Western Marxism, Anti-Communism and Imperialism

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.

Academic interest in over 500 years of European imperialism has significantly declined since the end of formal colonization in the 1970s and 1980s and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc communist governments in the early 1990s. Notably, waning concern about anti-imperialism has been evident among a segment of Western Marxists who have abandoned dialectical materialism and the Global South to focus on advancing the conditions of people in the imperialist core.

When we speak of Western Marxism in this article, we refer not just to Marxists in the West as a geographic space; rather, we mean a type of Marxism that is (1) uncritically anti-state or a form of anarchic Marxism, (2) denies the contributions of the socialist projects in the Third World and (3) believes that imperialism is passé. A definition of Western Marxism is not all-encompassing and recognizes that even non-Western Marxists may come from the West. Indeed, even Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel spent much of their lives in France. Thus, what makes a “Western” Marxist has more to do with position than geography.

Over more than a century, most Western Marxists have retreated from endorsing actually existing socialist projects and retheorized their significance in relation to capitalism. Such retheorization downplays the historical significance of actually existing socialism (AES) in the Global South, often by reframing them as part of global capitalism or global modernity. Western Marxists’ understanding of capitalism is overly broad and consequently it becomes impossible for them to actually conceive of or envision a world beyond it. Because their ideals are completely divorced from existing institutions and movements, socialism for them is precisely what Hegel called “the setting up of a world beyond that exists God knows where” (1991, 20). In effect, for many Western Marxists, capitalism becomes so expansive, and socialism becomes so pure, that it is not clear how it can exist.

The post-1990 tendency for Western Marxists to further downplay imperialism and privilege a nebulous global capitalism originates in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union as an extension of a wide-ranging intellectual and political tradition among Western Marxists and post-Marxists.

This article explores and analyzes how a section of Western Marxists have come to reject primary Marxist and Leninist concepts on imperialism, socialism and actually existing socialisms and to center further debate. From about the 1980s to the present, Western Marxists have replaced the abiding significance of imperialism with globalized capitalism, empire and undifferentiated “inter-imperialist rivalry.”

This article is not an exegesis of the entire Marxist canon on imperialism but is intended to interrogate a dominant group of contemporary theories for further research into and examination of a festering controversy that parts with fundamental concepts of class struggle and ignores the abiding exploitation by Western Europe and North America of 85 percent of the world’s population in the Global South.

Emergence of Western Marxism and Imperialism

Following the Russian Revolution, some Western Marxists began to replace support for revolution and fledgling socialist, instead promoting liberal-democracy and social reform in Europe and North America, restoring a position taken by the Second International before the Second World War. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, Georg Lukács, a supporter of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union, published History and Class Consciousness (HCC) in German in1923, which paradoxically supplied the oxygen for Western Marxism over the next century by channeling class into a relationship between subject and object, appropriating the abstract Hegelian notion of class consciousness over a grounded historical materialism advanced by Karl Marx in Capital (1867) and Friedrich Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1907). For Marx and Engels, class consciousness is a direct extension of the material being of the worker, but in HCC Lukács pursues the notion of working-class subjectivity as expressed in the communist party, a view which modifies class struggle from material dialectics into a philosophical abstraction. Lukács’s HCC distinguishes the individual as the historical subject in place of privileging the working class and nature, instead asserting that individual subjectivity is the primary force which is driven by ideas and not the material world. In spite of Lukács’s intention to philosophically situate the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union as the objective organ reflecting the working class, HCC becomes the driving force of Western Marxism in Europe and North America, re-centering the proletariat as a metaphysical and abstract subject and object of an undefined history.^[1]

