1. The Politics
of Anti-imperialism
Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, written during World War I, has the merit of opposing all imperialisms, including Russian imperialism, and of supporting the oppressed classes and democracy in all countries. However, it conflates two distinct phases of capitalism – imperialism and finance capital – and this has created immense confusion on the left. The idea that finance capital and foreign investments constitute imperialism would lead to absurd conclusions; for example, that China is an imperialist power in the US, or India in the UK. Instead, imperialism should be defined as political, and sometimes military, intervention in another country in order to install or keep in power a regime that acts more in the interests of the imperialist power than in the interests of any class – even capitalists – in its own country. Its driving force is nationalism in the imperialist country. Imperialism is opposed by struggles for national liberation,1 which constitutes one element in a democratic revolution – the people cannot rule themselves so long as they are ruled by another nation-state – but not the only one. Genuine anti-imperialists oppose all imperialisms, while pseudo-anti-imperialists oppose some while supporting others.
Theories of Imperialism
The main argument in pacifist-liberal economist J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study, first published in 1902, is that imperialism is directed by the search of investors, backed by the great financial houses, for profitable investment opportunities. For Marxist Rudolf Hilferding, too, in Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, written in 1910, the ‘export of capital’ is what marks imperialism (1981). Drawing on both of these works, V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) defined imperialism as (a) the dominance of international capitalist monopolies, (b) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital to create ‘finance capital’, (c) the export of capital rather than the export of commodities, and (d) the territorial division of the world among the biggest capitalist powers. Taking off from Marx’s analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,2 he identified the driving force of imperialism as the fact that
an enormous ‘surplus of capital’ has arisen in the advanced countries. … As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high, because capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low and raw materials are cheap. (Lenin 1917)
According to Otto Bauer, ‘Imperialism increases the number of workers who are forced to sell their labour power to capital. It accomplishes this by destroying the old modes of production in colonial areas and thereby forcing millions either to emigrate to capitalist areas or to serve European or American capital in their native land’ (Bauer 1913, 873–74; cit. Luxemburg 1972 [1921], 141). As in Lenin’s account, imperialism involves the destruction of the old modes of production in the colonies and their replacement with capitalist relations through the export of capital.
Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism in The Accumulation of Capital, first published in 1913, locates the drive for imperialist expansion in capital’s need for constantly expanding markets (Luxemburg 2003). Similarly, Leon Trotsky thought that capitalist states were being driven into compulsory competition with one another for markets; hence, ‘The future development of the world economy on capitalist foundations will mean an uninterrupted struggle for newer and newer divisions of the same world surface as an object of capitalist exploitation’ (Trotsky 1923, 76).
Although Marx refers to ‘the colonial system’ rather than imperialism, he too wrote about the struggle for markets as well as the draining of wealth from the colonies to the ‘mother country’: ‘The colonies provided a market for the budding manufactures, and a vast increase in accumulation which was guaranteed by the mother country’s monopoly of the market. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother country and were turned into capital there’ (Marx 1976 [1867], 918). He also pointed out that ‘by ruining handicraft production of finished articles in other countries, machinery forcibly converts them into fields for the production of its raw material’, making India, for example, a producer of cotton and market for textiles, whereas it had formerly been a major producer of textiles (Marx 1976, 579).
We have here two very different conceptions of the relationship between the imperial power and its colonies. In the latter conception, the colonies are treated as captive markets and sources of raw materials, their wealth drained and their production of finished articles ruined; the flow of wealth is unambiguously from the colonies to the imperial power, leading to the impoverishment of the colonies. In the former, imperialism is identified as monopoly or finance capital exporting capital to the colonies by way of foreign investments. What was actually happening at the time Lenin was writing, in 1916?
In fact, income from overseas investment by Britain, then the dominant imperialist power, exceeded the outflow of capital throughout most of the nineteenth century and up to 1914; furthermore, the emergence of monopolistic firms was slow before the 1920s (Barratt Brown 1972, 54). While praising the ‘vision and incisiveness’ of Marx’s analysis of British imperialism in India and accepting that the concerns of industrialists did play a role, Cain and Hopkins (2002, 277) felt that ‘it overstates the role of the forces associated with industrialisation’. According to them, the main beneficiaries of British imperialism were a ‘gentlemanly capitalist class’: ‘As the world economy expanded and opportunities for foreign investment grew, the numbers of socially acceptable investment outlets multiplied and the vast flows of returning income which resulted helped first to reproduce this gentlemanly elite and then, slowly, to recreate it in a new form’ (Cain and Hopkins 2002, 182–83).
Classic imperialism of the British type seems to conform more closely to the analyses of Luxemburg, Trotsky and Marx, where the colonies constitute markets, and sources of wealth and raw materials for the ‘mother country’. Indeed, this also helps to explain what Lenin was mainly preoccupied with in Imperialism – the support of supposedly working-class social-democratic parties for their respective bourgeoisies in World War I – if we conclude that the inflow of wealth from their empires allowed these bourgeoisies to make concessions to sections of the working class (‘the labour aristocracy’) in their countries.
However, export of capital was indeed beginning to take place. Hilferding (1981, 426n) cites a typical example: the combination, in 1906, of the four largest British sewing thread firms into J. & P. Coats Ltd., which absorbed many smaller British companies and roughly fifteen American ones, and set up factories in the United States to bypass US tariffs. This pattern of capital exports had started in the mid-1860s, with the German Friedrich Bayer taking a share in an aniline plant in New York State in 1865, the Swedish Alfred Nobel setting up an explosives plant in Hamburg in 1866, and the US Singer sewing machine company building its first overseas factory in Glasgow in 1867 (Tugendhat 1973, 33). There were various reasons why these companies chose to invest abroad, but the main one was to overcome tariff barriers created by the spread of protectionism. The rationale for this strategy was outlined by William Lever, founder of the Lever Brothers soap empire: ‘When the duty exceeds the cost of separate managers and separate plants, then it will be an economy to erect works in the country that our customers can more cheaply be supplied by them’ (Tugendhat 1973, 35). By 1914, the two principal Dutch margarine companies each had seven factories in Germany, and Bayer had dyestuff factories in Moscow, Flers (France) and Schoonaarde (Belgium); the American emphasis on research and innovation, along with the high cost of American labour, put them at the forefront of this movement, with the American-owned Westinghouse factory becoming the largest single industrial plant in Britain, Standard Oil becoming the largest oil company in Europe, and Ford producing a quarter of its cars in Britain (Tugendhat 1973, 35–36).
This was certainly export of capital, but to advanced capitalist countries rather than the colonies; and it was a struggle for markets waged not between imperialist powers but between capitalist firms on the basis of their competitiveness. If ‘the territorial division of the world among the biggest capitalist powers’ is seen as a defining feature of imperialism, as it was by Lenin, then there is no reason to label this ‘imperialism’ at all. Lenin’s mistake was to conflate two different phases of capitalism: an older phase, where imperialist powers were striving to bring as much territory as possible under their own control, and a newer phase of foreign investments by firms, which did not depend on the state to exercise territorial control over the countries in which they invested. Lenin can hardly be blamed, given that he was writing in conditions of exile and war, and had very limited access to research materials; it is his doctrinal followers who are to blame for perpetuating the notion that foreign investments constitute imperialism. This was already questionable at the time Lenin was writing, when most export of capital was to other advanced capitalist countries; in the twenty-first century, with Chinese investments in the US and Indian investments in Britain, it becomes downright absurd.
One obvious challenge faced by imperialism was the set of national liberation struggles of colonised peoples. Less obviously, once the capitalist economy encompassed more or less the entire globe, imperialism itself became a problem for capital. Geared as it was to accumulation in the ‘mother’ countries, its treatment of Third World countries predominantly as markets and sources of cheap raw materials and consumption goods led it to distort many of their economies into primary-product ones (Fuentes 1963). Even where this fate was avoided, as in India, imperialism blocked the development of heavy industry (Bagchi 1972, 44). Such policies contradicted the most potent means of counteracting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, namely the full-scale development of capitalism in these countries where the rate of profit was high. Even the aim of using them as markets was stymied by the impoverishment of their populations: starving peasants are not a promising market for manufactured goods. Furthermore, the division of the world into empires, insulated from each other by protective barriers, became an obstacle to the global reach of multinational corporations and finance capital.
