
This article was originally published in International Critical Thought journal, and you can access it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2024.2431960. We are reproducing the article with the permission of the author.
ABSTRACT
Many Western Marxists have jettisoned the concepts of imperialism while retaining opposition to actually existing socialist projects of the Global South. This paper asserts that the failure to critique imperialism and to support socialist projects in the Global South is grounded in a rejection of classical Marxist human relations to nature and a failure to contemplate the continuance of state-socialist projects in the Global South. Since the 1990s, Western Marxists have replaced imperialism with global capitalism that is untethered to Western imperialism. Western Marxists have also deemed socialist projects as a betrayal of their utopian views rooted in the Hegelian “purity fetish.”
Instead, some Western Marxists have aligned with imperialist states in support of political and economic intervention against countries they view as failed projects, often leading to the reassertion of imperialist domination. Consequently, Western Marxists blindly support Western policies which undermine socialist state projects and wittingly or unwittingly, the reassertion of economic, political, cultural and military dependency on imperialist capitalism.
Absent from the global capitalist-empire perspective is the fact that the neo-liberal state is reproduced in the image of U.S., imperialist, free-market capitalism. In large part, this view is in accordance with that of an element of Western Marxists who do not consider imperialism to be a global phenomenon and regard the enemy as capitalism, not the capitalist state and imperialism. First Worldism has produced a litany of books on a global capitalist system governed by market change, financialization and trade, where capital flows to the lowest level but not to the imperialist capitalist state.
Not surprisingly, Western Marxists who view the global capitalist class as a nebulous social force, devoid of a corporeality, do not consider nation states and global institutions as locations and spaces for class contestation. The adversary is global capitalism and the international capitalist class, and resistance to the capitalist hegemon is by amorphous and classless protests which form without political organization. In Hardt and Negri’s ambiguous Empire (2000), the questions of the working class and imperialism are passed over and replaced with what seems to be classless Westerners in opposition to an ill-defined power.
Ellen Meiksins Wood (2005) advanced a more nuanced view of the significance of contemporary imperialism in the neo-liberal globalized economy. Rather than entirely writing off the significance of the state in capitalism and imperialism, Wood maintained that old forms of direct colonial rule have been replaced with economic domination of the U.S. that was enforced through military domination, a global market economy and local comprador classes:
To be sure, behind the new global economic order is the most powerful military force the world has ever seen, and the constant threat of military coercion by the U.S., with or without the cover of international cooperation, is a necessary bulwark of “globalization.” But today, the old role of colonial settlers as a means of transporting economic compulsions has been taken over by local nation states, which act as transmission belts for capitalist imperatives and enforce the “laws” of the market. (Wood 2005, 156)
Wood’s argument and contribution against Western globalists underscores that the state cannot be reduced to capitalism. Capital is global, but it needs the state to secure legal domination, such as national banks and intellectual property. Moreover, the only means that capital has to expand is through the nation state, and for Wood this is the origin of capitalist imperialism. Capitalist imperialism differs from other types of imperialism because it seeks to create the same system (capitalism) everywhere. But, as stated, though Wood recognizes the state as a mechanism in advancing global capitalism, she is vague in specifying its precise operation.
In 2012, Panitch and Gindin posited a similar argument to Wood’s: that imperialism implies making the world safe for global capitalism, principally through U.S. military force and application of its capitalist “rule of law.” But, as stated, though Wood recognizes the state as a mechanism in global capitalism, Panitch and Gindin directly implicate the U.S. in the imperialist project.
The U.S. informal empire constituted a distinctly new form of political rule. Instead of aiming for territorial expansion along the lines of the old empires, U.S. military interventions abroad were primarily aimed at preventing the closure of particular places or whole regions of the globe to capital accumulation. This was part of a larger remit of creating openings for or removing barriers to capital in general, not just U.S. capital (Panitch and Gindin 2013, 11).
However, while incriminating the U.S. in the imperialist project, Panitch and Gindin do not focus on the dominance of Western monopoly capitalists as the primary protagonists in appropriating surplus value from the Global South, but home in on the U.S. as world hegemon. Thus, they absolve Europe, Australia and Canada as complicit in the exploitation and expropriation of surplus value from the South. While laying blame on the U.S. incarnation of the state, neither Wood nor Panitch and Gindin recognize the global divide privileging the North over the South.
