Monthly Review | The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left

Common contradictory propositions from Western left:¶

one nation cannot exploit another;
there is no such thing as monopoly capitalism as the economic basis of imperialism;
imperialist rivalry and exploitation between nations has been displaced by global class struggles within a fully globalized transnational capitalism;
all great powers today are capitalist nations engaged in interimperialist struggle;
imperialist nations can be judged primarily on a democratic-authoritarian spectrum, so that not all imperialisms are created equal;
imperialism is simply a political policy of aggression of one state against another;
humanitarian imperialism designed to protect human rights is justified;
the dominant classes in the Global South are no longer anti-imperialist and are either transnationalist or subimperialist in orientation;
the “anti-imperialist left” is “Manichean” in its support of the morally “good” Global South against the morally “bad” Global North;
economic imperialism has now been “reversed” with the Global East/South now exploiting the Global West/North;
China and the United States head rival imperialist blocs; and
Lenin was mainly a theorist of interimperialism, not of the imperialism of center and periphery
re: "unified" imperialist status post WWII - this was due to US dominance over other powers, not "ultra-imperialism" as described by Kautsky

Lenin's other major writings on imperialism¶

“The Socialist Revolution and the Rights of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses)” (written in January–February 1916);
“Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (written in October 1916);
“Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East” (November 1919);
“Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” (for the Second Congress of the Communist International [June 1920]);
“Preface to the French and German Editions” of his book on imperialism (July 6, 1920); and
“The Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions” (July 26, 1920)

Post WWII Developments¶

The ruling-class reality in the underdeveloped world, according to Amin, was one of “compradorization and transnationalization,” requiring new anti-imperialist revolutionary strategies, since there was no longer a national bourgeoisie as such. A revolutionary delinking strategy under these circumstances would depend on “building an anti-comprador social bloc” with the aim of enabling a sovereign project, divorced from the control of the imperialist world-system.
- Can see in Russia how typically "capitalist" formations can be progressive w/ respect to being part of an anti-comprador social bloc

Amin suggested that Lenin’s labor aristocracy theory did not go far enough to address how the whole “unequal international division of labor” created broad structures supportive of imperialism within the core imperialist states that could not just be wished away. Here what was needed was the “building of an anti-monopoly bloc.”

Nearly all revolutions since 1917 have taken place in the periphery of the world capitalist system and have been revolutions against imperialism. The vast majority of these revolutions have occurred under the auspices of Marxism. All have been subjected to counterrevolutionary actions by the great imperial powers. The United States alone has intervened militarily abroad hundreds of times since the Second World War, primarily in the Global South, resulting in the deaths of millions

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the primary contradictions of capitalism have been those of imperialism and class.

Another theoretical development characteristic of the Western Eurocentric left has been the adoption in stripped-down fashion of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, seen as a mere model of horizontal interimperialist conflict between great powers. Here, China and Russia are portrayed as constituting a single bloc (though representing very different political-economic systems), engaged in an imperialist rivalry with the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan.100 Middle-level or semiperipheral countries in the Global South enter the picture as “subimperialist” powers—a concept first introduced by Marini in the context of dependency theory but now being used in a very different way.101 Imperialism, in this new view, is no longer associated primarily with the global exploitative role of the great imperial powers, such as the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, which, making up the center of the capitalist world-system, have dominated the centuries-long history of imperialism. Rather, the characterization of imperialist states is extended to semiperipheral and emerging economies, now classified as imperialist or subimperialist, in the spirit of seeing imperialism primarily in horizontal rather than vertical terms.

India, China, and Russia actually transfer much larger amounts of value to the imperialist bloc than South America. Take the BRICS, the best candidates for being “sub-imperialist.” There is no evidence of significantly large and long-lasting value transfers to them from weaker/and or neighboring economies.¹

As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explained in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, the genocidal colonial wars against the Indigenous peoples of the United States simply merged into U.S. overseas imperialism

Common contradictory propositions from Western left:¶

Lenin's other major writings on imperialism¶

Post WWII Developments¶

See Also¶

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