The interests of nascent capitalists in Third World countries and those of capitalists in imperialist countries overlapped in one respect: both would benefit from industrialisation in the Third World. Where they differed was on the question of protectionism, with capitalists in imperialist countries wanting access to markets and investment opportunities in former colonies, while local capitalists wished to protect their domestic markets and infant industries. However, as the examples cited by Tugendhat show, that was no reason why they could not reach a modus vivendi. Logically, as national liberation struggles and independence movements succeeded in decolonising the Third World, imperialism should have shrunk and disappeared. So why did it persist?
Imperialism During the Cold War
An indispensable requirement for the spread of multinationals and finance capital was that countries should be open to foreign investment, and this was to become the driving force of US imperialism. US firms could prevail against other firms by virtue of their competitiveness, but this was possible only if they were able to invest in countries throughout the world. Given the existence of the Soviet Union and later China as alternative models and sources of support for Third World countries at a time of rapid decolonisation, ‘communism’ became the foremost enemy. Any government, no matter how willing to be friendly with the US, was suspected of the dreaded disease if it tried to escape the control of US corporations backed by the US government. It had to be overthrown and replaced with one more subservient to the US.
There are numerous examples, but a few will suffice to illustrate the way this operated. In Iran, nationalist feeling since the end of World War I had been directed against foreign ownership of the country’s oil; there was opposition not just to British ownership of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but also to a proposed oil concession demanded by the Soviet Union in the north. The leader of the oil protest movement, Mohammad Mossadegh, was elected prime minister in 1951, leading a coalition called the National Front, which enjoyed wide support in Tehran and other cities. ‘The oil industry was nationalized soon after Mossadeq became premier and within a few months his government was in direct conflict with the Shah and through the Shah with the USA, despite Mossadeq’s initial attempts to win the latter over … There is now no doubt that the US government, and specifically the CIA, played an active part in organizing the coup on 19 August 1953 that ousted Mossadeq’ (Halliday 1979, 25). Thus ‘a nationalist and secular democratic movement led by Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh had established constitutionalism, until it was crushed by a coup engineered by the CIA and the British secret service in 1953’ and replaced with a brutal dictatorship (Bayat 2010, 6).
In Guatemala, Juan José Arévalo was elected president in 1944, and a democratic constitution, which made many references to the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Four Freedoms, was passed. However, the United Fruit Company (which owned millions of acres of land, the only port on Guatemala’s Atlantic coast, and all the railways) had outlawed workers’ and peasants’ unions and strikes and made extensive use of forced labour, and it was not happy. There were several coup attempts during Arévalo’s six years in office. Jacobo Árbenz, who succeeded him in 1950, went a step further, attempting to carry out land reform by redistributing fallow land to the rural poor. Most of United Fruit’s land was fallow, and even though they were compensated for it at the rate they had declared for tax purposes, the company, the CIA and the Eisenhower administration decided that Árbenz had to go. He was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup in 1954, leading to a succession of far-right military dictatorships and a civil war in which hundreds of thousands died (Schlesinger and Kinzer 2005 [1982]).
Mossadegh could be described as a secular nationalist, Árbenz as a social democrat. Salvador Allende was more explicitly a socialist, and an admirer of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, but rather than coming to power through armed struggle, he was elected president of Chile in 1970, proceeding with a programme that included the nationalisation of banking and copper mines, public health care, education and housing, employment creation, and workers’ rights. He was willing to negotiate the terms of nationalising the telephone companies owned by the US company ITT, but instead the corporation became part of a plot to overthrow him. Indeed, declassified documents show that his peaceful road to socialism was a prime reason why the Nixon administration made every effort, first, to prevent him from being elected, and then to overthrow him with a coup. Among other things, the coup involved assassinating the commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, who opposed military interference in government; economic sabotage to stir up dissatisfaction with the Allende presidency; and a barrage of propaganda against him. Finally, Allende was overthrown and killed by a US-backed military coup in 1973; thousands were murdered and tens of thousands imprisoned and tortured during the subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (Zipper 1989; Kornbluh 2003).
Spanning the entire period of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations is the case that can be seen as paradigmatic of US imperialism: Vietnam. Beginning with US assistance to French colonialism and escalating steeply after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the US war on Vietnam left tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese dead (BMJ 2008), in addition to poisoning the land with its weapons of mass destruction for decades afterwards. All this was driven by the ‘domino theory’, which held that if Vietnam ‘fell to communism’, the contagion would spread to the rest of Southeast Asia and beyond. In June 1956, Kennedy outlined the fundamental thesis as follows:
Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the Keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and, obviously, Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the red tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam. (Chomsky 1972/1973)
It is true that in each of these cases, existing or potential investments by US corporations were part of the picture, but the nature of those investments was very different from the export of capital to advanced capitalist countries, where local accumulation was the goal. Instead, as Baran and Sweezy (1966, 112) noted, in 1963 ‘the return flow of interest and dividends (not to mention remittances disguised in the form of payment for services and the like) soon repays the original investment many times over – and still continues to pour capital into the coffers of the parent corporation in the United States.’ So although globally the average rate of profit was boosted by these foreign investments, the profits constituted an outflow of wealth from the Third World to the US. In this respect they resembled classical imperialism, as also in the patently racist attitudes to Third World peoples, who were treated as inferior beings whose lives were of little or no importance.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the situation was no better. Tsarist imperialism – which, like other Eastern European empires and the Ottoman Empire, had grown by annexing adjacent territories rather than overseas ones – was no less brutal than Western European and US imperialism. When Lenin’s Imperialism was published in 1917, he explained in the Preface that
In order to show the reader, in a guise acceptable to the censors, how shamelessly untruthful the capitalists and the social-chauvinists who have deserted to their side … are on the question of annexations; in order to show how shamelessly they screen the annexations of their capitalists, I was forced to quote as an example – Japan! The careful reader will easily substitute Russia for Japan, and Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non-Great Russians, for Korea. (Lenin 1917)
As a genuine anti-imperialist, Lenin was as opposed to Great Russian imperialist annexation of the territories of non–Great Russian peoples as he was to Western imperialism.
At the time he wrote this, he and most of the other Russian and European revolutionaries were hoping that revolutions in Western Europe would come to the rescue of the beleaguered Russian revolution and establish socialism throughout Europe. When those revolutions failed to materialise, the Russian revolutionaries were forced to adapt to an unforeseen situation. During the civil war that followed the revolution, emergency measures such as a highly centralised administration of industry and the compulsory requisition of grain from peasants came to be known as ‘war communism’. The peasants reluctantly put up with these, so long as the defeat of the revolution threatened a feudal restoration and loss of their lands, but once the war was over at the end of 1920, they became increasingly restive. With a severely devalued currency and a dearth of goods, peasants were reluctant to deliver grain to the towns. Moreover, the death of many workers and the destruction of industry in the civil war threatened to bring down the economy.
The antidote, familiarly known to history as NEP [the new economic policy] … began by striking at the point of greatest danger, as an agricultural policy to increase the supply of food by offering fresh inducements to the peasant; it developed into a commercial policy for the promotion of trade and exchange, involving a financial policy for a stable currency; and finally, reaching the profoundest evil of all, it became an industrial policy to bring about that increase in industrial productivity which was a condition of the building up of a socialist order. (Carr 1966, 271–72)
The Bolsheviks had succeeded because the promise of land distribution – a key measure in a bourgeois revolution – had bought them the support of the peasantry, who constituted around 80 per cent of the population. Once the emergency of the civil war was over, they found it prudent to keep their promise to the peasants, while also reintroducing capitalist management in industry. Thus at the beginning of the 1920s the Bolsheviks, who were revolutionary socialists, were in the anomalous position of having taken power in circumstances that made a socialist revolution impossible.