Global South Anti-imperialism
In sharp contrast to Western leftists’ dismissal of imperialism, Patnaik and Patnaik make a critical distinction on the centrality of the imperialist state, claiming that capitalism needs commodities, raw materials and labor at cheap prices with imperialism being the means to get them. Moreover, capitalism extracts surplus value through petty producers, who are not quite capitalists.
Ecuador may have a part role in the tropical “monopoly” of cacao and banana production, but Germany has Siemens and BMW, while the United States has big pharma, Boeing, Monsanto, Caterpillar and Apple. All of this confers monopoly powers within metropolitan economies, which are hard to break, no matter how hard India and Brazil might try in the production of, say, generic drugs (Patnaik and Patnaik, 2021, 164).
David Harvey, who responds to Patnaik and Patnaik in their volume, shifts the argument to high technology (e.g., the iPhone and other forms) without stating that modern commodities are in fact made by labor from the Global South which requires imperialist states of the West to facilitate low-wage global production chains, logistics and consumer goods predominantly sold in Western capitalist markets. In addition, Harvey disregards imperialism in his definition. As a rejoinder, Smith suggests that this process operates successfully “through forming corrupt relationships with the most venal and treacherous sections of the national bourgeoisies of the subject nations, cutting them in on the proceeds. This typically involves the intervention of imperialist state power” (2016, 231). Thus, capitalism requires both the metropolitan monopolies and compliant comprador elites on the periphery, a relationship of monopoly domination and acquisition which is indistinguishable from economic imperialism.
In the final instance, positing a stateless, neo-liberal global capitalism neglects the capability of the imperialist states to apply their own free-market model on the entire world. Neo-liberal hegemony is equivalent to imperialist hegemony.But, if Third World states are to survive under globalized capitalism, they must also open their borders to legal and economic subjugation of the imperialist states, in effect reconstructing the colonial project as neo-liberal imperialism. Concomitantly, the weakening of state power in the South (especially hierarchical, class-based socialist state power driven by workers and their communist parties) renders efforts to challenge the extant system unthinkable (Ness 2021).
In contrast, from the 2000s to now, a new wave of anti-imperialism rooted in the dominance of the imperial state has become more prominent in the wake of U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military interventions in South-West Asia, North Africa, Europe and beyond. Imperialism has begun to return to fundamental concepts of unequal development between the Global North and Global South, dependency theory and the aristocracy of labor within the neo-liberal capitalist system. Hardt and Negri’s Empire dismisses the Third World as a source of revolutionary change, instead privileging the First World as the principal site of innovation and social transformation:
The limited merit of the Third Worldist perspective was that it directly countered the ‘‘First Worldist’’ or Eurocentric view that innovation and change have always originated, and can only originate, in Euro-America. . . . We find this Third Worldist perspective inadequate because it ignores the innovations and antagonisms of labor in the First and Second Worlds. Furthermore, and most important for our argument here, the Third Worldist perspective is blind to the real convergence of struggles across the world, in the dominant and subordinate countries alike. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 264)
In turn, North America and Western Europe, all along at the center of the invisible empire, have become visible in the contemporary period of economic imperialism, directing and dominating the global capitalist system, enforcing neo-liberalism and the withdrawal of state regulatory and social welfare, marginalizing and crushing working-class and anti-systemic organizations.
Western Marxist Imperialism and the Challenge to Actually Existing Socialisms
We must come to understand that AES (Actually Existing Socialisms) were established through a complicated but authentic materiality, where realizing independent state power was fundamental in forming a socialist society. Socialism was not fashioned through Marxists by happenstance, but through a vanguard seeking to take state power for the working class. Although some Western Marxists genuinely considered the possibility of improving the faults of AES, most rejected them even though they knew little or nothing about their consequential advances.