Unwittingly, in the ensuing century, HCC has ushered in and propelled Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, anarchism, as well as other deviations from Marxism focusing on ahistorical philosophy. While linking working-class subjectivity with the party and organization is a compelling concept, as expressed in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic (1973) where he coins the term “Western Marxism,” HCC shifts the working class from the dominant historical force to the dominant theoretical concept in Marxism. By doing away with actuality and replacing it with ideation without conception, class struggle and revolution, and by extension, socialist anti-imperialism, become utopian unobtainable objectives. And, by doing so, the primary force of history is rendered into a silent deradicalized utopia, as Friedrich Engels warns in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (1907). The advent of Western Marxism deflects attention from the socialist revolutionary struggles to the abstractions of the reification of the singular lone worker. Thus, Western Marxism focuses on idealistic, abstract, cultural and philosophical questions and detaches itself from nature, political economy and the scientific Marxist currents of Engels, Lenin, Mao and, by extension, the Soviet Union and AES in the Third World.

Through rejecting dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, leading currents of the Western Left minimize imperialism and the working class under primitive accumulation. To be sure, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the Algerian and Indochina wars of independence against France and the United States stimulated anti-imperialist sentiment in the Western Left; for example, Jean Paul Sartre’s hiatus from existentialism and support for Third World liberation, in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2021). However, Marxist concern with imperialism waned and quickly shifted back to improving economic conditions in the core through social democracy and Eurocommunism from the 1980s to the present.

Ten years later, Prabhat Patnaik found the disappearance of imperialism from the lexicon of Western scholars and students even before the Soviet Union disbanded and the US emerged as the imperial hegemon:

The point is the paradox that while the system of relations covered under the rubric of imperialism has not changed an iota over the last decade and a half, fundamental questions today are discussed, unlike earlier, even among Marxists without any reference to it. (1990, 4)

This swing is evident in the aftermath of the Vietnam War when the British Marxist journal New Left Review (NLR) and Verso Books published Bill Warren’s Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (1980), falsely claiming European colonialism and imperialism as a progressive force for Third World development and a source of prosperity and global equality. Warren’s heretical position gained purchase among Western leftists who disregarded economic plunder and focused on developing social democratic welfare states at the expense of further impoverishing Africa, Asia and Latin America. NLR could then turn inwardly to improving conditions for the labor aristocracy in the West.

As Western Marxists were focusing on metaphysical dialectics and the deleterious impact of capitalism on abstract workers, non-Western Marxists centered attention on dialectical materialism and endeavored to apply dialectics to the transformation of the world: notably, the material contradiction between the rich and poor regions of the world, and as a means to study the capitalist world for praxis and transformation to socialism. In The Principal Contradiction, Torkil Lauesen applies Mao Zedong’s “On Contradiction” to strategy and praxis, without which Marxism is reduced to a set of philosophical ideas which have no material reality. Lauesen asserts, “The concept of contradiction builds a bridge between theory and practice. It is not just a valuable tool for the analysis of complex relationships; it also tells us how to intervene” (Lauesen 2020, 8). In this return to reality, Mao’s notion of contradiction is applied not just to understand the world but to change it: “Contradiction is present in the process of development of all things; it permeates the process of development of each thing from beginning to end. This is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction” (Mao 1937). At its core, Mao’s dialectical project places imperialism as the principal contradiction in the 1930s as it is today for the subordinated states:

When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. So it was in China in the Opium War of 1840, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Yi Ho Tuan War of 1900, and so it is now in the present Sino-Japanese War. But in another situation, the contradictions change position. When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war, but by milder means—political, economic and cultural—the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. (Mao 1937)

An imperilist counter distinction emerges between North and South in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution, restoring a position taken by the Second International before the Second World War. In effect, despite the various contradictions in capitalist society and increasing poverty in the colonized countries, the standard of living in the West increased through the spoils of imperialism and unequal exchange of trade with the periphery. Only upon achieving national sovereignty could the Communist Party of China launch a socialist revolutionary struggle, which became the principal contradiction. Mao writes in “On Contradiction”:

When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. (Mao 1937)

