economy or will overtake the United States here but China has a much bigger population than the United States this means the productivity of labor in the United States is still much higher than in China overall because China is also a very unequal country not the same thing the coastal areas where most of the capitalist development has taken place the areas in the interior were still lagging behind and so on and in terms of military power the United States is still far ahead China has just to give you an example China has I think two aircraft carriers only and the United States has I can't remember how many but many many many more and in many other areas this is the case so I think that while this situation obviously leads to more tensions more potential for regional wars and local wars in the world relations it does not mean that China will overtake the United States anytime soon because China is facing up to its own limits last point I want to make is what is the position of communist in relation to all this the position of communist is the following the position of communist is the main enemy of the working class is at home we are sitting here in the UK or in the United States our main enemy not China main enemy is the ruling class in this country and our allies are the workers of the world including the workers in China this is the interesting point the economic development the development of capitalism in China has created a powerful working class a working class that has no traditions no recent traditions of struggle there have been many strikes and so on but it doesn't have a long established tradition of reformist parties and trade unions and so on it's a fresh working class many of them are first generation migrants from the countryside into the cities they are working in conditions of high exploitation and as I'm describing this some of you might be thinking this is the same thing or similar parallels between this what happened in Russia in 1917 or what happened in Spain in 1970 or what happened in Brazil in 1980 a first generation working class and the conditions of dictatorship where there's no avenues for legal trade union or political development in conditions of high exploitation where the conditions have changed very quickly over a short period of time and this leads to what a revolutionary explosion and this is what's being prepared in China and our task is to link up with the Chinese working class and to fight together to overthrow imperialism and capitalism around the world not to celebrate that now there are more imperialist countries and the world is more multipolar but rather to strengthen our resolve to fight against capitalism and imperialism which are the main source of wars and exploitation a system that's already outlived any useful role that we might have played in the past