After the fall: Hope amid the ruins of post-Assad Syria

By Kevin B. Anderson

Published 6 February, 2025

First published at New Politics.

A few months after the epochal fall of the Assad dictatorship, Syria remains in flux. It could not be otherwise after 53 years of the strangulation of civil and political life under one of the world’s most murderous regimes. Nonetheless, some broad outlines of where Syria is going can be discerned.

But before entering into that, it is necessary to savor the moment. First, the fall of Bashar al-Assad (who ruled from 2000-2024, succeeding his father Hafez Assad, 1971-2000), constitutes a major historical turning point for the region and even the world. It shows above all that the spirit and reality of the Arab revolutions of 2011 have been smoldering underground all these years. This should give no comfort to local rulers who have snuffed out the 2011 revolutions in their societies, especially those in Egypt and Tunisia.

Second, the sudden collapse of the Syrian regime, within a matter of days, shows the fragile and brittle character of political class domination in general. Marxists have often repeated that, despite its unprecedented accumulation of wealth, capitalism is inherently unstable, a system where “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels once wrote (Communist Manifesto, MECW 6, p. 487). We saw this in the 2008 economic collapse. But this is equally true of the capitalist state, no matter how solid and impregnable it might appear in a particular context, even in our era of state-capitalism. We saw this in 2011 in the Arab world, when the Tunisian and Egyptian governments fell to revolutionary youth and workers in a matter of days, and we have seen it in Syria today. (In 2023, we saw how another “strong” state, Israel, was taken by surprise not by a mass uprising but by a determined attack across one of the world’s most closely guarded borders.)

CLR James stressed, based upon a passage in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, that radical change is characterized by “leaps” and breaks rather than gradualness (Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin, Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1986 [1948], p. 99). The years 2023-25 in the Middle East certainly exemplify that. But this is only part of the truth, for both the state and capital have a deep, structural existence, and such moments of collapse or breaks are rare enough. For as Marx intoned after the old order reasserted itself with a vengeance once the 1848 revolutions had met their defeat: “The tradition of all the dead generations lays like a nightmare upon the brains of the living” (Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 104).

The unfolding of the new

Keeping all this in mind, let us look at what is new in post-Assad Syria. Few noticed a year-and-a-half ago when the Syrian people surged into the streets for the first time in years with anti-regime, pro-revolution slogans as they targeted economic catastrophe and corruption. Notably, the predominantly Druze town of Suweida joined in in August 2023, breaking with the regime tactic of pitting ethno-religious minorities against the Sunni Arab majority. Demonstrators chanted, “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.” Across a number of towns and cities, “the flags of the Druze and Kurdish communities were raised alongside the [2011] revolution flag. And there were numerous displays of solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance” (Leila Al-Shami’s blog, “Syria: Revolution reborn,” Aug. 29, 2023).

As late as last summer, many EU countries, among them Italy, Denmark, Poland, and Austria, were seeking to end the boycott of the Assad regime, to reopen relations with it, and, above all, to force out the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who had streamed out of the country during the suppression of the revolution. These EU countries called for “a more realistic” policy, given that “Bashar al-Assad remains firmly it the saddle” (Jean-Baptiste Chastand, “Plusiers pays de l’UE veulent renouer avec la Syrie,” Le Monde, July 25, 2024).

Jumping to December 2024, when the 53-year-old regime tumbled after a six-day offensive spearheaded by a small Islamist-led force from the northern opposition enclave of Idlib, many have noted the almost complete failure of the large, well-armed regime forces to fight back. According to Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes:

While it was the advancing military forces of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) who marched into Damascus as Assad and his family fled, there are indications that it was unarmed civil resistance led by the resurgent popular committees and local councils, which initially came to the fore in the early nonviolent phase of the revolution back in 2011, that actually wrested control of much of the local governance from the regime, particularly in Daraa and Suweida provinces in the south (Daniel Falcone: interview with Stephen Zunes, “The Ousting of the Brutal Assad Regime Brings Euphoria and More Questions,” Counterpunch, Dec. 11, 2024).

In the town of Daraa, where the revolutionary uprising began in 2011, joy and sadness were mixed as crowds gathered to welcome home exiled revolutionaries. These included Sheikh Ahmad Al-Sayasna, whose sermon had helped galvanize the March 18, 2011, “Friday of anger” after local youths were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Too old and frail to give a full speech, he declared in just a few words, “We are a great people who deserve freedom and who know not hatred.” A young woman in the crowd cried out, “Syria is retrieving all its colors.” Another young woman who also experienced exile stated: “The Westerners are worried, but they need to understand that this is the first time decisions are in the hands of the Syrian people” (Eliott Brachet, “À Deraa, l’étincelle ravivée de la révolution syrienne,” Le Monde, Jan. 9, 2025).