But the illusion that it was a socialist revolution persisted, and was used by many (possibly the majority) of Lenin’s colleagues to oppose his policies favouring national liberation for Russia’s colonies. After Finland’s independence was recognised in 1917, no other nation received the same treatment. However, the larger nations of Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet republics, while smaller nations within the boundaries of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (including the Central Asian nations) became autonomous republics and autonomous regions responsible for matters of local government, education, culture and agriculture. The Soviets promoted the national, economic and cultural development of non-Russian peoples through a set of policies including giving ‘priority to the local language, a massive increase in native language schools, development of national cultures, and staffing the Soviet administration as far as possible with local nationals. Collectively, these policies were known as korenizatsiya, or “rooting”’ (Smith 2004).
The priority of Lenin’s Imperialism had been to explain how the supposedly working-class Social-Democratic parties of the Second International came to support their own bourgeoisies in World War I, and to insist that the working class in imperialist countries must always oppose the bourgeoisies of their own countries, who were struggling to divide up the world among themselves. However, subsequently, the Communist International (the Third International or Comintern) had to be far more specific and detailed. In Lenin’s draft theses on this question for the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, he emphasised that making ‘a clear distinction between the interests of the oppressed classes, of working and exploited people, and the general concept of national interests as a whole, which implies the interests of the ruling class’ was as important as making ‘an equally clear distinction between the oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations’. He went on to argue that the Comintern’s policy on the national and the colonial questions ‘should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie’. His specific recommendations were as follows:
With regard to the more backward states and nations, in which feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal-peasant relations predominate, it is particularly important to bear in mind:
first, that all Communist parties must assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in these countries […];
second, the need for a struggle against the clergy and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward countries […];
fourth, the need, in backward countries, to give special support to the peasant movement against the landowners, against landed proprietorship, and against all manifestations or survivals of feudalism […];
fifth, the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries. (Lenin 1920)
One could summarise these recommendations as proposing that communists should assist bourgeois-democratic liberation movements and peasant movements against landowners in what would later be known as the Third World, while at the same time maintaining a distinction between themselves, as embodying the interests of the working and exploited people, and the bourgeoisie or ‘national interest’. They should certainly not support ‘reactionary and medieval elements’, or ‘Pan-Islamism and similar trends’ in these countries, but instead struggle against them. For Lenin, national liberation is part of a process of democratisation, replacing an imperial government over which subject peoples have no control with national governments over which they have a limited yet significant amount of control; moving from imperial to local backward-looking or theocratic rule constitutes no progress at all. Lenin implicitly abandons the vision he had shared not only with contemporaries like Luxemburg and Trotsky, but also with Marx and Engels, of a socialist or communist revolution confined to Europe, instead envisaging a joint revolutionary struggle of ‘the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries’.
Lenin did not arrive at these positions on his own. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, his position and that of the Iskra current to which he belonged was extremely unsympathetic to national liberation struggles in the colonies of the Tsarist Empire. It was non-Russian Marxist parties in the empire’s periphery – especially in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and the Caucasus – who were arguing the positions subsequently articulated by Lenin (Blanc 2016). These parties, despite their commitment in theory and practice to opposing ethnic nationalism and to building proletarian unity across national divisions, emphasised the need for national independence as well as the autonomy of their own parties in relation to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Luxemburg was even more hostile to national independence struggles, although she, like Iskra, opposed the oppression of one nation by another.
This issue was complicated by the fact that the Eastern European and Ottoman empires, unlike Western European empires, had expanded by annexing adjacent territories, so that it was much easier to slip into the error of confusing empire with nation-state. Thus, as Blanc puts it, Iskra’s perspective of a centralised empire-wide party ‘tended to conflate the dynamics in Central Russia with that of the empire as a whole’ (2016). On the contrary, however, even by 1903–4, Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Latvian, and Finnish socialists had built regional parties of their own. This was one factor in the opposition to Iskra’s approach, which favoured centralisation into a Russian party despite the fact that many of the peripheral parties were ‘far bigger than their Russian comrades in this period’ (Blanc 2016). Another was the concern that centralisation in Russia would mean that the interests of non-Russian workers – including national liberation – would become sidelined.
Lenin became supportive of national liberation struggles as a result of the debate with borderland Marxists, the capitulation of Second International leaders to their ruling classes’ war drives in World War I, and his own analysis of imperialism. The central leadership in the party largely stood with him.
Another complication was migration within the empire, which resulted in people of one ethnicity settling in countries where another ethnicity was predominant. In the case of the Russian empire, the largest number of such migrants tended to be Russians. Among them, as also among Russified militants of local origin, ‘Russian chauvinism and nationalism tended to be the strongest. … Particularly after 1914, this gap between Lenin’s approach and those of his comrades on the ground became a major source of internal conflict within Bolshevism. Historian Jeremy Smith notes that the history of Bolshevik national policy between 1917 and 1923 is “largely the story of a struggle between the center and the periphery in which it was, perhaps surprisingly, the center which supported local autonomy”’ (Smith 1999, cit. Blanc 2016). Subject peoples too had migrated to other countries within the empire and settled in scattered clusters. The debate between Lenin and Luxemburg on the right to self-determination suffered from the failure, on both sides, to distinguish between colonies of an imperial power and enclaves of minority ethnic communities. In the former case, Lenin’s argument for the right to independence was correct; in the latter case, language and cultural rights as advocated by Luxemburg made more sense.
Lenin died in January 1924 and, after a short interregnum, was succeeded by Josef Stalin, whose position was diametrically opposed to Lenin’s on Great Russian chauvinism and the right to national liberation of Russia’s colonies. Despite being of Georgian origin, ‘he was the most “Russian” of the early leaders not only in his rejection of the west, but in his low rating of the local nationalisms of the former Russian Empire. He became the protagonist not only of “socialism in one country”, but of a socialism built on a predominantly Russian foundation’ (Carr 1970, 195–96). In fact, ‘socialism in one country’ was a euphemism for state capitalist primitive accumulation involving the dispossession and proletarianisation of the peasantry and industrialisation through extreme exploitation of the working class. Raya Dunayevskaya (1941) was an early exponent of this theory, and Tony Cliff (born Ygael Gluckstein), a Palestinian Trotskyist of Polish Jewish origin, developed it in the first edition of his State Capitalism in Russia in 1947.
Trotsky contended that although the Soviet Union had undergone a political counterrevolution under Stalin, it remained a ‘degenerate workers’ state’, but Cliff pointed out that unions had been stripped of their right to negotiate over wages, which were instead fixed unilaterally by the state; piecework and competition between workers were used to atomise the working class; workers were denied the freedom to change their place of work, and there were severe punishments for arriving late, idling at work, and so forth; strikes were prohibited and punished with twenty years of a penal sentence. While the conditions of all workers were grim, with long hours and unhealthy working conditions, the condition of women workers was ‘appalling’, with women sometimes working twenty-four-hour shifts in freezing temperatures. These descriptions echo those of the misery of workers during the industrial revolution in Britain, but conditions in Russia’s slave labour camps – to which people could be condemned for petty offences like the theft of bread, not to mention political dissidence – were even worse. In 1942, it was estimated that the population of these camps consisted of eight to fifteen million men, women and children (Cliff 1974, Chapter 1, Part 1).