As Lauesen notes, class contradictions

have impacted both capitalists, who want to see continued accumulation of capital, and other classes, which are dependent on capitalist production to maintain their living conditions. . . . This is the importance of class struggle: it can steer contradictions in one direction or another. (Lauesen 2020, 123)

As historical materialism was unfolding through NDR and socialist revolutions, Western Marxists focused attention on theoretical debates about the nature of class in post-industrial society. In Farewell to the Working Class, French socialist André Gorz went as far as to assert that the working class had disappeared as new technology had abolished class and its aspirations, which were “as obsolete as the proletariat itself” (Gorz 1982, 67–68), wholly overlooking the expansion of the industrial working class in the periphery. In the absence of a historical materialist analysis, Western Marxists negated the major contradiction: the emergence of a far larger industrial working class in the Global South from the 1980s to the 2020s, and the extraction of surplus value for the benefit of capitalists and the aristocracy of labor in the rich countries of the North.

Imperialism, Neo-Liberal Capitalism and Western Marxists

A new shift occurred from the 1980s to the present as Western Marxists and leftists fragmented even further into multiple perspectives: post-Marxism, postmodernism, and First Worldism. Marxist political economists began to focus on globalization and neo-liberal capitalism, privileging globalized capital in the absence of the imperialist state, the primary force behind global production chains and the deepening exploitation of the Third World. In this context, scholars focused on imperialism even less. Many Western Marxists focused on the wrongdoings of Third World comprador elites who assumed power and were unable to transform their countries. Apart from anti-imperialists, dependency theorists or most world-system theorists, Samir Amin (1976), Arghiri Emmanuel (1972), Immanuel Wallerstein (1979), Walter Rodney ([1972] 1981), Ruy Mauro Marini (2022), Donald A. Clelland (2012) and John Smith (2016), few scholars alluded to the dominant capitalist imperialist system that was reinforced in the post-independence era. Only a small proportion of workers are actually true proletarians (i.e., live exclusively from their wage) while 75 percent are categorized as semi-proletarians who live on subsistence farming outside of the capitalist system and occasionally work for below-minimum income, which allows super-exploitation in a multitude of ways. According to Clelland (2012), labor exploitation constitutes a “dark value” of unpaid inputs to global capitalism, constituting a surplus drain on workers of the Global South.

In this article we contend that imperialism is necessary for capitalism to extract higher surplus value through exploitation of the Global South. Western Marxists overlook the importance of the imperialist state as the primary force behind capitalist accumulation. Decolonization ended the imperial project and replaced it with an amorphous empire (Hardt and Negri 2000). We align with Samir Amin in seeing the global spread of capitalism as dependent on imperialism and the extraction of surplus labor from the Third World. Capitalism could not produce and reproduce itself without imperialism. We question the respective positions of Marxists and post-Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2020), David Harvey (2007), Gilbert Achcar (2013), William I. Robinson (2014) and Kim Moody (2017). They form one representative group of scholars who have more or less dispensed with Western imperialism, international value exchange that benefits rich countries and depends on the super-exploitation of the Third World as essential international contradictions. For them, imperialism, both on Leninist and non-Leninist interpretations, either does not exist or is insignificant and is replaced by global capitalism, where relations of subordination are secondary. Ellen E. Wood (2005) and Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2013) suggest a middle position which recognizes imperialism but accords less significance to surplus extraction from the Global South.

Western Marxism, the First World and the Aristocracy of Labor

The development of a privileged working class was advanced by Friedrich Engels as early as 1887 with the publication of the English edition of the Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels writes:

That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. (Engels [1887] 2010, 13–14)

Lenin’s critique of the labor aristocracy extends the work of Engels from the nation state to the global system through identifying a crucial convergence between the bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy in imperialist countries in exploiting the masses of humanity on the periphery. Lenin viewed the Left and social democratic parties as collaborators in the imperialist wars against the rest of the world to ensure the continued extraction of profits. Yet for Lenin, this political convergence of the bourgeoisie and trade union leaders in imperialist core countries did not extend to the larger working-class masses. Like Engels, he predicted that the lower echelons of the working class would eventually rise up to oppose the corrupted, bureaucratic and wayward leadership of trade unions and establish a class-conscious working-class opposition (Lenin 1916).