In early January, the people of Suweida remained on revolutionary alert, holding onto the weapons they had wielded in December as the regime began to fall. As the Assad regime suffered territorial losses under the blows of HTS-led forces from the north, Suweida also rose up. Its armed networks, which had survived underground, reopened contact with a coalition of rebels from southern Syria, the region where the 2011 uprising first spread widely. “It was coordinated in secret. Once Aleppo fell, we formed the Operations Network [Chambre] of the South. Then, on December 7, we liberated our region as our allies marched on the capital,” stated a commander of the Druze Mountain Brigade, which claimed a force of 7,000 under arms. Also in Suweida, Druze, Christians, and Muslims gathered around a Christmas tree amid revolutionary slogans, especially, “A free, united, civic, and democratic Syria” (Eliott Brachet, “En Syrie, la circonspection des Druzes,” Le Monde, Jan. 7, 2025).

In Damascus, there was a pervasive sense of picking up where things had left off in 2011. At a December 12 funeral procession for a young revolutionary murdered in prison during the last days of the regime, one participant declared, “It is very moving to march again all together with citizens of Syria from all four corners of the country, on the same route that we took at the beginning of the revolution” (Hélène Sallon, “A Damas, les poignantes obsèques de l’opposant Mazen Al-Hamada,” Le Monde, Dec. 14, 2024).

In newly liberated Syria, as the poet Samar Yazbek has observed, the main slogan repeated incessantly by the joyous crowds was, “Syria is one and indivisible, it belongs to all Syrians, and everyone is entitled to the same rights.” She saw this as a clear repudiation of the Assad regime’s divide-and-conquer strategy and also of efforts by Israel, Türkiye, and other outside powers that are seeking to dominate the new Syria, even as others like Russia and Iran were exiting the scene (“Bashar al-Assad est tombé, mais la véritable révolution des Syriens ne fait que commencer,” Le Monde, Dec. 24, 2024).

These revolutionary crowds also entered en masse the regime’s notorious prisons, vile dungeons where tens of thousands met their deaths over the decades, this in addition to the 500,000 Assad and his allies killed in their repression of the 2011 revolution. In December 2024, the people freed those remaining and searched desperately for other survivors or evidence of what had happened to all those who disappeared into these houses of torture.

Summing up upon his return from exile, the noted Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh observed concerning the rapid collapse of the regime, “It’s the best thing that could have happened and it took place in the best way possible, without destruction, without massacres, without a great deal of human suffering” (Hélène Sallon, “Le retour doux-amer de Yassin al-Haj Saleh en Syrie,” Le Monde, Jan. 3, 2025).

Some Syrian Arab intellectuals have also begun to speak out more strongly in defense of the large Kurdish minority (10% of the population) than their earlier counterparts like Saleh. During the civil war the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) established the progressive, pro-feminist autonomous zone of Rojava, now under threat from the Türkiye-funded Syrian National Army (SNA), which has been allied to HTS. As the young Marxist analyst Joseph Daher writes, “The uprising in 2011 allowed an unprecedented emergence of a deep Kurdish national dynamic in the history of Syria. The Kurdish question raises many other issues about the country’s future, including the potential for a pluralist identity not solely based on Arabness or Islam, as well as the nature of the state and its social model. Ultimately, these are all challenges that are intrinsically connected to the desire for true emancipation of Syria’s popular classes” (“The Kurdish Struggle Is Central to Syria’s Future,” New Arab, Dec. 29, 2024).

Internal contradictions

Many in the Western media have noted the relative tolerance of minority religious communities on the part of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose quite small armed forces – probably less than 20,000 in a country of some 25 million – drove down from Idlib in the north to Damascus amid only token opposition, as the Assad regime and its military forces simply collapsed. Given that HTS originated as part of the ultra-fundamentalist Al Qaeda network, although those ties were severed about eight years ago, there is much apprehension about its agenda as it has begun to take over the state. This is especially the case within more secular, leftwing, and feminist sectors of the Syrian population. As Al-Haj Saleh asked upon his return from exile, “Who will be oppressed? People like us, democrats, liberals, people on the left.” He added that so far, there has been “a type of religious and cultural inclusivity but not a political one. I fear they may not accept political pluralism,” noting that HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has surrounded himself with like-minded people in his administration (Sallon, “Le retour”).