From 1928 onwards, consumption was subordinated to accumulation, with massive investments in heavy industry while investments in light industry were insufficient to maintain the standard of living of the workers. Industrial products were subsidised heavily, and armaments production received the greatest subsidies and investment (Cliff 1974, Chapter 1, Part 2). During the harvest, kolkhoz (collective farm) workers had to work from 5:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. without breaks, while dairymaids were required to work from 4:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., 365 days a year, with a break of only 1.5 hours a day. Taxes on consumption goods (the ‘turnover tax’) fell most heavily on staples consumed by the poorest: 73 to 74 per cent on wheat, and 70 to 80 per cent on salt (Cliff 1974, Chapter 1, Part 3).
Egalitarianism, which had been promoted after the revolution, became a crime under Stalin. This is a graphic description of the class differentiation in place:
A maid with two children, one of ten and another of three, told Alexander Werth in 1942: ‘The children live chiefly on bread and tea; the little one receives substitute milk – what can you do? – stuff made of soya beans, without taste and of little nutritive value. With my meat coupons this month I only got a little fish. Sometimes I get a little soup left over at the restaurant – and that’s about all.’ At the same time, Alexander Werth could write in his diary: ‘That lunch at the National today was a very sumptuous affair, for, in spite of the food shortage in Moscow, there always seems to be enough of the best possible food whenever there is reason for any kind of big feed, with official persons as guests. For zakuski there was the best fresh caviare, and plenty of butter, and smoked salmon; then sturgeon and, after the sturgeon, chicken cutlets à la Maréchal, then ice and coffee with brandy and liqueurs; and all down the table there was the usual array of bottles.’ (Cliff 1974, Chapter 1, Part 4)
Thus, as Don Filtzer writes, ‘the working class became the object of exploitation of a new elite which itself took shape during industrialization’, and the fact that a significant proportion of the pampered elite was drawn from the working class ‘does not alter the basic relationship between the elite and the workforce: the latter creates a surplus product which the former expropriates’ (Filtzer 1987, 8–9).
Charles Bettelheim had a very different starting point. He started visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s and admired its economic successes, believing that ‘the economic and social development of the Soviet Union provided a sort of “model” for the building of socialism’ (Bettelheim 1976, 10). Only after the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 did he come to a similar conclusion to that of Cliff: that the USSR had a militaristic imperialist-style foreign policy driven by competition with the USA for world domination, and its social relations of production constituted ‘a specific form of capitalism just as oppressive and aggressive as the “classical” forms’, with accumulation propelled by competition with Western capitalism (Bettelheim 1976, 18). Like Cliff, he saw the development of the monstrous authoritarian state apparatus of the Soviet Union as evidence of a furious class struggle waged against the proletariat. Paul Mattick (1978) characterised the Russian and Chinese revolutions as ‘state-capitalist revolutions … which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state’.
In fact, referring to the internal repression as ‘class struggle’ understates its ferocity massively, as two examples will show. The first is the ‘radical – one could maintain genocidal – attack on the so-called kulaks, the supposed rich farmers … a group that in practice was often defined by owning a few head of cattle and oxen or having a tin roof over their huts’ (Naimark 2010, 55–56). Peasants labelled as kulaks were deported or shot as families, abused as swine, dogs, cockroaches, scum, vermin, filth and garbage, and depicted as apes, ‘dehumanized and racialized into beings inherently inferior to others’. Some thirty thousand were killed outright, while the rest were sent to ‘special settlements’ where large numbers died of ‘hunger, disease, filth, privation, fierce cold, and inadequate shelter and food’. As Naimark argues, ‘Stalin surely knew and understood that these conditions were ubiquitous and that the kulak population of the special settlements was being decimated month after month by the horrid conditions in which they lived … Indeed, a good argument can be made that Stalin intended to wipe out the kulaks physically as a group of people – not just metaphorically as a class’ (2010, 59; 60–61; 63).
The other example is Stalin’s extermination of opponents, rivals (including the entire Bolshevik leadership) and dissidents, both real and imagined. The Bolshevik leaders, unless they committed suicide like Tomsky or escaped abroad like Trotsky, were tortured and blackmailed into confessing in show trials that they had committed grotesque and impossible crimes, before they were executed; Trotsky was tracked to Mexico by one of Stalin’s agents who killed him by sticking an icepick in his head in 1940. ‘We know a lot about the fearsome browbeating, torture, and threats to family members that lay behind many of the confessions. That Stalin directed the trials behind the scenes is not a matter of historical dispute. He systematically eliminated his political rivals through this process of trials, confession, and execution’ (Naimark 2010, 102). In 1937 and 1938, at least 1,575,000 people and probably many more were arrested and brought to ‘trial’ in this way; at least 681,692 were executed and the rest sent to exile and potential death in the Gulag. An estimated 800,000 more victims were shot in secret and buried in unmarked graves without their families being informed of what had happened to them (Naimark 2010, 109; 111). Thus unspeakable cruelty was used to ensure Stalin’s absolute and total power.
Many admirers of the Soviet Union, like Bettelheim, were disillusioned when it invaded Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, evidence of the imperialist character of Stalinist Russia long preceded these events. In the Introduction I already referred to the Ukrainian genocide, in which not only were millions of people exterminated in a single year, but the culture, language, religion and intelligentsia (teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders) were also sought to be wiped out. It was the most extreme example, but not the only one:
It has had its matches within the Soviet Union in the annihilation of the Ingerian nation, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, the Crimean Tatar Republics, the Baltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Each is a case in the long-term policy of liquidation of non-Russian peoples by the removal of select parts. … What we have seen here is not confined to Ukraine. The plan that the Soviets used there has been and is being repeated. It is an essential part of the Soviet programme for expansion, for it offers the quick way of bringing unity out of the diversity of cultures and nations that constitute the Soviet Empire. That this method brings with it indescribable suffering for millions of people has not turned them from their path. If for no other reason than this human suffering, we would have to condemn this road to unity as criminal. But there is more to it than that. This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation. (Lemkin 1953)
Historians who had portrayed the Tsarist Empire as the oppressor of non-Russians were discredited, and the official version of history shifted to one in which the Tsarist Empire had brought progress and civilisation to backward peoples. The relationship between Soviet imperialism and its colonies was similar to classical imperialism, with the colonies plundered for raw materials and food to serve the industrialisation of Russia. There was an increasing dominance of Russians in non-Russian regions, and the Russian language was made compulsory in non-Russian schools. Deportations of indigenous people were combined with settlement of Russians in non-Russian nations, shifting the demographic makeup of these regions (Smith 2004). The Muslim nations of the Caucasus and Crimea were especially targeted; between 1943 and 1944 the entire Karachai population, Kalmyks, Chechen and Ingush peoples, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meshketian Turks were rounded up and expelled; those who could not be moved were shot, their villages burned to the ground (Snyder 2010, 330–31).3 Kazakh villagers were used as guinea pigs to test the results of 456 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989 (BBC World Service 2016).
The Hitler-Stalin pact signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov on August 23, 1939 also had a strong imperialist dimension. Stalin was well aware of Hitler’s politics by then, but that did not deter him from forming an alliance with him, and even going so far as to adorn Moscow airport with swastikas when Ribbentrop arrived there. The pact did not merely guarantee mutual non-aggression; its secret protocols committed the Soviet Union to providing food products and raw materials to the Nazis in return for finished products like machinery from Germany, effectively making Stalin a Nazi collaborator for most of the first two years of the war. Such a pact would have been unthinkable had the two men not been so similar: ‘Both were dictators who killed vast numbers of people on the European continent. … Both destroyed their countries and societies, as well as vast numbers of people inside and outside their own states. Both – in the end – were genocidairs’ (Naimark 2010, 137). Hannah Arendt (1968) has drawn extensive parallels between their regimes in her monumental work The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the secret protocols, Hitler agreed to give Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Poland to the Soviet Union. Within days of signing the non-aggression pact, Hitler invaded Poland, setting off a declaration of war by Britain and France, while Stalin moved in to occupy the territory offered to him by Germany; both slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles (Snyder 2010, 116; 119–141). It was not Stalin but Hitler who abrogated the pact, attacking Russian positions on June 22, 1941 and forcing Stalin to fight back.