However, for more than a century, the Western labor aristocracy has become widespread and further entrenched as the privileged segment of the working class recognizes that it benefits economically from imperialism. Labor support for war and imperialism extended to socialists, social democrats and the political Left in the West, who also recognized their trade union and political parties benefit from imperialism. This, then, has affected parts of the Western Left. For example, the British Labour Party has been deeply engaged in imperialism, appalling those socialists who wish to identify with it as a so-called working-class party (Gupta 1975).

Eric Hobsbawm asserts that the farther removed the proletariat in the imperial core is from economic activity, the more it has a material and economic basis in maintaining the system and a susceptibility for social chauvinism toward oppressed peoples in the colonial world. In the absence of a principled trade union leadership, the working class resorts to self-interested organizational economism which has perilous consequences for global working-class unity (Hobsbawm 1970).

Western working-class support for war is self-serving as imperialism has been a driving force in the establishment of the European social welfare states. Decisively, Lukács’s regression toward abstraction and the phenomenology of consciousness views the political economy of the extraction of surplus value through trade from the periphery as a natural occurrence rather than a conscious form of Western parasitism which facilitates the imperialist mode of living in the imperialist core. If surplus extraction is a phantom of nature, Western Marxists can focus on perfecting conditions in the West through social democracy, a form of removing the alienation in the West through universal basic income, expansive healthcare and pensions, thereby removing the degradation of work and replacing it with carnal and recreational activities geared to perfecting the human experience. To this end, imperialism transfers resources to a parasitic aristocracy of labor in the West, which benefits from exploitation of the periphery. In turn, the central Marxist principal of labor as a revolutionary and transformative force was also dismissed. French philosopher André Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class (1982) scorned the industrial working class as a reactionary and exhausted social force as if socialism would be achieved through the absence of work rather than through class struggle. Following this line, most but not all Western Marxists entirely ignored imperialist exploitation of labor in the Global South.

Certainly, in the West there is labor exploitation of Black and Latino people, migrant workers, low-waged women and other oppressed peoples. The aristocracy of labor thesis indicts the majority of the West as willing or unconscious conspirators and beneficiaries in the pillage of the Third World.

Neo-colonialism, Imperialism, Hegemony and Multipolarity

In the post-Second World War era, enthusiasm and optimism prevailed in states of the Global South that political independence from the Western imperialists would straightaway translate into economic prosperity through advancing economic programs in the interest of the masses. Ever since the victory of the Russian Revolution and especially in its aftermath, fervor around the potential socio-economic gains which would result from decolonization have drawn leading anti-imperialists in the Third World to Moscow and then Beijing. Communist parties militarily challenged Western-backed bourgeois nationalist parties for power and control of their emerging states, promising to form and institute egalitarian societies on the basis of the successful Soviet model.

Independent parties gained power in the Global South following the end of the Second World War, in most cases peacefully but often through armed conflict with colonial and imperialist powers. But the expectation that political sovereignty would bring about economic sovereignty was not realized in the newly independent countries as the United States, the global hegemon, and Europe’s former colonial countries maintained economic domination over the Global South through extending colonial policies and new forms of economic imperialism (Prashad 2019; Stavrianos 1981).

This perspective was stated vehemently by Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1966). As Westerners viewed political independence as the end of imperialism, Nkrumah found that it not only failed to end political, economic, cultural and other forms of dependency on Western Europe and North America but represented the most “dangerous stage.” As it was impossible for colonial powers to rescind independence, they would compete among each another to plunder territories that had “become nominally independent.” He asserted that existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies would be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, though, its economic system and thus its political policy are directed from outside (Nkrumah 1966, ix).