In the new Syria, the negative role of HTS and other radical Islamist groups during the 2011-13 civil war continues to be noted, even as they seem to have moderated their perspectives somewhat. As Shireen Akram-Boshar noted recently: “Syrians within Syria and in the diaspora are wary of HTS. Syrian activists have long described Nusra and other Islamist groups as a second pole in the counterrevolution, after the Assad regime. Syrian activists for years have lifted the stories of Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, Samira Khalil and Nazem Hammadi — four democratic activists who opposed the Assad regime as well as the Islamist groups, and were kidnapped and disappeared at the end of 2013, most likely by another, similar Islamist militia” (“As Assad Regime Falls, Syrians Celebrate — and Brace for an Uncertain Future, Truthout, Dec. 11, 2024). This connects to one of Raya Dunayevskaya’s key dialectical insights, wherein “the discernment of the counter-revolution within the revolution became pivotal” (Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao, p. 106).

HTS rule over the rebel enclave of Idlib over the past seven years, while not redolent of Taliban-style reactionary policies, is hardly reassuring. Funded to an extent by Türkiye, HTS developed an authoritarian system in which women’s rights were restricted, open sale of alcohol prohibited, and dissidents imprisoned and tortured. After protests in 2021 against repression, HTS loosened controls somewhat.

Now in control of Damascus, HTS has appointed an old Assad regime bureaucrat as chief of the national police and has tried to confiscate arms from the people, especially the youth. HTS has moved decisively to take control of the legal system, dispatching eleven of its minions from Idlib to take charge of the central body of Syrian attorneys. In response, a petition signed by 400 Syrians, 130 of them lawyers, has demanded that the legitimate purges taking place of corrupt and repressive Assad legal officials does not result in their replacement “by others also lacking any electoral legitimacy” (Hélène Sallon, “En Syrie, des avocats s’inquiètent de la mainmise du pouvoir sur le barreau,” Le Monde, Jan. 20, 2025).

Syrian women have also expressed grave concerns about the future. In Aleppo in December, a women’s demonstration was called off after threatening messages were received by organizers. The HTS-led government has also sent out mixed signals. After an HTS spokesman said in late December that women’s leadership roles would have to be limited to “functions that correspond to their nature and biology,” protest demonstrations broke out in several cities. HTS leader al-Sharaa has expressed a somewhat different line publicly, naming human rights leader Aisha al-Dibs to a bureau of women’s affairs, but the latter has denounced feminism and called for a society based upon Islamic law (Céline Pierce-Magnani, “En Syrie, la méfiance des femmes face au nouveau pouvoir,” Le Monde, Dec. 30, 2024).

The strongest worries about the new Syria have been expressed by the Kurds, who have come under pressure from the Turkish-backed SNA as well as the Turkish military and air force. Kurds have already been forced out of some areas. The town of Kobane, where the SDF and its women’s units held off ISIS in 2014 in a legendary battle that broke the back of those Islamist reactionaries, is again in danger from SNA and Turkish forces. Recently, Commander-in-Chief of the Kurdish SDF’s People’s Protection Forces (YPJ), Rohilat Afrin, expressed concern about the direction of the new Syria, in terms of both Kurdish autonomy and women’s rights: “We believe that the war in Kobane was a war for humanity; a war to protect all women and land. We are confident that a state of public alert on a global scale will be raised and solidarity will be provided should Kobane be attacked again…. The mindset entrenched within the new government makes it clear that there is no place for women there — or only a place where women must accept to cover their heads and adopt a patriarchal mindset. Avoiding the above will require a great deal of organization and struggle. This is a serious danger that we need to recognize” (Rojava Information Center, “Syria: ‘We cannot hand over our weapons while attacks on women and our territories continue’ — An interview with YPJ Commander-in-Chief Rohilat Afrin,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Jan. 12, 2025).