After the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Moscow-dominated regimes were set up in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and later East Germany. The only exception was Yugoslavia, where Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Yugoslav communists and partisans, had taken power without the help of Stalin, and remained independent of him (Arendt 1968, 308; Snyder 2010, 353). This pattern resembles US imperialism, with friendly dictators being installed and supported by the imperial power, and military incursions only when the regime is threatened with being overthrown. The Russian equivalent of the US intervention in Vietnam was Afghanistan. The Moscow-affiliated People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), established in 1965, was opposed from the beginning by the Jam’iyyat-i Islami party, founded by theology professors who had studied in Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. The Jam’iyyat ‘protested the official founding of the PDPA in 1965 by publishing a leaflet entitled ‘Tract of the Holy War’ and ‘conducted zealous protests against Israel, the U.S., the Afghan monarchy, and most of all, communism’ (Kohlmann 1999, 6). A PDPA coup in 1978 faced tribal revolts that developed into a full-scale uprising by December 1979, when the Russians invaded and occupied Afghanistan.4
The military campaign that followed resembled the US campaign in Vietnam in its brutality to civilians, and like the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan left a cruel legacy that went on maiming Afghan children long after they had left: ‘millions of plastic mines disguised as pens, watches, and even toys’ (Kohlmann 1999, 19). The war had reached a stalemate in the mid-1980s when Reagan, who was already supporting the mujahideen, agreed to supply them with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. These weapons turned the tide against the Russians, who finally withdrew in 1989, leaving power in the hands of Najibullah of the PDPA. He managed to survive until the mid-1990s due to infighting among the mujahideen, but was finally hanged when the Taliban, who had been fostered in Pakistan by the ISI, took over.
With Stalin’s adoption of the ‘theory of socialism in one country’, which held that socialism could be built in the Soviet Union even in the absence of revolutions elsewhere, theoretical justification was created for subordinating revolutionary movements throughout the world to his conception of the national interests of Russia. One way this was done in the Third World was to argue that the struggle of the masses in these countries at this stage was anti-imperialist, and therefore that the Chinese Communist Party, for example, should remain in the Kuomintang, which represented a bloc of four classes, namely the workers, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie (Stalin 1927, 675): a very different proposition from having alliances with parties like the Kuomintang while maintaining independence from them, as Lenin had advocated. Stalin’s insistence that the Communists remain in the Kuomintang despite growing evidence of Chiang Kai-shek’s hostility to them ended in the catastrophe of 1927, when the armed workers, having gained control of Shanghai, were ordered to bury their arms and open the gates to Chiang’s army (Brandt 1966 [1958], 110–14).
The results of this utterly disastrous policy were described graphically by Victor Serge: ‘There is a savage repression in the countryside; there are arrests, executions and assassinations in the towns. The Communists are outlawed, the trade unions dissolved; fascist formations are masters of the streets. The government of a great national party that still pretended to represent the anti-imperialist revolution in mid-July represents no more than bourgeois counter-revolution, the natural ally of the imperialists’ (Serge 1927a). Serge opined that the ‘young unknown militant Mao Zedong’ was right when he asserted that the revolution against feudalism and imperialism could not succeed without a peasant uprising (Serge 1927b), and after the 1927 bloodbath, Mao was canny enough to chart his own course even while paying lip service to Stalin’s leadership.
Lenin did not always practice what he preached, but unlike his more Eurocentric predecessors (Marx, Engels) and contemporaries (Trotsky, Luxemburg), he had a vision of anti-imperialist socialist internationalism that remains relevant even today. It is all the more tragic that his legacy was sidelined in favour of that of his authoritarian, sadistic, racist, genocidal successor, for whom ‘anti-imperialism’ meant Russian imperialism, ‘anti-fascism’ included collaboration with Hitler, and ‘socialism’ meant super-exploitation of working people and extermination of all political opposition. We can trace the origins of pseudo-anti-imperialism to support for Stalin’s Russian imperialism.
After the Cold War:
The Rise of Neoconservative Imperialism
Russia’s war in Afghanistan contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, it was Mikhail Gorbachev – who became general secretary of the Politburo in 1985 and president of the USSR in 1990, and whose policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) allowed for greater freedom of expression of anti-Soviet sentiments in the non-Russian republics and, indeed, even in Russia itself – who was seen, by conservative hardliners, as responsible for the impending catastrophe. The result was the coup carried out against him in August 1991. Paradoxically, the coup hastened the collapse of the USSR by weakening Gorbachev, who wanted to replace it with a looser union rather than dissolve it altogether, and empowering Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin wanted full sovereignty for the Russian Federation, which entailed the end of the Soviet Union.
The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union can be seen from an anti-imperialist perspective as a process of decolonisation and democratisation.5 Even twenty-five years later, East Germans were grateful to Gorbachev for ruling out a Russian invasion of East Germany in November 1989 and thereby allowing the Berlin Wall to be brought down peacefully (Croucher 2014). His policy of perestroika involved not only internal reform, but a novel approach to foreign affairs, including policies for nuclear disarmament and the rejection of military intervention abroad. As Guardian columnist Jonathan Steele described it in a 2011 interview with Gorbachev, under perestroika,
no country was an island or should act unilaterally. The new Soviet policy of non-intervention allowed the eastern European states to produce internal regime change by peaceful means. [As Gorbachev states:] ‘What we were able to achieve within the country and in the international arena was of enormous importance. It predetermined the course of events in ending the cold war, moving toward a new world order and, in spite of everything, producing gradual movement away from a totalitarian state to a democracy’. (Steele and Gorbachev 2011)
In subsequent years, Yeltsin, who became the first president of the Russian Federation, signed a far-reaching Partnership and Cooperation Agreement between Russia and the EU in 1994, and pledged to support European integration; there was a real prospect that Russia would join the EU (2015). Even more significantly, Russia joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991; received a visit from then–NATO secretary general Manfred Warner in 1992; joined Partnership for Peace (PfP) in 1994; and entered the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council in 1997. As Yuriy Davydov, a NATO research fellow, wrote in a report titled ‘Should Russia Join Nato?’ (2000): ‘Russia’s participation since early 1996 in the Implementation Force (IFOR) and then in the Stabilisation Force (SFOR) alongside NATO Allies are seen by many Western and Russian experts as a model for their military co-operation, especially in the peacekeeping field. Indeed, NATO and Russian troops have worked together effectively.’ It looked as if the world was heading for a post-imperialist period of peace. Unfortunately, that did not materialise.
In retrospect, it is evident that the Cold War was a prolonged period of intense rivalry between US imperialism and Russian imperialism. The US appeared to have won when the Soviet Union disintegrated, but it was a pyrrhic victory because, by then, imperialism had lost its usefulness to global capital.
So long as military conquest resulted in the expansion of the capitalist world economy into new parts of the world, military expenditure contributed to capitalist accumulation on a world scale. But with decolonisation resulting in the development of capitalism in former colonies, and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR creating a truly global capitalist economy, military spending not only became unnecessary for capital, but actually held back productivity and competitiveness. Seymour Melman shows how the huge percentage of US research and development funding going into military production, compared with a much smaller proportion in Japan and Germany (55.3 per cent, as against 6 per cent and 8.5 per cent respectively), resulted in productivity in the US lagging far behind productivity in Japan and Germany (2001, 110–14, 124–26). The belief that ‘military Keynesianism’ could compensate for this loss in competitiveness and the loss of jobs to other countries was based on a faulty premise. As Chalmers Johnson explains, ‘By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.’ The mistake lies, Chalmers argues, in ‘treat[ing] military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption’ (2008).
Militarism constituted not just an indirect deduction from capitalist accumulation by competing with state investments in infrastructure, the social sector, and civilian research and development, but was also a direct deduction, because it was financed by taxes on profits and wages (Mattick 1981, 215). In that sense, it was ‘economically parasitic activity, that yields no return to society’ (Melman 2008, 6). In a globalised world economy, where productivity was the key to success, militarism became an impediment to economic power.