Their assessments of AES were based on Western mainstream newspapers, while analysis of the Western Left used alternative and more authentic sources. Today, this view of AES is rooted in a purity of Western Marxism, described by Domenico Losurdo in Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn. His support for anti-imperialist revolution and critique of Western Marxism is unwavering:
. . . if, in our accounts of twentieth-century history, we avoid myopia and Eurocentric arrogance, we must recognize the essential contribution made by communism to the overthrow of the world colonialist-slavery system. . . . Even if it has assumed new forms with respect to the past, the struggle between anticolonialism and colonialism and neocolonialism has not ceased. It is not by accident that, following its triumph in the Cold War, the West celebrated it as not only a defeat inflicted on communism but also on Third Worldism and as the premise for its coveted return of colonialism and even imperialism (Losurdo 2024, 225)
In fact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union had undermined these significant gains in AES countries while enlarging the workforce which Western imperialists could exploit (Foster and McChesney 2017). From the 1970s to the 2020s, scholars, students and activists have been directed toward Western socialism and forms of idealistic sectarian leftism, even in the Third World, and opponents have been classified as apostates. History cannot necessarily be understood through the teleological lens which Western Marxism prescribes, even if capitalism seems to be rooted in a continuous effort to increase surplus value and profits. The dialectic is to hold on to pessimism and optimism simultaneously. Thus, we must always hold out hope for a better world despite the enormous challenges which we have before us. Losurdo (2008) shows in Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, that we need to have the capacity to understand and recognize all sides of socialist projects and political actors, the inspiration which brings positive change to the most oppressed.
Western Marxists have been joined by disillusioned Westerners who have even embraced Third World tendencies, forming a solid flank of opposition to the liberation of the Global South.
Western Marxists reject Frederick Engels’ seminal essay Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1907) and embrace a dogmatic purity rooted in millenarian eschatology. In retrospect, the 1960s social movements in the West produced Western Marxists and disillusioned purist Marxists who would ultimately reject communist projects. Worse still, this generation and their intellectual progeny would become the most vocal critics of socialist constructs. The delusion of Western Marxist purity converted many to embrace a new orthodoxy: liberal bourgeois hegemony. The utopian socialist pathway, whether crystallized through Western Marxism or, significantly, Westerners adopting purist Marxist variations in the Global South but not the Global North, transformed into a dominant imperialism which challenged anti-imperialist socialist projects.
The divergence over Marxist ideological purity sums up the fundamental prescriptive dilemma of most Western Marxists. If we are profoundly opposed to any form of idealistic rigidity, we must assess anti-imperialist and socialist projects in the Third World as positive, notwithstanding their flaws. If not, we expose our own. Undeniably, we must learn from the past and judge socialist policy which diverges from purity as essential to building anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist projects, from the Soviet Union to China and surely beyond.
The New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union in 1921 was a necessary expedient by Lenin to save the fledgling socialist project and to recover from the war and foreign intervention and intrusion. Moreover, subsequent turns to market socialism by other socialist states have been principally expedient measures intended to protect, preserve and reinforce the socialist project and should be applauded rather than disparaged, as Western Marxist dogmatists and purists are wont to do. The problem is really what one does once most of the AESs no longer exist, with the notable exception of China, along with Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.
Apart from most Western Marxists, some leading scholars, not least literary critic Frederic Jameson, recognize the significant socio-economic gains and accomplishments of socialism in the Global South: increased life expectancy, reduced infant mortality, access to healthcare, public housing and education. Rejecting commonplace Western Marxist characterizations, Jameson acknowledges these achievements of AES.
The end of socialism . . . always seems to exclude China; perhaps the fact that it still has the highest economic growth rate in the world has led Westerners to imagine (incorrectly) that it is already capitalist. . . . As for Cuba, one can only feel rage at the prospect of the systematic undermining and destruction of one of the great successful and creative revolutionary projects. (Jameson 1996, 15)
It is remarkable that self-proclaimed Marxists and anti-imperialists would oppose this essential plank of socialist transformation, notably the efforts by the Soviet Union and China to redistribute wealth in their societies, not least through expropriation of private property and collectivization. Surely, the bourgeoisie will endlessly seek to defeat socialist governments, and, assuredly, an aspiring bourgeoisie or corrupt bureaucrats will constantly seek material gain, even in a socialist society.
