This text was originally published on May 19, 2025, by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. We are making it available to readers of Nos Révolutions translated into French1with the kind permission of the author and the Foundation.
How the Russian Marxist who died over a century ago can help us to understand our own time
The instant, the decisive “moment” — the notion is widespread among scientists of all stripes. In physics, Galileo called the decrease in gravity of a body resting on an inclined plane a “moment”. In economics, we speak of the “Minsky moment”, named after the theorist Hyman Minsky, to describe the point when a speculative bubble on the financial markets reaches its maximum extent before bursting. Implicit in all these cases is a change of scenario: the “moment” as a turning point in a system’s “laws of motion”..
Applying this idea to the investigation of historical processes, it seems safe to venture that the global turmoil we observe today could be christened something like a “Lenin moment”.The reference, however, is not to Vladimir Lenin the Bolshevik revolutionary per se, so much as Vladimir Lenin the indefatigable scholar who, at the outset of World War I, penned his famous essay on Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,a text that continues to prove highly useful in understanding historical trends to this day.
Imperialism is a work more underrated by vulgar economists than overrated by orthodox Communists.It certainly cannot be called “scientific” in the modern sense: Popperian falsification — or indeed any mode of empirical verification — is rendered impractical by the work’s narrative tenor. Its reading, however, offers a cornucopia of highly original insights, from which multiple generations of scholars, Marxist and otherwise, have drawn as the basis for ground-breaking research.2.
The Leninian insight that has held up best to the test of time is the nexus between the entanglement of international credit and debt relations, the related processes of centralization of capital into opposing monopolistic blocs, and the consequent mutagenesis of economic struggle into outright military conflict.The “Lenin moment”, we might say, is precisely that anguished tipping point of events: the hour of collective terror in which the entanglement of capitalist competition overflows into armed confrontation. In that sense, the war in Ukraine and its tails, which will be very long and winding, can be considered the “Lenin moment” of this new era of world disorder.
Trump, American Debt Personified
To understand the point, it comes in handy to analyse the diplomatic strategies of the various protagonists of the “moment” in light of the material interests they are called upon to serve. For such an exercise, Donald Trump represents an ideal guinea pig. Everyone analyses the new American president’s posture, attitude, his supposed subjective ability to shift the objectivity of events. Yet neither sympathizers nor detractors succeed in analysing Trump for what he really is: another puppet in the hands of the process of capital accumulation..
Donald Trump is nothing less than the personification of America’s foreign debt, a massive overdraft that has now surpassed the record figure of 23 trillion US dollars.This gigantic net liability to the world has jammed the huge “military-monetary circuit” on which America built its global hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The same problem already confronted Biden and previous administrations, as the US was forced to loosen its grip on the Middle East.With Trump, however, the impossibility of further debt-fuelled imperial expansion has become an incontrovertible fact.3.
Ferguson’s Error
Stanford historian Niall Ferguson tried to summarize the problems facing the US by arguing that the hegemonic crisis of empires occurs when interest and debt repayment spending exceeds military spending.Various prominent pundits have backed him up on this point. They are unable to understand that Ferguson’s “law” is wrong.
Unlike Lenin, in fact, Ferguson dwells only on the public component of the debt. But if the problem were only domestic public debt, monetary policy could easily finance it by imposing low interest rates, keeping repayment stably below arms spending. The real difficulties emerge when it comes to foreign debt — not only public but also private.In that case, it becomes necessary to attract capital from the rest of the world in order to finance it, and thus rates of return can no longer fall below a profitable threshold that economists call “arbitrage”. It is in this case that the constraint on spending, general and therefore military, emerges.
For a long time, it was believed that America, holder of the “exorbitant dollar privilege”, was immune from this external constraint. Apologists for the somewhat confused doctrine that goes by the name of “Modern Monetary Theory” still believe in this proclaimed immunity. But the truth is now another: Hedging liabilities by printing more US dollars has become a very uncertain proposition, as American protectionism itself undermines the right of foreign dollar holders to use them at will to buy Western capital, and so spreads further doubts about the currency’s value and, with that, the possibility of covering the debt.By an astonishing heterogenesis of ends, then, America’s trade and financial barriers prove to be the engine of the feared “de-dollarization”.
Cicero’s sinews of unlimited money to fund war have thus broken down. It is from here that we must begin to grasp the crisis of American hegemony, and it is from here that one can understand Trump’s withdrawal from the Ukrainian front. For America, indebted to the world, it is indeed time to close ranks, circumscribe imperial goals, and downsize the span of its domination.In that sense, if a “law” of crisis of empire exists, it is in the comparison between military spending and foreign debt service.
Action and Reaction
US financial distress also explains the brute way in which Trump demanded Ukraine’s “rare earths” from Zelensky to repay military expenditures.We are at the point where debt becomes a driver of what Lenin already called the “intensive hoarding” of raw materials.
