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‘The Denial’ of Imperialism on the Left

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations. — Lenin referring to an earlier statement by Marx.

“[I]t was the combined effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent wave of globalization, and Washington’s aggressive drive for a unipolar order that led to much more open denials of imperialism on the left. Ironically, at a time when liberals were celebrating a new naked imperialism, much of the global left jettisoned all critical notions of imperialism theory, even, in some cases, offering support for the new empire ideology. Here the ideological hegemony exerted by capital over the Western left was on full display. [with its derivatives and distractions: identity politics, ‘democracy promotion’, ‘the threat of Islam’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, expansion of NATO, ‘it’s in their culture’, ‘saving Muslim women’, ‘we are all middle class now’, ‘human rights’, liberal feminism, celebrity culture …]

“[T]he gap between the views of imperialism held by the Western left and those of revolutionary movements in the Global South is wider than at any time in the last century. The historical foundations of this split lie in declining U.S. hegemony and the relative weakening of the entire imperialist world order centered on the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan, faced with the economic rise of former colonies and semicolonies in the Global South. The waning of U.S. hegemony has been coupled with the attempt of the United States/NATO since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to create a unipolar world order dominated by Washington. In this extreme polarized context many on the left now deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by the core imperialist countries. Moreover, this has been accompanied more recently by sharp attacks on the anti-imperialist left.

“[G]rave misconceptions with respect to Lenin’s theory and its contemporary relevance are traceable in part to a tendency of radical academics in the West to study his Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism in abstraction from his other major writings on imperialism.” 

John Bellamy Foster’s critique does not spare Giovanni Arrighi, Hardt and Negri, David Harvey, Gilbert Achcar. I think Foster, to an extent, distorted and dealt selectively with Achcar’s argument on anti-imperialism.

Related

John Smiths’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

Jason Hickel’s work


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