Yet, Western Marxists and their patrons in the government and media will be the first to criticize collectivization and anti-corruption campaigns as suppression of human rights. In the meantime, the imperialist West will apply coercive measures against socialist states during the transitional period, including economic sanctions, interruption of trade, Western subsidized color revolutions and coup d’états to overthrow governments dissenting from capitalist neo-liberal reforms and military intervention. A principled anti-imperialist position must oppose such sanctions and coercive economic measures.
Thus, rather than situating imperialism among capitalists in dominant hegemonic states of the Global North, sociologist William I. Robinson presents imperialism as benefitting global capitalists, in rich and poor countries, denoting them as the transnational capitalist class (TCC). This view ignores the significance of the dominant imperialist states of North America and Western Europe which set global neo-liberalism into motion and formed the presumed TCC extending to rich and poor regions of the world. For Robinson, U.S. military intervention advances all members of the TCC rather than specific imperial powers (2014).
Disregarding Western-backed military intervention, economic sanctions, compulsory neo-liberalism and political obstruction by Western imperialists in the Global South, Marxists in the West have scorned AES experiments and their adherents. In International Viewpoint, Robinson contends:
The worldwide left nonetheless has yet to reckon theoretically with just how quickly and thoroughly Third World revolutionary parties and their leaderships who came to power in the latter decades of the 20th century—in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam and elsewhere—were wont to shed revolutionary ideology, embrace capitalism, join the ranks of the bourgeoisie, demobilize what were politicized mass bases, and brazenly pilfer public resources. (Robinson 2022)
Robinson resonates Western Marxists’ myopic perspective of the failure of AES by offering selective and evasive anecdotal evidence of leadership betrayal, maligning counter-hegemonic projects while all but ignoring the political and military force of Western imperialist states which set in motion neo-liberalism and globalization for the benefit of a select few. These critiques of AES are echo chambers of the mainstream media in the West. Sectarian anarchists and other leftists do not consider that forming socialist governments with unswerving principles is a prerequisite for challenging the imperialist system dominated by the West.
Moving toward Third World socialism requires harnessing and directing objective and grounded policies which advance the interests of the most precarious urban and rural working-class members who represent the largest national constituency throughout the Global South. Certainly, this requires transferring resources from multinational companies and local comprador agents to meeting social needs (Marini 2022). In the absence of socialist policies, countries of the Global South will remain trapped in interminable global schemes to eradicate poverty and inequality. Achieving social development goals to ameliorate poverty in the poorest countries is highly unlikely to be realized under the auspices of economic, imperialist, financial institutions such as the IMF and WB that impose austerity on the Global South under severe economic constraints; constraints that only reinforce domination by rich countries.
Instead, Western Marxists tacitly support imperialist privilege through critiquing the faults in budding national programs to counter global inequality. In short, the Western Left, including academics, fixates on empty sectarian rhetoric and condemnation of an amorphous global capitalism against a nebulous international working class. On no occasion do Western Marxists support governments striving for socialism in search of alternatives to inequality and the preservation and extension of global unequal exchange.
Neo-Conservative Marxism, Inter-imperialist Rivalry and the New Cold War
As U.S. global economic hegemony is challenged economically, militarily, culturally and politically in the wake of the American rules-based order of “forever wars,” a number of Marxists have adopted neo-conservative stances and incorrectly advanced Lenin’s concept of inter-imperialist rivalry from presumed global competitors who do not present a threat to the U.S. but seek a multipolar world based on the principles of mutual respect found in the Charter of the United Nations.3 Paradoxically, these New Cold War theorists have claimed multipolar states resisting the extension of U.S. and Western economic and military power (notably, China, Russia, Iran and other states) are the primary adversaries (Bond and Garcia 2015; Hensman 2018; Pröbsting 2022).