By the mid-1990s, imperialism, which relies on militarism, had outlived its usefulness for capital. One reason why this is not immediately apparent is that Lenin’s definition of imperialism included finance capital, which was of course thriving at this time. However, David Harvey emphasises the importance of seeing ‘the territorial and capitalist logics of power as distinct from each other’ (2003, 29). Once this is done, it becomes evident that by the early twenty-first century ‘there appears to be a deep inconsistency if not outright contradiction between the two logics’ (Harvey 2003, 204). When finance capital and foreign investment are delinked from territorial domination, and seen as separate phenomena with dynamics of their own, the contradiction between imperialism and a strong capitalist economy becomes more evident.
‘Neoliberalism’ was the term used to describe the measures taken to counteract the crisis of profitability that took place in the 1970s, and it was promoted assiduously by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank). The short-term stabilisation measures they imposed in return for loans included cutbacks in government expenditure, high interest rates and currency devaluation, while the longer-term adjustment measures centred on deregulating the economy, privatising state enterprises, and liberalising trade and investment. This last measure came to be known as ‘globalisation’, because it liberalised trade and capital flows around the globe, and it led to the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. The IMF/World Bank regime, sometimes called the ‘Washington Consensus’, at first reinforced US dominance over the world economy at the cost of wrecking the economies of Third World countries and Russia (Stiglitz 2000). However, in the longer term it had the opposite effect. By the early 2000s, manufactured products and IT services from China, India and other Third World countries were increasingly dominating the world market; much of this was by way of outsourcing or offshoring, as companies in North America and Western Europe gave up the struggle to compete, instead using the more competitive production in Third World countries to their own advantage (Hensman 2011, 42, 47).
How did this happen? As Harvey writes (2003, 187), globalisation created ‘an increasingly transnational capitalist class’, which ‘paid very little heed to place-bound or national loyalties or traditions. It could be multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. If financial exigencies and the quest for profit required plant closures and the diminution of manufacturing capacity in their own backyard, then so be it. US financial interests were perfectly content to undermine US hegemony in production.’ To call this ‘imperialism’ is surely absurd. Who are the imperialists here? China, which is the main beneficiary of this new global order? Or the US, which appears to be committing economic hara-kiri? Neither fits the bill. Is it, then, the multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural and cosmopolitan capitalist class? But they represent no state; they are representatives of global capital. The crucial link between state and capital which defines imperialism is missing here; this is global capitalism, pure and simple.
However, the 1970s also saw the emergence in the US of a different political ideology – neoconservatism – which had very distinct imperialist overtones. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2007, 129) explain, ‘Viewing U.S. leadership as “good both for America and for the world,” to quote the website of the neoconservative Project for [the] New American Century, neoconservatives generally favor the unilateral exercise of American power’; the way to exercise this power is, of course, through military force. Neoconservatism found its electoral base among socially conservative fundamentalist Christians opposed to women’s equality and LGBT rights: ‘In the wake of 9/11, for example, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson … expressed the view that the event was a sign of God’s anger at the permissiveness of a society that tolerated abortion and homosexuality’ (Harvey 2003, 190–91).
The neoconservative charter for foreign policy, as laid out in the Project for the New American Century in 1997, was to put the US ‘in a military and geostrategic position to control the whole globe militarily and, through oil, economically’ (Harvey 2003, 199). Israel, to which they uniformly show unapologetic support, appears to be the linchpin of their strategy from both a military and ideological point of view, and within Israel they support the most right-wing elements: ‘It was a group of eight neoconservatives … that drafted the 1996 “Clean Break” study for incoming Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That study advocated that Israel abandon the Oslo peace process and use bold measures – including military force – to topple unfriendly Middle Eastern regimes’ (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007, 130). A peculiarity of neoconservatism is that its vision is stuck in an earlier stage of capitalism, where militarism was an asset and not a liability; thus its protagonists fail to understand that their programme for world domination undermines the economic viability of the very state whose interests they believe they are supporting.
When George W. Bush came to power in 2000, his administration enabled a large number of neoconservatives like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, John Bolton and Elliot Abrams, who ‘had advocated toppling Saddam Hussein since the mid-1990s and believed this step would benefit the United States and Israel alike’, to move in and shape foreign policy (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007, 238–39). It was sustained pressure from these figures that resulted in the US invasion of Iraq in 2002. Mearsheimer and Walt (2007, 231) argue that ‘the war was motivated at least in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure’, and indeed this was made clear in a letter from Project for the New American Century to President Bush in September 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (History Commons, n.d.). In July 2016, the Chilcot Report confirmed officially – in more polite language – what those of us who opposed the war on Iraq had been arguing all along, namely that evidence for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had been fabricated (Brinded 2016); but the pretext for attacking Afghanistan – that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden, was hiding there – is hardly more convincing, whether you accept the allegation that the war was at least partly about oil (Monbiot 2001) or reject it (Stevenson 2001).
The wars did nothing to improve America’s security, and the massive expenses involved helped to drive up the national debt to over $9 trillion, a huge sum which could be largely explained by defence expenditures. Simultaneously, there was a severe erosion of democratic rights. In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson had warned: ‘We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation’ (Johnson 2006). Two years later, his prediction came true, and he concluded that ‘our short tenure as the world’s “lone superpower” has come to an end’ (Johnson 2008).
Obama, who inherited two wars and an economy in crisis, got the message. While his administration did little to rein in the neoliberal forces that had stoked the crash, commentators who are politically poles apart acknowledged that it managed to restore the US economy to comparative health (Egan 2015; Drum 2015). A careful evaluation of its policies also shows that it broke with the neoconservatism of the previous administration. Obama’s support for abortion rights and LGBT rights clashed with the social conservatism of the Bush administration. He had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and criticised US imperialism before becoming president; once in power he pledged to end the practice of torture and close down the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, and before leaving office commuted the 35-year prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower who had revealed US war crimes in Iraq (McFadden et al. 2017). Normalising relations with Cuba was a step towards putting the lingering legacy of the Cold War to rest.
Most significantly, by contrast with the neoconservative threat to wage war on Iran, Obama made it a priority to push through a nuclear deal with Iran despite stubborn opposition from many members of Congress, acknowledging that ‘we had some involvement with overthrowing a democratically elected regime in Iran’ (Friedman 2015). In the process, his relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu deteriorated to the point where it was described as ‘the worst relationship between a US president and an Israeli prime minister ever,’ with Obama openly referring to the taboo subject of Israel’s nuclear weapons, and Netanyahu’s opponents recirculating a video of him using exactly the same discredited arguments in support of the Iraq war as he was currently using to oppose the Iran nuclear deal (Tibon and Shalev 2015). In December 2016, through its abstention in a vote on a resolution describing Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 as a ‘flagrant violation’ of international law, the Obama administration allowed it to be passed in the UN Security Council (Beaumont 2016).
It is true that drone strikes continued to kill civilians, the surveillance apparatus crossed all boundaries, US troops remained in Afghanistan, and Congress put obstacles in the way of closing Guantanamo Bay. But it would be naïve to think that a country which has been a superpower for decades could become a normal member of the international community in the span of a few years. As Lao Tzu said, a journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step, and the first few steps were taken by the Obama administration (although promptly retraced by Obama’s successor). Its military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were undertaken at the request of their governments in order to combat enemies who are acknowledged to be malignant even by pseudo-anti-imperialists (the Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in Iraq). The interventions in Libya and Syria will be taken up in Chapter 7, but it is worth mentioning here that they took place in the context of popular uprisings and were not aimed at crushing them. Persistent attacks from the right on the decline in military strength and global dominance of the US during Obama’s presidency are testimony to his administration’s withdrawal from the role of superpower (Adams and Sokolsky 2015).