Imperialist and subimperialist threats … and Syria’s future

The fact that the Assad regime since the 2011 uprising has been propped up by Russia, Iran, and the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militias from Lebanon, was shown in how quickly this five-decade-old edifice collapsed once these outside powers began to withdraw in late 2024. Russia pulled out most of its forces by then and refused to do what it had done a decade earlier, conduct indiscriminate air attacks on Syrian rebels and civilians. Here the determined resistance of the Ukrainian people played no small role in weakening Russian imperialism, while Ukraine’s drones gave actual material support. Hezbollah, weakened by Israel’s attacks in the fall of 2024, which had caught its leadership off guard, assassinating them in one swoop, was in no position to aid the regime either. And Iran, reeling from Israeli air attacks and expecting more especially with Trump’s election in the US, also refused to do anything for Assad.

It should also be noted that Russia and Israel had a tacit understanding under Assad, allowing Israel to attack Syria at will. In addition, after the fall of Assad and the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, some in the Israeli and US governments are under the dangerous illusion that they can now move on to re-order the region by toppling the Iran regime from without.

But even as various imperialist and subimperialist powers — Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah — were leaving the scene, new ones were appearing, or at least appearing with greater force. Türkiye, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan harbors neo-Ottomanist ambitions for the whole region, not only backed HTS and its “own” SNA, but has also exercised huge direct influence on the new government. Erdogan wants the new Syrian government to leave the Kurds to him and the SNA, but here he comes up against other forces, not least the Kurds themselves, but also their tacit backers in the US military, who have seen SDF as a bulwark against the resurgence of ISIS.

Israel has intervened in post-Assad Syria in several ways, sinking the small Syrian navy out of the water, destroying from the air many military bases, and taking over a considerably expanded territory around the Golan Heights, which it already occupies illegally. The Israelis have given their usual alibi for their war crimes: fighting “terrorism.”

All of these powers, and others, are seeking to take advantage of Syria’s economic weakness, born of years of civil war and the exploitation of the country by the Assad family amid epochal levels of corruption. These powers are seeking to dismember or divide Syria into regions and enclaves they hope to dominate. Hence, the constant call by Syrians today for the unity of the country.

Some on the left, especially campists, have gone so far as to say that the collapse of the regime was orchestrated by Israel and the US and that all this serves imperialism and reaction, with little or no liberatory content to be seen. This logic is extremely questionable. For as longtime Marxist analyst of the region Gilbert Achcar observed in the wake of Assad’s fall, “There are those who believe that any local actor is but the puppet of some external actor. Such people can’t acknowledge any agency for local actors. That’s, of course, a very poor way of perceiving the situation” (Stephen R. Shalom, “The Collapse of the Assad Regime: An Interview on Syria with Gilbert Achcar, New Politics Online, Dec. 13, 2024).

Such a logic also fails at the human level. Who can defend, excuse, or minimize the brutality of a regime that turned the whole country into a giant torture chamber and death camp? Who can forget the regime’s watchword during the uprising and civil war, “Bashar or we burn the country”? When the time came, in December 2024, the long-suffering Syrian people shook off the regime, with the armed forces melting away as the leaders slinked off to Moscow.

The people of Syria now have an opening, of a type not seen since the early, heady days of 2011. Let us hope that they can make something positive out of this, not only for Syria, but also for the region and the world, which is in such great need of hope at a time when authoritarianism and fascism are descending on us in so many parts of the world. Let us also salute the persistence and the resilience of the Syrian people, who never gave up in the years since 2011, whether inside the country or in exile, and who continue on today amid myriad obstacles. Let that be a lesson for all of us, everywhere.

Kevin B. Anderson teaches in the Department of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara, with affiliations with Political Science and Feminist Studies. He is the author or editor of several books, including most recently The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (2025). He is also an editor of The International Marxist-Humanist.

 

Leónidas Iza (Pachakutik, Ecuador): ‘Our election campaign is an extension of the people’s struggle’

By Leónidas Iza & Iain Bruce

Published 6 February, 2025

First published in Spanish at Jacobinlat. Translation by Iain Bruce, which was edited by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal for clarity.

In conversation with Iain Bruce, Ecuadorian Indigenous leader and presidential candidate Leónidas Iza analyses the profound economic, social and institutional crisis the country is going through, marked by the advance of neoliberal policies, state repression and the precariousness of living conditions.

Iza reflects on the impact of popular demonstrations on the upcoming general elections, with the first round to be held on February 9, and the need to build a political project from the grassroots that defends plurinationality, the public sector and national sovereignty. He also addresses the tensions and challenges facing the Ecuadorian left, the role of the Citizen Revolution led by former president Rafael Correa, and his strategy for the elections.