Neo-conservative Marxists support the expansion of U.S. dominance in Eastern Europe, East Asia, West Asia, Africa and beyond. In so doing, they provide intellectual cover to the concept of inter-imperialist rivalry even as the U.S. and the West support NATO expansion, color revolutions and the rules-based order of human rights aimed at destabilizing their supposed rivals. Gilbert Achcar, a leading neo-conservative Marxist intellectual and regime-change advocate, who served as a consultant to the British Ministry of Defence (Norton 2019), contends that the New Cold War began in the late 1990s when Russia was emerging from economic collapse, due to draconian shock therapy, and China modernized its economy and exported commodities which increase the wealth and living standards of Western corporations and consumers (Achcar 2023). Achcar mistakenly attributes military tensions to Russia and China even as NATO expands eastward into the former Soviet Union and seeks to control the Eastern Pacific.
Taken together, advocates of inter-imperialist rivalry dismiss Western interference in the internal affairs of China, a nation which was occupied by Western imperialists but since 1949 has not occupied a square inch of foreign territory. At bottom, Marxists claiming the world is now in a stage of inter-imperialist rivalry seek to draw equivalence between the global interventions of the U.S. and the defensive reactions of multipolar contenders.
Anti-imperialist Marxists are consistently ridiculed as supporters of AES and ridiculed as “campists” and “tankies” who support existing socialist states by opponents and by leftists who misinterpret Marx and Lenin on the requirement to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.
But since the 1950s, some Western Marxist schools and journals have instead aligned with the U.S. and the West to support economic sanctions and war against selective countries they have viewed as authoritarian, seeking to impose free-market neo-liberal reforms which would give rise to high poverty and inequality in Indochina, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe and beyond. Notably, the “left” journals Against the Current and New Politics defend NATO and Western militarism, economic sanctions and its rules-based order and reject multilateralism.
After more than a half century of neo-colonialism and more than 30 years of U.S. dominance, the world has embarked upon a dialectical shift toward unification of imperialist power through weakening and dissolving regional configurations and foreclosing realizable unification and promoting identarian divergence. Today, more and more proponents of a multipolar world system support a global shift from U.S. and Western imperial and hegemonic dominance to a multipolar system, whereby weak and bifurcated states typically found in the Global South can unify and gain the capacity to advance regional interests. Nkrumah recognized that neo-colonialism would expand in the post-independence period with “catastrophic” consequences for divided states of the South. He asserted:
Neo-colonialism is based upon the principle of breaking up former large, united colonial territories into a number of small non-viable States which are incapable of development and must rely on the former imperial power for defence and even internal security. Their economic and financial systems are linked, as in colonial days, with those of the former colonial ruler. (Nkrumah 1966, xiii)
He correctly predicted that neo-colonialism would shift imperial control from a single Northern state to competing states seeking to protect economic interests in the Third World (Nkrumah 1966, xv) and inflecting economic, cultural and ideological spheres of influence (239). Intriguingly, Nkrumah recognized that the First World instituted welfare states which attenuated class conflict through the extraction of wealth from the South, thus “transferring the conflict between rich and poor from the national to the international stage” (255).
Conclusion: Working-Class Internationalism? Present and Future
The new focus on imperialism is a rejection of the Western Marxist archetype of socialism and communism, which denies the development of revolutionary national power among states of the Third World. Western Marxists are themselves the beneficiaries of neo-colonial preserved dominance, as Western working classes depend on the exploitation and oppression of land, natural resources and workers in the Global South. Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange is central to understanding the continuance of extractive economic imperialism which, without the emergence of anti-imperialist counter-hegemonic and socialist states, will preserve a global system of inequality (Emmanuel 1972). Unequal exchange exposes the endurance of imperialism to be essential for the extraction of surplus labor from the most exploited workers living outside the imperial core.
The world is not static, and episodic variations and departures occur in the global system; for instance, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of China. Following Mao Zedong, Torkil Lauesen observes that the principal contradiction is embedded in a historical and material conjuncture which is not static but changes based on the dialectical forces in the world. In the context of the world system, the contradiction shifted from the Global North’s working class to a global system where the center of capitalist exploitation converged on the Global South after the Second World War (Lauesen 2020).
To comprehend the “principal contradiction,” attention must focus on understanding Western and Northern imperialism and working-class resistance in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is incorrect to judge anti-imperialist socialist projects in the periphery and semi-periphery as equivalent to the Western imperialist project. In this sense, contemporary Western Marxists are gripped by an opposition to the growing global presence of multipolar AES projects in the Global South, viewing them as equivalent to Western imperialism and dooming them to failure before they have had a chance to emerge. We must not sentence socialist projects to death prematurely as they are part of a longer trajectory of class forces (Williams 1980).