Meanwhile, in Russia, Yeltsin’s ill health and incompetence combined with the IMF’s ‘shock therapy’ had ensured that Russia’s valuable public sector assets were privatised and grabbed by a small number of oligarchs who were subsequently linked to the state. Its state capitalism was thus transformed into state-supported oligarchic capitalism, while the bulk of the population suffered cruel austerity measures and plummeting living standards. The devastation of the economy was exacerbated by low oil prices. Yeltsin was forced to resign in 1999, and Vladimir Putin took over as acting president, becoming president in 2000. A decade later, Gorbachev, who had done the most to democratise Russia, was appalled at what was happening to his country under Putin, calling it a ‘sham’ democracy and condemning its leaders for reversing the democratic gains of the 1990s (cit. Elder 2011). Gorbachev described United Russia, Putin’s ruling party, as a ‘throwback’ to the Communist Party, with a destructive effect on the political life of the country: ‘The monopoly ends in rotting and hampers the development of democratic processes.’ Bemoaning the loss of independence of the judiciary, he highlighted the case of the court clerk, Natalya Vasilieva, who had revealed that the judge in the Khodorkovsky trial had been subject to influence.
The Russian economy did well under Putin as oil prices rose, but neither diversified to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons – indeed, oil and gas increased from less than half of Russia’s exports in 2002 to two-thirds a decade later – nor tackled rampant corruption, which ‘is without exaggeration the biggest threat to our development’, as Putin himself acknowledged in 2012, by which time falling oil prices were already putting pressure on the budget (Schuman 2012). Instead of diversifying the economy and eliminating corruption, however, Putin set out to rebuild Russia as a superpower, drawing on both its Soviet and pre-Soviet imperial history. In 2005, expressing nostalgia for an epoch when Russians who had settled in non-Russian colonies were the bosses there, he said, ‘The collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory’ (Putin 2005). Ten years later, he justified the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which he had more diplomatically condemned during a visit to Poland in 2009 (Dolgov 2015). And in the debate over the right to self-determination, he made it clear where his sympathies lay. In a speech in which he accused Lenin of placing a ‘time-bomb’ under Russia, Putin criticised Lenin’s notion of a federative state from which regions could secede; on this point, he suggested, Stalin’s unitary state model had been preferable. It was the federative model favoured by Lenin, on the contrary, that had hastened the breakup of the Soviet Union (Associated Press 2016a).6
In her (2014) article, Mary Elise Sarotte speculates that Putin, who was a KGB agent in East Germany when protesters pulled down the Berlin Wall and toppled the regime in 1989, was traumatised by the events: ‘For someone who believed deeply in the cold war order, it was most likely an excruciating experience. It is clear that he returned home soon afterwards in disgust, full of bitterness that lingers to this day’, and which shapes his responses to peaceful mass protests in Russia and Ukraine. Since then, he has become more and more of a neo-Stalinist, celebrating Stalin’s role in defeating the Nazis in World War II (Thoburn 2016), whereas it should be obvious that the death toll, especially of Russians, would have been considerably lower had he fought against Hitler from the start instead of forming an alliance with him, and had he refrained from sabotaging the war effort by executing competent officials and generals who were contributing to it.
We will return to an examination of Putin’s politics in Chapter 2; the point to note here is that he is a neo-Stalinist neoconservative. Peter Beinart (2014) lists the ways in which Putin resembles American neocons: (1) Like them, he is obsessed with the threat of ‘appeasement’ of enemies, and vows to fight back, thus gaining the admiration of US neoconservatives; (2) like them, he insists on principles of foreign policy – like non-intervention in other countries – so long as they apply to others, but not if they constrain his own country’s imperialism; (3) like them, he wishes to expand his country’s global military footprint without regard to the negative impact on Russia’s economy; and (4) just for good measure, his government opposes abortion and LGBT rights. His shock-and-awe air campaign in Syria, and his position that anyone opposing his protégé Assad is a ‘terrorist’, are strongly reminiscent of George W. Bush.
Pseudo-anti-imperialists like Putin, his allies, and their supporters are neo-Stalinists engaged in rehabilitating Stalin, who in his time had rehabilitated tsarist imperialism; this accounts for their single-minded opposition to liberal democracy. They are proponents of neoconservative imperialism, living in a time warp where economic power depends on military dominance and where the US seeks to control global oil production – ignoring the facts that the US is now that a major oil producer thanks to fracking (Harlan 2015), and that a global oil glut and mounting stockpiles have led to a steep fall in oil prices (Durdan 2015). In one sense, history has left them behind; in another sense they are very modern in their ability to flood the electronic media, social media and internet with their propaganda, often influencing even sincere anti-imperialists who do not take the trouble to check their ‘facts’ (Weiss 2015b). This is what explains how pseudo-anti-imperialism has succeeded in colonising left-wing discourse in a way it had not been able to do since Stalin’s lifetime.
Fighting Imperialism and Authoritarianism
Over the twentieth century, Western imperialism changed from being a key component of the capitalist drive for global expansion to being a major contributor to capitalist crisis. Russian imperialism, which had once helped Soviet state capitalism to develop at breakneck speed, became a major contributor to the demise of the Soviet Union. In both cases, the colossal military expenditures required to maintain an empire were instrumental in leading to economic collapse. But if imperialism is no longer of any use to global capitalism, what explains its persistence? Part of the answer is that one section of capitalists – those involved in the military-industrial complex – has a vested interest in the continuation of imperialism because of its dependence on militarism, and Mearsheimer and Walt (2007) do indeed show that this section was deeply involved in the neoconservative imperialist project in the United States. However, this by itself cannot explain the persistence of imperialism in the twenty-first century.
The desire to wield power over others, through structures ranging from patriarchy to absolute monarchy to empire, predates capitalism by millennia. Capitalism neither eliminates these power structures automatically, nor invariably fosters them as a ‘divide and rule’ strategy. Rather, capital employs an opportunistic policy of using or dumping them according to its own needs, and different sections or types of capital may even have different needs at the same historical juncture. It is also important to note that what Marxists misleadingly call ‘bourgeois-democratic revolutions’ – misleading because this term suggests there is an organic connection between capitalism and democracy, which is certainly not the case – are actually the confluence of two revolutions, one bourgeois and the other democratic. A bourgeois revolution may involve the popular masses and give them a chance to put forward their democratic agenda, but crush them subsequently. Capitalism can survive for decades without democracy; only the unremitting struggle of the popular masses can succeed in carrying out a democratic revolution, which is a necessary condition for the socialist transformation of society.
I would argue, therefore, that we need to redefine what we mean by ‘right-wing’ (reactionary or backward-looking) and ‘left-wing’ (progressive or socialist). If we keep in mind that today the whole world is dominated by capitalism and that the differences between private capitalism, state capitalism, and state-supported oligarchic capitalism are merely superficial – they all exploit wage labour (and in the worst cases slave labour) in order to accumulate capital – then the notion that being ‘right-wing’ entails support for private capitalism while being ‘left-wing’ entails support for state capitalism, or for state-supported oligarchic capitalism, is seriously flawed. It is true that neoliberal policies in the West – favouring the rule of the market in all spheres, promoting privatisation of just about everything, opposing state expenditure on social security and welfare, and being hostile to trade unions – are inimical to the working class. However, it is equally true that state capitalist or former state capitalist regimes have drastically cut back state expenditure on social security and welfare, clamp down ferociously on workers’ unions that attempt to be independent of the state, and are characterised by enormous and increasing inequality between a small rich minority and a vast impoverished majority.
The key difference, therefore, is between democratic states that allow working people to fight back against the forces exploiting and oppressing them, and authoritarian states that block such struggles in multiple ways: by opposing freedom of association, expression and peaceful assembly; jailing and killing critics and dissidents; eliminating free and fair elections; and promoting authoritarianism and inequality in society through means such as patriarchy, racism, nationalism and religious bigotry. It is far more useful to characterise as ‘left-wing’ those who prioritise the struggle to establish the conditions in which oppressed and exploited people can fight back, and as ‘right-wing’ those who crush such struggles and/or promote authoritarian ideologies and inequality in society.