For Washington, after all, the Russian–Ukrainian border dispute is now secondary. What the White House is pressing for today is to blandish Russia in an attempt to separate its destinies from those of its main adversary: China.To this end, Trump will even go so far as to sell the “gold card” of US citizenship to Russian capitalists for the modest sum of 5 million dollars. Sanctioned just yesterday, Moscow’s oligarchs are now pampered. The American U-turn is spectacular.
This exhumation of the old Nixonian divide and rule strategy comes a bit late, however. Since the beginning of the war, trade between Russia and China has doubled.As Xi Jinping warns, the American attempt to separate one from the other now appears desperate.
Nevertheless, the pressure of foreign debt will force the US to try other moves, more or less extreme, in order to limit the expansion of China and its allies.The risk, otherwise, is an advancement of the great Chinese creditor in the processes of merger, acquisition, and capitalist control in areas of influence a retreating US has had to leave untapped. For the first time in history, Lenin would say, capitalist centralization is blowing eastwards. Stemming this new wind is a vital matter of capitalist hegemony for Trump and his ilk.
That is why the US president’s posture has grown increasingly provocative. Just think of the recapture of the Panama Canal, which had long been in the hands of investors from Hong Kong.Trump warned that he would take it back, by hook or by crook. The owners were therefore forced to sell it off to the American firm BlackRock at the remarkably low price of 22 billion dollars. Should the deal ultimately be completed, American protectionist barriers may henceforth be applied to the neuralgic Panamanian crossroads as well. The gap between moral persuasion and Mafia-esque intimidation grows smaller and smaller.
As per Newtonian law, however, Trumpian actions are followed by Chinese reactions.Beijing’s foreign ministry warned, “If the US insists on trade war, or any other kind of war, China will fight them to the end.” Any: the unprecedented undefined adjective of the “Lenin moment”, and an implicit threat to leap from economic conflict to military confrontation.
The Real Reasons for European Rearmament
In this giant clash of tectonic plates, Trump’s “betrayal” of Europe remains to be examined.In Germany, France, Italy, and other countries of the old continent, apologists for rearmament insist that the American president has left former European sodalists unprotected against a possible Russian invasion. But it is hard to imagine more simplistic war propaganda than this.
The reality of Europe’s arms race is quite different. For decades, EU countries have acted as veritable vassals of the American empire.Where NATO expanded, business opportunities were created — primarily for American, but also for British, French, German, and Italian companies. From the former Soviet bloc to Africa and beyond to the Middle East, this was the story of Atlantic imperialism in the phase we are leaving behind.
It is clear, then, that when the debt crisis forces the American empire to downsize its area of influence and expropriate even its former vassals, the main problem of European diplomacies becomes to design an autonomous imperialism capable of accompanying the outward projection of European capitalism with an autonomous military power.In Lenin’s words: as power relations change, the ways of partitioning the world must change accordingly.
Memento Lenin
The final component of our current “Lenin moment” is the role of the mythical subaltern class. Dispersed, deprived of collective intelligence, left at the mercy of individual caprice alone, workers today seem resigned to suffer the effects of a military spending boomin the form of further cuts to the welfare state and declining purchasing power. Even worse, the few who still cast a glance at politics now appear to speak the same language as bourgeois diplomats.Their highest intellectual ambition is to place themselves under the banner of the “good guy” against the latest “bad guy” — an unconscious mental adaptation to a future as cannon fodder.
With the revolution liquefied, even the consolation of revealing scientific criticism escapes the consciousness of the masses. Yesterday the two advanced together, while today they are retreating together. And yet, there is something that the current dark period in history could teach us: just as the trajectory of capitalist centralization feeds the catastrophe of the democratic and diplomatic crisis, so those same tendencies open the door to unprecedented subversion of the system.“Lenin moment”, memento Lenin4.
* Emiliano Brancaccio is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Naples Federico II and promoter, with Robert Skidelsky, of the appeal “The Economic Conditions for Peace" published in the Financial Times, Le Monde, and Econopoly – IlSole24Ore.
- Translation by Antoine Guerreiro ↩︎
- Among the extensive literature on the subject, see: Emiliano Brancaccio, Raffaele Giammetti, Stefano Lucarelli (2024). "Centralization of capital and economic conditions for peace”, Review of Keynesian Economics, 12 (3), 365–384. ↩︎
- On the links between US net liabilities and international diplomatic crisis, see also a recent debate with Bank of Italy Governor Emeritus and former member of ECB board Ignazio Visco (in Italian): Emiliano Brancaccio e Ignazio Visco (2024). “‘Non-ordine’ economico mondiale, guerra e pace: un dibattito tra Emiliano Brancaccio e Ignazio Visco”, Moneta e Credito, 77 (308). Moneta e Credito, 77 (308). ↩︎
- Emiliano Brancaccio and Marco Veronese Passarella, (2022).Catastrophe or Revolution?”, Rethinking MarxismOn capital centralization, see also: Emiliano Brancaccio and Fabiana De Cristofaro, "In Praise of ‘general laws’ of Capitalism: Notes from a Debate with Daron Acemoglu”, Review of Political Economy, 36 (1). ↩︎
Illustration image: "Lenin Statue in Osh", photograph from August 17, 2018, by Adam Harangozó (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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