Frances Stoner Saunders, in Who Paid the Piper? (2000), provides evidence that Western counterintelligence has falsified much of the evidence in the post-Second World War era. This means that we should not underestimate the tremendous economic, cultural and social power of Western media in obscuring the historical truths advanced by their opponents. Far too many imperialists and capitalists condemn peripheral and semi-peripheral countries for their activities in the Third World rather than trying to focus on their accomplishments. When Third World socialist states oppose imperialism, they encounter major resistance and must at times change tactics and strategy.
Further, it is incumbent on anti-imperialists to engage in intellectual and direct praxis. We should not condemn the errors of anti-imperialist projects (as Western Marxists are prone to do) despite their achievements, like Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, creating equality and improving women’s conditions and the environment (Harsch 2013; Murrey 2018; Peterson 2021). Advancing class conflict is a teleological process but has many contradictions and imperfections, which may include “one step forward and two steps back” (Lenin [1904] 2021).
Socialist anti-imperialists must be firmly rooted in the history and contradictions of material conditions and the historical development of capitalism. However, they must also understand the underlying causes of unintended consequences and the requirement to support imperfect projects against Western imperialism. We must give socialist experiments time to germinate and to consolidate power before passing judgment on their efficacy. After all, too many self-proclaimed anti-imperialists in the West are more intent on disparaging fledgling socialist projects in the Global South than on recognizing their own governments’ complicity in undermining countries there which do not accept neo-liberal capitalism and the U.S. rules-based order. Western Marxists’ frequent criticisms of economic performance become self-fulfilling prophesies after sanctions prevent states from participating in trade.
Transnational organizing is essential to building an international working-class movement, but it is impossible without recognition of the global divide and unequal exchange between the Global North and Global South. Western Marxists and leftists must conceive of class exploitation as primarily a global divide which can only be addressed through concrete political organizations. In the present era, economic imperialism is expanding as the Global South is the center of global production and supply chains, and it is vital for international capitalists primarily domiciled in the Global North to advance surplus value. Commodity chains do not advance international solidarity and cooperation. In fact, they are used to divide the global working class, as internal and international migrant workers with fewer rights are at the lowest point in the world system of production and distribution under global neo-liberalism.
Global commodity chains lead to class stratification and divisions, and resolute socialists and anti-imperialists must oppose their expansion and growth (Suwandi 2019). Local discontinuous struggles within commodity chains do not have the potential to contribute to the radicalization and organizational power of class movements within nation states of the Global North. Formation of socialist states which resist subordination in the global system is the foremost precondition for challenging economic imperialism. However, in the last 30 years, the emergence of post-Marxism has focused on language, identity, postmodernism and autonomy as the new form of activism, replacing the political party and trade union. While Monthly Review has focused on anti-imperialism, Verso has centered on publishing post-Marxists who do not consider political economy and imperialism. Prominent postmodern theorists include Alain Badiou, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Étienne Balibar, Félix Guattari and Giorgio Agamben. John Holloway (2002), a post-Marxist sociologist who opposes socialist revolutions, plays into the hands of imperialism through praising anarchic and weak political movements in the Global South which have failed to take power as models for opposing imperialism, including the Zapatistas. In opposition to disciplined Marxist political parties, support for AES and the Global South, the rise of an imperialist post-Marxist Left took center stage from 1980 to the present.
