"Sure, powers like the US and others still exact colonial-like force over smaller and weaker countries, for economic gain,"

that's definitionally colonilism under imperialism.

"but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left."

not true, when colonizers leave of their "own volition", it's usually with a puppet government left behind called "friendly" that's essentially a proxy for colonial extraction. Nations that kick out the foreign influence under libertaory action often are sanctioned or invaded to try and topple them and revert to depedance on western intervention, but, when they succeed, rights and success often are much increased for the people in them, see "Human Rights in the USSR" by albert syzmenski, who uses only western sources for the book to steelman his position.

The western dependence happens through layers of coordinated and planned proxy vasselization. See the books "Unequal exchange" by Arghiri Emmanuel and "superimperilaism" by michael hudson for more details and scientific treatments of the question. "Inventing Reality" by Micheal Parenti might be another good read for you!

"But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're all serfs of usury by the international banking system which runs on getting us addicted to debt which we and future generations are forced to pay off without being asked if we agree with it,"

Glad that one of the other sibling comments looked this quote up so I didn't have to. Fully "growing the scope:"

> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.

> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.

> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.

-- "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"

"Then that's not colonialism, it's just serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest."

This distinction collapses under the scientific understandings of imperialism and colonialism, linked above in more detail.

>not true, when colonizers leave of their "own volition", it's usually with a puppet government left behind called "friendly" that's essentially a proxy for colonial extraction.

When and where did that happen? When colonizers were kicked out by force, radical nationalists took power on the basis of "kicking out the oppressors/colonizers" who 100% weren't puppets of the original colonizers, but the contrary.

Case in point North Korea, Cuba and Iran and many African countries. Those regimes are 100% not US/UK puppets and yet they don't treat their people much nicer than they were under US/Western rule they revolted from. Quite the contrary, they're even worse off, because they don't know how to manage a modern industrial economy without the colonizers which originally built it.

USSR soviet Marxist communism was designed as a antithesis to US/western capitalism, and its workers ended up more oppressed than workers in the US, and the USSR was a world power, not some small powerless country like Cuba or Iran that could be bullied by US sanctions into poverty and submission, so its poverty was entirely self inflicted by the mismanagement and incompetence communism and anti-capitalist systems of governance inevitably bring which only end up functioning under oppressive tyrannical rule, until they inevitably collapse.

China became a world power from a starving nation, because it also abandoned centralized controlled communism and switched a lot of its economy to free market capitalism under the rules of the "evil western imperialists colonizers" because that's better and it actually works for lifting people out of absolute poverty. Chairman Mao's policies only created more poverty.