Nkrumah recognized that the post-colonial era would acquire diverse forms, from the equivalent of states controlled by military garrisons of the former colonial power to economic suzerainty over former colonies through imposing the former colonial power’s currency and monetary control of foreign exchange, as in Francophone West Africa. When newly independent states gained independence relatively peacefully, the inheritance of former colonial powers was evident within legal, bureaucratic, economic and political continuities. In almost all cases, colonial political systems were incongruent with the authentic material conditions of nascent independent countries. The constant was that developed countries retained economic and financial power “to impoverish the less developed.” But Nkrumah presciently recognized and documented that neo-colonialism extended beyond the colonial power and extended to economic dominance, shifting imperial control from a single developed state to imperialist and hegemonic capitalist countries capable of exploiting and plundering neo-colonies in ways which they could not deploy when maintaining colonial domination (Nkrumah 1966, x–xiii).

From the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union and then China provided essential support to sometimes diverging anti-colonial, anti-imperialist forces in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and beyond, leading to the formation of Marxist-Leninist post-colonial states. But in many instances, socialist movements gaining independence and political power in the post-war era encountered immediate opposition from right-wing insurgencies and death squads funded and supported by the United States and Western European and settler colonial states. Following the end of the Second World War, the West turned its attention to suppressing rising movements for political and economic independence in the Global South, opposing Marxist and socialist states which met in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955 to promote economic development, self-determination and advance global peace at the height of the Cold War.^[2] In 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formed in Belgrade, Yugoslavia with the same guiding principles. Western powers, seeking to retain or impose their dominance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, fomented imperialist opposition to new socialist states while preserving economic dominance through foreign mining and agricultural firms, using unequal forms of exchange which depleted the Global South’s natural resources.

Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, deposed in a British-supported coup d’état in 1966, recognized an inherent dilemma: decolonization established the basis for the persistence of imperialism through fragmenting the new states which had achieved ostensible independence. Nkrumah, who was a pan-Africanist but not a Marxist, was well aware that states of the Global South which had been granted independence by their colonial rulers were fragmented by boundaries which prevented them from becoming durable and resilient like their former colonial masters. He asserted that the endurance of imperialist capitalist rule is instituted through dividing and fragmenting territories (Nkrumah 1966, xiii).

But it is significant that Walter Rodney’s Marxist-Leninist critique claimed that Kwame Nkrumah “denied the existence of classes . . . until the petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him,” at which point he was forced to recognize that classes do indeed exist (Rodney 2022, 48, see also 68–69). According to Temin, Rodney exposed the historical significance of European economic development as an extension of capitalist imperialism:

“Self-reliance,” the core of the policy and philosophy first articulated in Tanzania’s 1967 “Arusha Declaration,” encapsulated the idea of building a non-aligned socialist society whose external independence did not hinge on Western (or Soviet) aid or investment. While maintaining socialist emphases on national ownership of the means of production, the politics of self-reliance rejected earlier state-led developmentalist emphases on industrialization such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. (Temin 2023, 243)

Nkrumah, foreshadowing contemporary demands outside the West for multipolarity, points to the significance of achieving a world which is not controlled exclusively by the West but has several geo-political forces in which Global South countries can develop and thrive through pursuing their own independent policies. The unipolar rules-based world system which gained dominance after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been dominated by the United States and its Western allies, which are also the major beneficiaries of a system perpetuating the most extreme form of free market. In this context, it has not been possible to challenge an economic, political and juridical order with alternative forms of organization, notably socialism. After 1991, those countries seeking to challenge the dominant neo-liberal model have been at risk of economic isolation and exclusion from the world economy. Consequently, with several exceptions, few countries have resisted the neo-liberal model. For this reason, Nkrumah challenges neo-colonialism and contemplates a world with several constellations of power, or what Third Wordlists call polycentrism. The call for African unity is an appeal for multiple powers which can attend to unique socio-economic crises without dependency on the imperial system. Expanding the magnitude of detached states in the Global South would expand their power to form socialist systems outside the Western-dominated unipolar system (Nkrumah 1963). Socialism requires scale to thrive without sanctions, military threat and other forms of coercion from dominant states.