Faced with a political scenario dominated by the right, the rise of drug trafficking and the fragmentation of progressive forces, the Indigenous leader reaffirmed his commitment to an alternative that does not abandon street protests, but rather integrates the electoral dispute into a broader social and political struggle to transform Ecuador.

Over the past year, Ecuador has faced a series of difficult situations — rising levels of gang violence and state repression, drought and an electricity crisis, deepening poverty and mass migration. Could you describe what the context was like at the start of this campaign, a little over a year after Daniel Noboa became president in November 2023?

Ever since the idea of a “bloated state” and excessive bureaucracy was introduced, the model imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — successively implemented by the [Lenin] Moreno, [Guillermo] Lasso and now Noboa governments — has resulted in a fragile state lacking in social policies to strengthen key sectors of the Ecuadorian economy and society. Education, health and employment have been seriously neglected, as has support for the grassroots and solidarity economy. This has led to a drastic deterioration in living conditions for ordinary Ecuadorians.

As a consequence, in the most impoverished areas, many have ended up seeing drug trafficking, organised crime or illegal activities as their only way out. For the majority of Ecuadorians, this represents a problem; but for the political and economic elites, for the oligarchies, it is an opportunity — they have exploited this suffering to promote their usual projects.

We now find ourselves in a painful situation. After President Noboa’s declaration of a “state of war”, which is now a year old, these elites have managed to establish their hegemony over public consciousness and discussion. The so-called Phoenix Plan to tackle gang-related violence does not really exist and there is no real intention to put an end to crime; instead, what we are seeing is the use of this crisis as a mechanism of control.

In economic terms, the declaration of war has hit the country hard. It has scared off investment and affected strategic sectors, such as tourism, which has declined on the coast, in the highlands and the Amazon. Furthermore, due to the energy crisis, we have recorded losses of more than $8 billion, according to estimates by concerned business groups.

On the other hand, we are experiencing serious violations of human rights. Cases such as that of the four children in Maldivas [where four Afro-Ecuadorian boys were detained by the army and later found dead] are just one example of a systematic policy. It is estimated that under the state of war, more than 20,000 young people have been prosecuted but data indicates that only between 350-500 of them had any real involvement in illegal activities. What happened to the rest? We do not know.

Added to this is a climate of structural racism. In Ecuador today, if a white or mestizo person sees someone of African descent, they assume they are a criminal. If they see an Indigenous person, they label them a terrorist and a “Quito arsonist” [in reference to the Indigenous-led uprisings of 2019 and 2022]. If they see a poor person, they stigmatise and racialise them. This is the scenario that the Ecuadorian right has been able to take advantage of, and it is one that we have to confront.

Today we face systematic violations of human rights, a state that operates with a monarchical logic, the breakdown of basic conditions for democratic coexistence, and the failure to comply with the Constitution and Code of Democracy. The four branches of government have subordinated themselves to the executive, and the latter, in turn, is subject to the conditions imposed by the IMF.

In the past year, Ecuador has agreed to a new loan of $5.5 billion, not yet disbursed, but destined exclusively to pay previous debt. Meanwhile, the economic and political elites continue to control national politics, deepening a crisis that increasingly affects the majority of the Ecuadorian people.

Last month there was a major mobilisation in the Amazon against the construction of a super prison. Do you think this marks a reactivation of the social movement after the impact of Noboa’s security policy? And, in that sense, do you think this has influenced the campaign, generating a new political climate?

Look, Ecuadorians are, by nature, a fighting people. Throughout history, all governments have tried to curb this rebelliousness and dismantle organisational processes in different ways: criminalising and persecuting leaders, inventing parallel organisations, or trying to link us to organised crime and drug trafficking. We have seen these strategies time and time again. But popular resistance is stronger, and they will never succeed in breaking it.

When we have mobilised, we have done so forcefully, as happened in 2019 and 2022. Leading up to the uprising of June 2022, there were 28 protest events; leading up to October 2019, there were 38. Currently, we have already had between 5 and 10 mobilisations, which indicates that concrete actions from different sectors are accumulating. First, there are scattered struggles, then they are articulated and, finally, they lead to social outbursts. This is a cyclical process, so I am not worried: governments can continue trying to repress us, but sooner or later the issues come together and the struggle arises again.

What happened in the Amazon is a blow to Noboa’s government. He governs arrogantly, with a monarchical vision, as if he were the landowner on a big estate. This time, he had to back down because the resistance affected him electorally. He did not suspend the construction of the prison due to concerns about life in the Amazon — for him, the region represents only 3% of the national electorate, it does not interest him — but because he feared this would impact his image in other parts of the country.

