Whether American Empire? Slow and Painful Decline or Socialist Transformation? Bisharat Abbasi
The question of the American empire today is not whether it remains powerful—power, in its coercive, destructive, and parasitic sense, it still possesses in abundance—but whether this power corresponds to a historically progressive role or merely prolongs a mode of existence whose material foundations are already exhausted. From a Marxist standpoint, empires do not fall because they are immoral, nor because their leaders are foolish, nor because rival powers “outplay” them diplomatically; empires fall when the social relations they universalise cease to generate sufficient material surplus to sustain the political, military, and ideological superstructure erected upon them. In this precise sense, the United States is no longer an ascending capitalist civilisation but a late-imperial formation whose survival increasingly depends on force, financial manipulation, and the externalisation of crisis to the Global South. The real question, therefore, is not whether the American empire will decline—it already is—but whether this decline will unfold as a slow, violent, and reactionary descent into permanent war, or whether the internal and external contradictions of US monopoly finance capitalism can be resolved through a socialist rupture that reconstitutes society on new foundations.
To grasp this problem, one must begin from political economy rather than spectacle. The United States sits atop an unprecedented mountain of debt, fictitious capital, and financialised claims on future value. Yet this is not a “debt crisis” in the peripheral sense. The US does not face insolvency as Pakistan, Argentina, or Sri Lanka do; its debt is denominated in its own currency, its treasury bonds remain global safe assets, and its military guarantees the circulation of the dollar through coercion rather than confidence. What confronts the US is something more profound: a crisis of value production. Manufacturing hollowed out, infrastructure decayed, labour disciplined through precarity rather than productivity, and surplus increasingly generated not through expanded reproduction but through rent, speculation, and monopoly control. In classical Marxist terms, the US increasingly consumes more value than it produces, compensating for this imbalance by appropriating global surplus via the dollar system, sanctions regimes, intellectual property monopolies, and military-backed access to resources. This is not sustainable accumulation; it is imperial rentierism, and historically such formations do not renew themselves without radical transformation.
This is why war appears not as an aberration but as a structural necessity. The militarisation of US foreign policy is not driven primarily by ideology or moral panic, but by the material requirement to enforce the conditions under which imperial accumulation remains possible. Control of energy corridors, sea lanes, and strategic chokepoints; containment of Eurasian integration; destabilisation of sovereign states that attempt independent development; and the prevention of alternative financial architectures—all of this is inseparable from the survival of American capitalism in its present form. When peaceful economic expansion no longer suffices, imperialism resorts to coercion, exactly as theorised by Vladimir Lenin in his analysis of monopoly capitalism. The multiplication of proxy wars, sanctions, colour revolutions, and hybrid conflicts is thus not evidence of strength but of exhaustion: the empire must constantly intervene because it can no longer allow history to move on its own terms.
Yet decline does not mean immediate collapse. This is a critical point that vulgar anti-imperialism often misses. Empires, especially those with global monetary privileges, can rot for decades. The British Empire after the First World War remained formally powerful even as its industrial base eroded and its colonies rebelled; its decline was slow, violent, and deeply reactionary. The United States today exhibits similar features: an overextended military apparatus, internal political polarisation, decaying public goods, and an elite increasingly disconnected from productive social life. Inflation substitutes for reform, repression for consent, and culture war for class politics. None of this suggests an imminent “bankruptcy” in the technical sense; it suggests a long imperial twilight in which crisis is managed through externalisation and force.
At the same time, the global environment has changed in ways that sharply constrain imperial manoeuvrability. The rise of alternative centres of accumulation, regional trade arrangements, and non-Western development models has weakened the ability of the US to dictate the terms of the world economy unilaterally. De-dollarisation, though uneven and partial, reflects not a sudden collapse of the dollar but a gradual erosion of its absolute dominance. States increasingly seek to reduce vulnerability to sanctions and financial warfare by diversifying reserves, settling trade in local currencies, and building parallel institutions. This does not end imperialism overnight, but it transforms the terrain on which it operates, raising the costs of coercion and reducing the returns of domination. In historical-materialist terms, the world-system is entering a phase of multipolar tension in which no single imperial centre can stabilise accumulation globally.
From the perspective of the Global South, this matters enormously. For peripheral and semi-peripheral societies, American decline does not automatically mean liberation. On the contrary, periods of imperial contraction are often the most dangerous, as declining powers lash out to preserve privileges they can no longer reproduce organically. The intensification of sanctions, regime-change operations, and militarised borders is not accidental; it is the politics of a system attempting to freeze history. For this reason, anti-imperialism cannot be passive or celebratory. It must be organised, sovereign, and materially grounded, capable of defending national development, regional integration, and popular power against imperial retaliation. The weakening of US hegemony opens space, but space must be filled by conscious political projects, not wishful thinking.
This brings us to the second pole of the title: socialist transformation. Is it conceivable that the United States itself could resolve its crisis through socialism rather than imperial decay? In principle, yes. Marxism has never argued that socialism is the destiny of “other” countries only. The United States possesses a vast working class, immense productive capacity, and a history—often suppressed—of labour struggle, anti-racist resistance, and socialist organising. The problem is not objective possibility but subjective and political conditions. American capitalism has historically integrated sections of its working class through imperial rents, racial hierarchy, and consumerism, blunting revolutionary consciousness while exporting exploitation abroad. As long as imperial privilege remains materially operative, even in declining form, socialist transformation faces immense obstacles.
Nevertheless, history does not stand still. As imperial rents shrink and internal contradictions sharpen, the ideological foundations of US capitalism erode. The promise of endless upward mobility collapses; public services decay; inequality becomes obscene; and political institutions lose legitimacy. In such conditions, class struggle inevitably intensifies, even if it initially appears in distorted, reactionary, or confused forms. The choice before American society is not between stability and socialism, but between reactionary decay and revolutionary reconstitution. Either the system continues to cannibalise itself through militarism, surveillance, and repression, or a break occurs that reorients production toward social need rather than imperial dominance.
From a Marxist–Leninist standpoint, socialist transformation in the United States would not be a moral redemption of the empire but its historical negation. It would require dismantling the military–industrial complex, abolishing the imperial dollar regime, and reconstituting the state as an instrument of popular power rather than global coercion. Such a transformation would not only liberate American workers; it would fundamentally alter the balance of forces worldwide, removing the central pillar of imperialist domination. Yet precisely because the stakes are so high, the resistance of the ruling class would be ferocious. No empire voluntarily abolishes itself; it must be compelled by organised mass struggle.
Thus, when posed rigorously, the question “Whether American Empire?” does not admit a simple answer. The United States is already in decline, but decline is not destiny. It can persist for decades as a militarised, parasitic, and increasingly authoritarian formation, exporting crisis and violence to the rest of the world. Or it can be transformed through socialist rupture, a path that remains historically possible but politically difficult. For the Global South, the task is not to wait for either outcome but to act: to build sovereignty, solidarity, and socialist alternatives that weaken imperial power regardless of how the American contradiction resolves itself internally.
In the final analysis, empires do not end because time runs out; they end because new social forces render them obsolete. Whether the American empire collapses under the weight of its own contradictions or is transcended through socialist transformation will depend not on prophecy, but on struggle—class struggle within the United States, and anti-imperialist struggle across the world-system. History has posed the question. The answer will be written not in forecasts, but in praxis.