Following countries’ formal achievement of independence since 1945 and through into the 1980s, most Western Marxist scholars have not considered the resilience of imperialism outside the colonial state. The majority saw it as a remote and obscure subject which ended with the independence of most regions of the Global South after the Portuguese colonies fell in the 1970s. Certainly, they did not neglect research on the Global South but, in place of imperialism, they implanted class as the major form of conflict there. This view was shared by almost all Western Marxists, who, as a whole, failed to account for the past and enduring malevolence of economic imperialism directed at the Global South.

In sharp contrast to Western Marxist globalists who privilege an immaterial form of capitalism without capitalist state actors as the leading force in the political economy, other scholars demonstrate that the globalization of poverty is a hegemonic project of imperialist states and their multinational organizations, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) and World Trade Organization (WTO) (Chossudovsky 2003). Vijay Prashad (2007) diagnosed the dilemma as the rise of imperialist neo-liberalism, disintegration of the Third World and the domination of the United States and its Western allies, which imposed market policies on the Third World by force and represented a profound shift away from AES and Marxism as practice. From 1980 to 2000, the Third World as a force against Western imperialism began to cave in as states rapidly abandoned responsibility for social welfare and state elites succumbed to the supremacy of the neo-liberal market. For Prashad, the rise of neo-liberalism and demise of socialism and disintegration of the Third World are inextricably intertwined.

During the course of the Cold War (1945–1990), the US government designed a calculated policy with its Western allies to coerce the Soviet Union and the Third World socialist states. With the demise of both the Soviet Union and Cold War and with the preservation of US military power intact, US foreign policymakers were drawn into the mistaken belief that they should no longer withdraw but rather accelerate and advance a policy of reshaping a neoliberal rules-based world using US military power in the interests of a an imperialist transnational capitalist class. The US defense and treasury assiduously endeavored to ensure that resources continued to flow toward Western transnational corporations, and that the dollar carried on as the principal hard currency (Prashad 2007, 278).Those intellectuals continuing to assert that imperialism remained the most significant factor of capitalism in the world economy—Samir Amin (1976), Arghiri Emmanuel (1972), Walter Rodney ([1972] 1981) and Prabhat Patnaik (2001) —were commonly excluded from debates dominated by Western Marxists intent on preserving and expanding the bourgeois-democratic and social-welfare gains in the Global North during neoliberal globalization while disparaging the flaws of past and present socialist projects in the Global South.

The Reassertion of Imperialism in Political Debate

From the mid-2000s to the present, the concept of imperialism was resuscitated by scholars centering attention on the growing economic power of rich countries in the Global North over poor countries in the Global South. Above all, imperialism re-emerged as an economic dynamic as manufacturing shifted from North to South, where commodities could be produced at far lower cost and much more surplus value could be extracted through inequality of trade from workers (Amin 1976; Cope and Ness 2022; Emmanuel 1972; King 2021; Patnaik and Patnaik 2016; Patnaik and Patnaik 2021; Smith 2016).

The revival of imperialism research exposed the privileges First World workers enjoy thanks to five centuries of pillage in the Third World. In contrast to Western Marxists’ position that global financialized capitalism does not require a nation state, Patnaik and Patnaik maintain that “[t]he colonial state worked directly and exclusively in the interests of metropolitan capital, while the liberal state works directly and exclusively in the interests of international finance capital, which is the lead actor in the current epoch” (2016, 33). In this way, Patnaik and Patnaik share Lenin’s assertion that imperialism requires a state to expand and exploit the world for the benefit of workers and capitalists in the major powers (Lenin [1917] 1948).

