"Neoliberal globalisation signifies, above all, a new stage in the globalisation of the capital labour-relation. It pitches the workers of the dominant nations and the workers of the global South together, in competition with each other and yet bound together in mutual interdependence, connected by globalised production processes, exploited with different intensities by the same capitalists. But this qualitative, new stage in the evolution of the capital/labour relation possesses a very specific quality: the imperialist division of the world was inherited by capitalism; it is now inherent. In other words, the globalisation of the capital/labour relation, in the context of and on the foundation of a pre-existing division of the world into oppressed and oppressor nations, entails the internalisation of this division. Neoliberal globalisation is, therefore, the unfolding of the imperialist form of the capital relation.

As a result, this latest stage of capitalist development has been leading not to convergence of the oppressed nations with the ‘advanced’ countries and the supersession of the North-South divide but to something meriting the term global apartheid, in which the southern nations have become labour reserves for super-exploitation by northern capitalists, producing industrial inputs and consumer goods, sustaining the western ‘consumer society’. This is imperialism on an entirely capitalist basis, in an advanced stage of its development, in which the globalisation of the capital/labour relation has taken place on the basis of inherited imperialist division of the world. In the neoliberal era, capitalism has fully sublated the old colonial division of the world; discarding all that is inimical to it and preserving and making its own all that promotes its continuation and expansion. 

The dismantling of the colonial empires and the attainment of formal sovereignty by the subject nations, advances made possible by the multitudes who joined hard-fought struggles for national liberation; and by the imperialists’ greatest fear, the increasing propensity of these movements to take a revolutionary socialist path, as shown on countless occasions from Korea to Algeria to Nicaragua. The new relationship of forces obliged imperialist powers to reorganise their relations with emerging capitalist elites within the subject nations, allowing their protégés to hold the reins of power while never letting go themselves. The end of colonialism and the attainment of formal sovereignty may have emancipated the national bourgeoisies, but the great majority—those left with nothing but their labour-power to sell, in a word the proletarianised peoples of these countries—still await their emancipation. The world continues to be divided into ‘oppressed and oppressor nations’, but now the national bourgeoisies act as intermediaries and accomplices in the imperialist plunder of their nation’s nature and living labour."

— John Smith, 11 Mr h 2016