For now, the project is suspended and they have promised not to resume it. However, they have not provided any official document to confirm this. We will continue to pay close attention to what happens.

How have these protests influenced the mood of the campaign?

I think that all mobilisations force people to have to take a stand. The first thing we must understand is that the political and economic elites have managed to implant the idea that politics is something negative for popular sectors and their leaders. 

They have constructed a discourse that if we participate in politics, we do so for our own individual interests, that we are “taking advantage” of mobilisations to run for office. They say, for example, “There they are again, the golden ponchos, using the struggle to get into elections.” But when they stand for election, then it is democratic, it is legitimate. Unfortunately, many people have fallen into that trap.

We, on the other hand, have been clear: without abandoning the streets, we are going to contest elections as a further extension of the struggle. We are not abandoning mobilisation, but complementing it with electoral participation. That is why the organised rank and file who have been on the streets are now taking a stand in this election.

I will give you a concrete example: our comrades who have been defending the hills and highland moors from extractivism. Yesterday I saw a statement from them that said: “We’re backing Leónidas Iza”. Not because they believe that the elections are an end in themselves, but because they understand that the electoral arena is another tool for channeling the strength that they have built up in the streets.

Our struggle is not reduced to electoral politics; it is another dimension within a broader process. We fight in the streets, in national and international courts, in the drafting and reform of laws, in local governments. What we have not yet fully achieved is consolidating all these struggles under a unified project. We are on our way to doing that.

That is why I firmly believe that, in time, we will succeed in aligning the struggle towards a proposal that represents the interests of the people in this process.

And what are the main planks of your program for government?

Well, when I am asked about “my” government platform, we end up going back to the same old stories that I have been fighting against these days. “What is Leónidas Iza’s government program?” No, that is to individualise politics, to make people believe that it is about personal interest. It is not my program, but the government program of the people, the program of the Indigenous peoples, the cholos, the Indians, the mestizos, the stigmatised Afro-Ecuadorians.

Our government program has not been produced from behind a desk, but out of grassroots struggle. It is the result of what we stood up for in 2019, of what we took to the streets for in 2022. And that was clear: financial relief for the people; no mining in watersheds and fertile areas; genuine and deep implementation of plurinationality; and total rejection of privatisations.

In our government, we will strengthen the productive capacity of Ecuadorian state-owned companies and defend national production. What does this mean? That we are going to promote policies to support small farmers — those whom the state has abandoned but who were the first to take to the streets when the crisis hit. This is a government program built from the people and for the people.

One of the central issues is crime. They have led us to believe that the solution is to put more weapons and more police on the streets. No. In our government plan we have been clear: yes, there are some young people who have fallen into criminal networks and who we may not be able to rehabilitate socially, and we will have to face up to that. But crime cannot be combated with repression alone; we need a solid social policy linked to neighbourhoods, communes and territories.

We need to strengthen education and healthcare and create minimum employment conditions. Why? To prevent 12- or 13-year-olds, whose parents work in precarious conditions and cannot look after them, from being recruited by organised crime. This is the vision of the popular sectors, not of those who think that crime can be solved with a warmongering mentality, with more weapons and repression.

And what has happened? The state has been deliberately weakened, its capacity reduced under the pretext of combating its supposed “bloatedness”. But when you dismantle the state, you dismantle the basic policies that sustain any society, be it in the First, Second or Third World.

In terms of institutional framework, we are going to respect democracy. Why do we write democracy in the Constitution if each government then interprets it as it pleases, turning us into a monarchy? No! Democracy cannot be a concept manipulated by political and economic groups as they see fit. It must be a democracy rooted in the people, not in the interests of an elite that uses it as an instrument to perpetuate its power.

Halfway through last year, in Pachakutik, in CONAIE, I believe you tried to unify or at least bring together the different left-wing currents and groups. I understand that at least a minimum agreement was reached: not to attack each other and to support whoever reaches the second round. Is that agreement, even if minimal, still in place? How do you see the current situation and what is your position towards a possible second round?

Yes, there is a general government program that some sectors accepted, assuming that it should be the basis for an agreement. However, there are central issues that many of those who call themselves progressive are still not willing to stand firm on. Issues such as mining, bilingual education, redistribution of wealth, defence of national production and the public sector continue to be points of contention.