For Western Marxist intellectuals, the “aristocracy of labor” theory and the division of wealth between core and periphery (which might very well have been a key feature if Marx had written a Capital, volume 4) is a hard lesson which denies their self-proclaimed active role in the revolutionary transformation to socialism and ascribes it instead to Marxist anti-imperialist revolutionaries in the Global South. In the early 20th century, Marxists were already well aware of the benefits amassed by the Global North’s working classes from the continued exploitation of the Global South, representing the imperialist dialectic of outsourcing and global production. In 1907, Lenin asserted that European workers were beneficiaries of colonial labor:

Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society. (Lenin 1907; italics in the original)

Nkrumah also recognized that imperialist states used the extraction of profits to placate and buy off their own working classes. He asserted that colonialism created North American and Western European welfare states based on high working-class living standards and on state-regulated capitalism at home. In so doing, “the developed countries succeeded in exporting their internal problem and transferring the conflict between rich and poor from the national to the international stage” (Nkrumah 1966, 239).

If Global South countries were to achieve unconditional independence, end unequal exchange and foster development, neo-colonialism would have to end, which in turn would activate acute class conflict in the advanced countries:

When Africa becomes economically free and politically united, the monopolists will come face to face with their own working class in their own countries, and a new struggle will arise within which the liquidation and collapse of imperialism will be complete. (Nkrumah 1966, 239)

While much of the literature on imperialism focuses on the contemporary transformation of economies in the Global South through integration into global supply chains for commodity production, Patnaik and Patnaik demonstrate the decisive extraction of surplus value from primitive accumulation in the South, where limited subsumption of capital forces labor into super-exploitation. They show that, whereas agriculture and natural resources are also produced in the Global North and throughout the world using technological advances, Global South workers are exploited directly through primitive accumulation, which is decisive for the global economy, most notably the use of cheap labor for the extraction of cash crops and minerals. Indeed, in the periphery it is because the labor there is so cheap that investing in technology is not profitable for multinational corporations of Western agribusiness (Patnaik and Moyo 2011).

These essentials for global production are made possible by inadequate subsumption of capital (capital investment) and the super-exploitation of low-wage labor. In this way, mineral extraction is more profitable without the injection of new technology, as seen in the reliance on low-wage labor for production of copper, platinum and rare earth minerals (Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Moreover, production in the Global South was typically restricted to growing and harvesting agricultural commodities (e.g., cocoa, coffee, etc.) and extracting minerals with a low organic composition of capital as opposed to the imperialist North, with high subsumption of capitalism which facilitated mechanized production and refining of agricultural commodities, minerals and petroleum, depriving poor countries in the South of essential technology and profit.

Fordist industrial production was confined to the North from the 1940s to the 1970s but industrial production substantially shifted to the South through the imposition of neoliberal capitalism, requiring the strengthening intergovernmental bodies dominatd by the West, viz., World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 to regulate production or the benefit multinational corportions in the core. Under neoliberalism, raw-material exploitation extended to industrialization, both Fordist and production with low subsumption of capital, dependent on a vast informal reserve army of labor. Hence, global inequality expanded as profits generated by foreign investments on the periphery was captured by multinational capital in the core.