French philosopher Alain Badiou is representative of post-Marxist thought, privileging sporadic events, encounters and incoherent moments of disjuncture as the replacement for organization. He considers the political party to be exhausted, instead espousing an anti-party and anti-state perspective privileging the subject as a liberatory force, known as a “political organization” (Badiou 2013). In its essence, the rejection of the party and state is a denunciation of AES, a position consistent with anarchists and autonomous leftists. Put bluntly, the anti-party and anti-state intellectual orientation of Western Marxists is rooted in First World, free-market bourgeois individualism, established over 500 years of the expanding imperialist core. National chauvinism is an extension of the dominant imperialist classes’ extraction of material gains, a neo-colonial process which persists even after formal decolonization. Collectively, post-Marxist intellectuals disavow the party and state form, dismissing the devastation which Western imperialism has inflicted on the Third World and the super-exploitation which has created a divide between North and South. Amiya Kumar Bagchi shows that “The state systems and their functioning were an essential part of their theorising.” He follows Lenin’s view of modern imperialism: “. . . as a political phenomenon with deep foundations in monopoly capitalism. The means of fighting imperialism must also be political; the means would be chosen according to the specific historico-national context” (Bagchi 1983, PE-10).
Thus, party and the state have been integral to the imperialist project over the past 500 years. Further research must examine the political and material forces driving the intellectual orientations outlined in this essay, including disavowal of past and present accountability for the criminal extraction of resources in the Global South. Is the anti-party/anti-state thesis an extension of a lineage of political and economic exploitation which can only be reversed through politics and the nation state? Scholarship must understand the evolution of AES and Marxism-Leninism into New Left anti-communism, and now neo-liberal “Marxism” invested in the irreversibility of neo-liberal globalization. What remains certain is that Western anti-imperialists must reject the trend among leftists to regard irregular and discontinuous organizations operating outside the state as the future forms of class struggle. Class struggles occur in plantations, mining communities, factories and working-class districts and are built through time by dialog, meetings and communal decisions to influence politics and state action.
Today, there is an intense need for political and social organization. Neo-liberal capitalism has advanced free markets and individual responsibility on a world scale through the proliferation of private ownership and through neo-liberalism and its multilateral agencies (the IMF, WB and WTO), requiring the withdrawal of the state for participation in the world capitalist order. The anti-imperialist Left in the Global South must rebuild the organizational power which has been crushed since the 1960s by the hegemonic free market, backed by violence and military power, in every facet of life. In particular, the Global South requires strong, resilient, socialist, anti-imperialist organizations willing to take on the dominance of the free market projected by the Collective West. Nkrumah suggests political movements within small states will not succeed without the creation of regional multipolar blocs capable of challenging Western hegemony (1966).
Losurdo (2024) points out a consistent paradox in Western Marxists’ thought. While they may support socialist movements, they join imperialists in opposing socialism once it is created and gains political power. In the real world, anti-imperialism is irrelevant in the absence of authentic counter-hegemonic forces capable of challenging the dominant power structure. Western Marxists are trapped in a utopian world where the idea of socialism is superior to the actuality of socialism in which history continues with contradictions and flaws. In this way, Western Marxists have no real path toward socialism, defined as state control over the economy in the interest of workers and peasants. We do not have to imagine socialism; it exists in multiple forms and is faced with unrelenting challenges. Regrettably, Western Marxists, dogmatists, anarchists and utopians present the primary contradiction.
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Immanuel Ness is a professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and visiting professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesurg. His recent publications include Migration as Economic Imperialism (2023). He is writing a book on the unique efficacy and potency of the Chinese labor movement.
This is Part-2 of the article, published on Jan 4 …
Western Marxism, anti-communism and imperialism
https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/western-marxism-anti-communism-and-imperialism/
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Notes:
- Two years later, holding to the fundamental concepts of reification and class consciousness, Lukács’s unpublished monograph, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (2020), preserves the significant concept of reification and the consciousness of the proletariat, rejects philosophical revisionism, and foregrounds social existence as determining class consciousness and class struggle rather than individual subjectivity driving existence. Moreover, in the preface to the 1967 edition of HCC, Lukács succinctly asserted that his views were framed “through spectacles tinged by Simmel and Max Weber” (1971, ix)].”
- The Bandung Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia from 18 to 24 April, was attended by 29 Asian and African countries besides the five countries mentioned above; namely, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, the Vietnam Democratic Republic, South Vietnam (reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976) and Yemen. See Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2014).
- Charter of the United Nations. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CTC/uncharter.pdf.
Originally published: Anti-Imperialist Network on December 24, 2024 by Immanuel Ness (more by Anti-Imperialist Network) (Posted Dec 28, 2024)