For example, on the mining issue, some people ask: “Where are we going to get the money from?” The answer is clear: we have to collect it from those who are not paying what they should. But many sectors lack the necessary determination to face these debates. These are pending issues that remain open and which, in the event that we are an option in the second round, could serve to unify the struggle even more from the perspective of the popular sectors.

Now, why have more pragmatic and long-term agreements not been achieved? Precisely because of the history of how certain sectors have governed. They have not understood what plurinationality really means, nor have they accepted that the rights of Indigenous peoples are not a concession from the state or a favour from governments, but fundamental collective rights.

Free, prior and informed consent, the application of Indigenous justice, bilingual intercultural education, defence of food sovereignty, of our culture and our languages ... all these issues have been left at the mercy of the political will of the government in power, without any real commitment. This historical debt has held back genuine unification through this process. These are issues that still need to be resolved in any space for debate.

Until now, the non-aggression pact has been respected. But in political and ideological terms, we must take as a reference point the structural problems that any government must overcome, regardless of who comes to power.

At the moment, there are candidates who claim to represent the left and others who present themselves as right-wing. They all try to present themselves as “new”. But the real question is how much sensitivity and how much memory people have to recognise who can genuinely be a real option for Ecuador.

Sorry, Leónidas, but specifically, if you make it to the second round, you are obviously going to want the other left-wing parties to support you. Now, if the scenario were different and the final contest were between Luisa González [the presidential candidate of the Citizen Revolution movement] and Noboa, would you call for a vote for the Citizen Revolution?

At the moment, I cannot say what will happen in the second round. We are focused on building support for our option in the first round. If we start discussing hypothetical scenarios now, people might end up voting in this first round for an option they do not really agree with. That is why the responsible thing to do at the moment is not to speculate about the second round, but to consolidate our proposal and our strength at this stage.

Now, if we reach the second round, and I am sure we will be one of the options in that round, at that point we will have to assess our capacity to integrate the different sectors of Ecuador and move forward based on that scenario.

 

In search of alternatives: Strategies for social movements to counter imperialism and authoritarianism

By Iqra Anugrah

Published 7 February, 2025

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First published at TNI.

In May 2024, seven months after Israel’s war on Gaza began, students at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) built the first Gaza solidarity camp in the Netherlands, following the lead of their distant comrades at Columbia University and other universities across Europe and the US. The UvA’s board, backed by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, saw the police evict the camp. But the movement did not stop. The student protesters quickly and effectively built a second, bigger encampment, which became a trigger for a nationwide encampment and protest movement for Palestine supported by students at other Dutch universities, various social movements, the Palestinian diaspora, and including working-class people, especially those with a migrant background. A new anti-imperialist politics was born.

While the war on Gaza and the Palestinian Occupied Territories on the West Bank has rejuvenated anti-imperialist politics, it builds on many recent social movements in the Global South that have been at the forefront of resisting capitalist-induced authoritarianism and imperialist/expansionist politics. This includes the anti-authoritarian Milk Tea Alliance (MTA) in East and Southeast Asia, left-wing political formations and governments in a number of countries across Latin America and Europe, Black Lives Matter protests in the US and beyond, and various local and national struggles against extractive industries, capitalist exploitation, oligarchic power, and state repression.

Understanding the nature of imperialism today and the creative ways through which social movements and popular resistance push back against it is pivotal to making sense of the ravages of contemporary global capitalism and authoritarianism and offering alternative solutions.

Imperialism: A return of a forgotten concept

The political and economic tensions between the US and China or other middle-level powers such as Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa (the original BRICS countries), have become common talking points in academic, media, and public discourses. Along with the BRICS bloc, other middle-power countries, such as Qatar and Türkiye have also gained global attention for presenting a diplomatic challenge to Western hegemony.

These accounts, however, fail to situate the shifting landscape of global power within the historical development of capitalism, a political-economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, exploitation of labour, and the profit motive. As a result, we are left with fearmongering and pseudo-moralistic accounts of the world, seeing rising major and middle powers as either ‘threats to liberty, democracy, and rule-based order’ or ‘saviour vanguards’ against centuries of Western colonialism and hypocrisy.