Much of the left has ignored or downplayed the importance of fighting against authoritarian relationships and inequality in civil society, and this has stymied its fight against fascism. Take, for example, Clara Zetkin’s (1923) report on fascism: she is remarkably prescient in writing about its dangers, yet she lambasts the ‘reformists’ and trade unions not for failing to fight against anti-Semitism but for letting down the workers’ struggle against capitalism; she does not even mention her own work for women’s liberation as contributing to the struggle against fascism, although, as Wilhelm Reich later shows in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946, 34–44), patriarchal, authoritarian families are the breeding ground of fascists. It is true that the rapid growth of unemployment and poverty can feed into the development of fascist movements, but poverty and unemployment do not automatically result in pogroms; the dissemination of fascist beliefs and ideologies and the organisation of violence are necessary to encourage the anger generated by capitalism and the ruling class to be redirected against helpless victims.
In fact, at least some of the barbarism unleashed by right-wing movements is of no use whatsoever to capital. One of the examples used by Israel Shahak (1994, 111n.) to illustrate ‘the irrational, demonic character which racism can sometimes acquire’ is that ‘during the eight months between June 1942 and February 1943 the Nazis probably used more railway wagons to haul Jews to the gas chambers than to carry much needed supplies to the army. Before being taken to their death, most of these Jews, at least in Poland, had been very effectively employed in production of equipment for the German army.’ Thus even for those sections of German capital who profited from the war, it would have been logical to use these Jews for production; but the logic of genocidal racism dictated that they be exterminated. The two logics are at odds here.
Conversely, there are cases where the needs of capital may have emancipatory potential for oppressed sections. For example, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute (2016) found that promoting women’s participation in the economy identically to men could add trillions to global growth. We can conclude from this that global capital, for its own reasons, needs more women to join the wage-labour force. While feminists might challenge the way in which current calculations of GDP leave out the value contributed by unwaged labour (mostly performed by women), or the argument that gender equality should be promoted only because it adds to GDP, it would be self-defeating to oppose gender equality just because capital seems to need it at this juncture (Nandy and Hensman 2015). Similarly, if ‘gender and LGBT equality are increasingly upheld as a paradigmatic “European” value by some states and supranational institutions such as the EU’ (Stella and Nartova 2016, 18), we may contest the specifically ‘European’ character of these values, but it would be foolish to oppose them in the name of anti-imperialism.
These examples show that we need to disentangle capitalism from forms of oppression like racism and sexism. It is undeniable that capitalism is responsible for unspeakable atrocities and must be fought,7 but this should not detract from the fight against other forms of oppression. If anything, the struggle against racism and religious bigotry, patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, xenophobia, nationalism and all forms of authoritarianism should be a priority, because a working class dominated and divided by these ideologies and politics can never defeat neoliberalism, much less capitalism. Nor can the struggle against capitalism be won without the freedom to express oneself freely, to debate, discuss and organise. Therefore, the establishment of these facets of constitutional democracy is essential to the struggle against capitalism. It is true that because liberal democracy can coexist with capitalism, it is restricted in its scope. However, what neo-Stalinists refuse to recognise is that state capitalism and state-supported oligarchic capitalism are also forms of capitalism, and that capitalism without liberal democracy is much worse than capitalism with it. Those who have the luxury of living without constant dread of arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and execution for themselves or their loved ones may lack the imagination or empathy to understand what it feels like to be in that position. As filmmaker Nanfu Wang (2016) put it, ‘I’m not a paranoid person, but my experience making a film about human rights in China gave me a sense of fear that I think Westerners don’t comprehend.’ To support authoritarian states by word or deed in the name of opposing capitalism or imperialism is a betrayal of struggles against both.
Yet opposing everything said or done in the advanced capitalist countries of North America and Western Europe (‘the West’) entails doing precisely that. Pseudo-anti-imperialists for whom opposing the West is always the priority do not seem to care that opposing US and EU calls for accountability for war crimes in Sri Lanka makes them proponents of impunity for war crimes; that disagreeing with Laurent Fabius, François Hollande and Barack Obama when they say ‘Assad must go’ (France 24 2012, The Economic Times 2015) makes them accomplices to Assad’s war crimes and crimes against humanity; that opposing US air strikes supporting the Kurdish offensive to enable encircled Yazidis to escape makes them accomplices in the ISIS genocide of Yazidis; that supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes them supporters of imperialism. In every one of these cases, they take positions that are diametrically opposed to those taken by genuine anti-imperialists, because they support oppressors against the oppressed, authoritarianism against democracy.
Genuine anti-imperialists do, of course, oppose Western states when they invade and occupy countries, impose authoritarian regimes on Third World peoples, or kill civilians in airstrikes. But pseudo-anti-imperialists, by opposing ‘the West’ as such, are also rejecting the democratic revolutions carried out by labour activists, feminists, LGBT activists and anti-racists in the West. This is evident in some of the reactions to the ISIS attacks of November 2015 in Paris, many of which attributed them either to ‘blowback’ from Western intervention in Muslim countries, or to a reaction to racist discrimination against people of African origin in France and Belgium. Yet, as more perceptive observers pointed out, ‘The terrorists did not target symbols of the French state or of French militarism … They targeted, rather, the areas and the places where mainly young, anti-racist, multi-ethnic Parisians hang out. … The other venue attacked was the Stade de France, the national football stadium … But the Stade de France, like France’s national football team, also has great cultural resonance. “Les Bleus” – as the team is known – are seen by many as an embodiment of multicultural France, a team consisting of “noir, blanc, beur” (black, white, Arab) players’ (Malik 2015). ‘The attackers targeted sites of inclusiveness and conversation’ (Kinstler 2015), and ‘explaining’ this right-wing assault in any other way than recognising it for what it is entails participating in targeting the most progressive features of ‘the West’.
There has been much talk of a ‘new Cold War’, but what has been happening, on the contrary, is a consolidation of the far right that cuts across the erstwhile Iron Curtain. The alliance between Putin and extreme right parties in Europe is long-standing, and it is strong enough for him to have invited them as observers of the Crimean referendum held directly after Russia’s military intervention in 2014, prior to Crimea’s annexation, for they could be trusted to endorse it (Shekhovtsov 2014b). The French Front Nationale (FN), whose leader Marine Le Pen is frank about her admiration for Putin, ‘has confirmed taking Russian money. The First Czech Russian bank in Moscow has lent the party a whopping 9.4m Euros’ (Harding 2014). Most strikingly, Putin supported Donald Trump’s bid for the US presidency (Walker 2015): the same climate change denier who wanted to build a wall to keep out ‘rapist’ Mexicans and ban Muslims from entering the US, who promised to resume waterboarding and other forms of torture because ‘if it doesn’t work they deserve it anyway’, who called for surveillance of mosques, who repeated a disproved rumour that thousands of Muslims cheered as the Twin Towers came down, and who used a ‘dog-whistle’ anti-Semitic advertisement (Johnson 2015; Marshall 2016b).8 Trump, on his side, expressed open admiration for Putin and supported his role in Syria (Hanchett 2015). This alliance between neo-Stalinists (who may not even pretend to be Marxists, although some do) and neo-fascists (who may not all be anti-Semites, although some are) is a twenty-first century version of the Hitler-Stalin pact, epitomised by the endorsement of neo-fascist Le Pen in the French presidential election by neo-Stalinist James Petras (2017). Trump, like Putin, emphasises military power without counting the cost to the economy (Shear and Steinhauer 2017) and identifies with his neo-fascist supporters to such an extent that he refused to condemn them outright after their rampage in Charlottesville (Shear and Haberman 2017). Both are authoritarian neoconservatives who rely on neo-fascist support.