Mainstream political economists contend that the center of the world economy has moved from an advanced developed core in Europe and North America to an undeveloped periphery in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where remarkable economic gains have occurred, integrating the global economy, notwithstanding the Global South’s subordination. The global economy has produced a periphery of manufacturing industries which advanced capitalist nations rely on for the production of commodities (Dicken 2015). However, while a noteworthy “global shift” has occurred under neo-liberal capitalism, Dicken acknowledges the economically subordinate position of countries in the Global South. Even so, this account seeks to propose that the contemporary world economy is multifarious and variegated, discounting the dominance of rich countries of the Global North over most of the Global South, where poverty and inequality persist. Ironically, Dicken proposes that the global capitalist economy is complex and depends on capital flows to those regions where higher levels of surplus value can be extracted. This perspective parts from the position that the primary forms of class conflict are within nation states; rather, as Branko Milanović (2018), former chief economist at the IMF, argues, the most significant form of class conflict is between rich and poor countries. The “non-capitalist mode of production” and primitive accumulation are ubiquitous throughout most of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, the real shift is the imposition of neo-liberal capitalism, which has contributed to the withdrawal of the state and the requirement that workers be self-reliant actors. Therefore, the expansion of neo-liberal capitalist imperialism has undermined the negligible benefits provided by developmental states and replaced them with a far more pernicious system which renders formal political independence irrelevant to most in the Global South. Economic imperialism has reinforced dependency on the capitalist core (Cope and Ness 2022). Western Marxists who reject imperialism typically point to the rise of authoritarianism and despotism among Southern leaders who support an emergent upper class of multimillionaires and billionaires who rival those in the West. They contend that rising powers in the South are challenging Western imperialists through plundering natural resources and polluting the environment in the Global South (Bond and Garcia 2015). Accordingly, this plays into the claim that the adversary is not Western imperialism but capitalism, neo-liberalism and financialization. Yet they do not see a subservient comprador class whose members are agents of Western capitalism and facilitate the plundering of most states of the Global South by rich countries of the North.

State Power, Defense of Socialism and the Rise of Neo-liberalism

Western Marxism comprises a range of ideologies which are informative in political philosophy but, as a whole, lack credibility and concrete authenticity as a practical means to seize state power. Ultimately, Western Marxism stands in opposition to socialist endeavors to overturn the capitalist state and replace it with a socialist one. It is not possible to establish enduring socialism without grasping state power and instituting a socialist program opposing the bourgeoisie. Philosopher Domenico Losurdo (2024) suggests that Judeo-Christian faith is the foundation of Western socialism, which is ingrained in an end-time, upheld by self-proclaimed communists.

This unmistakable defect of Western Marxism is clear in Losurdo’s critique (2024). He challenges the intellectual basis of communist utopianism as rooted in the opposition to science, which Frederick Engels had underscored in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in 1907. For Losurdo, Western Marxists reject the integral significance of anti-imperialism within the struggle for socialist state power and oppose the struggle for national self-determination in the Global South (Broder 2017).

Since the 1990s, the construct of imperialism has been further diminished and disregarded by Western Marxists, who have viewed globalized capitalism as superseding the state and the hegemony of the First World (Harvey 2007; Robinson 2014; Slobodan 2018 among many others). In contrast to Western Marxists who have dispensed with the concept and reality of imperialism, Monthly Review School, notably political economists Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy (1966), have asserted that the enlargement of private capital is dependent on imperialist state-accumulated profits. Fellow Monthly Review historian Harry Magdoff has examined the contours of US imperialism and its dependence on monopoly control over resources and markets. In the case of Western Europe, economic advantage “is obtained through exploitation of colonial and neo-colonial countries” while the US has advanced through imperial control over resources and markets (Magdoff 1969, 16).

Patrick Bond and Ana Garcia (2015) mistakenly focus attention on emergent states in the South as forming part of an inter-imperialist rivalry, naturalize the ideology and experience of neo-liberalism and stress the imperative of a global capitalist market that did not require an imperialist state to expand but thrived on the withdrawal of the state from capital controls, paving the way for dismissing the significance of the working class, the Third World and the idea of socialism.

Western Marxism, Neo-liberal Capitalism and the Imperialist State

Absent from the global capitalist-empire perspective is the fact that the neo-liberal state is reproduced in the image of US, 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 US 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 US, 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 US 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 US in the imperialist project.

The US informal empire constituted a distinctly new form of political rule. Instead of aiming for territorial expansion along the lines of the old empires, US 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 US capital (Panitch and Gindin 2013, 11).

However, while incriminating the US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 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 returnof 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, US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 an 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.

Notes on Contributor

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.

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1. 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)].” ↑
2. 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). ↑

3. Charter of the United Nations. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CTC/uncharter.pdf. ↑