This false dichotomy is reproduced in political discourses. Many liberal and conservative accounts see the rise of China as a threat to freedom, ironically at the same time as the so-called ‘Free World’ has been actively engaging in mass surveillance, interventions of democratic processes to safeguard its political and economic interests, and support for repression of the Yemenis and the genocide of Palestinians. Meanwhile, some sections of the left and progressives more broadly hold an idealised notion of Third World or Global South anti-imperialism as inherently and eternally progressive, neglecting the contradictions inherent in these anti-imperialist political projects (or rather, states) and their frequent degeneration into mere authoritarianism.

This is why a contextual, political economy-informed reading of imperialism remains relevant. It allows us to comprehend the intersecting realms of state and corporate power, the role of the West, especially the US, in maintaining capitalism and the current form of international relations, the complicity of domestic political and economic elites in perpetuating this unjust power structure, and popular resistance against such global dominance, especially from social movements and grassroots resistance in the Global South.

A major element of imperialism, according to Lenin, is the expansion of capital and its accompanying social and political relations from the rich countries — colonial metropoles and post-1945 global powers such the US and Japan — to peripheral and underdeveloped areas — collectively known as the Third World, and later ‘the Global South’.

In its current form, imperialism relies on several mechanisms of profit extraction and coercion for national subjugation, namely transnational corporations (TNCs) relying on cheap labour for profit, political elites using authoritarian and military methods to discipline working people and their progressive politics in the name of political stability and smooth investments, and continuing alliances with old imperialist powers.

Imperialism, then, is not merely the expansion of capital and exploitation of labour by TNCs on a global scale, but rather a political project of the ruling class in imperial metropoles to constrain and undermine the sovereignty of nation-states in the Global South and to maintain their domination through economic, political, and even military means.

While economic imperialism, strengthened by domestic rule of capital in contemporary capitalist societies, continues to be the dominant feature of contemporary imperialism, it is its more vulgar, militaristic aspect that often disturbs public conscience. This military power ensures not only economic imperialism but has also cemented the power of US imperialism — along with its strategic allies — during and particularly after the Cold War.

This politico-military dimension of imperialism has been pursued even at an astronomical military and human cost. The US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, foreign meddling in the chaotic Libyan civil war, and Israel’s opportunistic invasion of Syria after the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 are just a few examples.

Strangely, some activists, organisations, and scholars on the left, especially those residing in the West, can be so preoccupied with the domestic politics of their respective countries that they overlook the challenges faced by anti-imperialist movements in the Global South and the bleak realities of imperialist encirclement.

A recent cross-national study has vindicated the continuing relevance of classical insights on imperialism. It shows that rich countries benefit from a large scale ‘appropriation of resources and labour from the global South’ in the post-Cold War period (1990-2015), totalling approximately $242 trillion in market prices for the whole period.

The economic rise of non-Western countries and regions and the performance of high-growth economies such as the Asian Tigers and Tiger Cub economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) does not spell the end of imperialist power structures. If anything, imperialism is continually reinforced by TNCs and governments in the US and former colonial powers. For instance, Intan Suwandi’s in-depth case study of Indonesia demonstrates that economic imperialism continues to operate via supplier companies and TNCs from the Global North profiting from global labour arbitrage — wage differentials between workers in the Global North and the Global South. Workers in Indonesia and other growing economies continue to be exploited, while the TNCs make a killing.

This continuing economic plunder and military adventurism naturally engenders collective resistance. Various social movements have mounted significant challenges to global imperialism, including the so-called ‘Battle of Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Zapatista national liberation army (EZLN) in Mexico, opposition to Western-backed authoritarian governments in many countries across Latin America and East and Southeast Asia, mass demonstrations against the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, and numerous local social movements against land-grabbing, resource exploitation, privatisation, and corporate expansion. The heydays of armed national liberation movements might have passed, but the spirit of anti-imperialism continues.

Imperialism, authoritarian capitalism, and the fog of conceptual fallacies


These imperialist dynamics overlap with the global turn towards a more authoritarian form of capitalism and electoral governance sustaining it — reactionary or illiberal populism. Figures like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi have won elections and right-wing populist movements of various stripes, ranging from anti-immigrant far-right political parties in Europe to Hindutva and Islamist currents in India and Türkiye respectively, have made significant political inroads.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom which blames this malaise on the deficit of democratic culture and the breakdown of elite consensus, this latest wave of authoritarian tendencies matured as a result of the unchecked power of capital, the hollowing out of participatory democratic institutions, oligarchic control of politics, and assaults on many forms of redistributive or social welfare.

Authoritarian capitalism, then, can be seen as a product of capital’s expansion from the metropole through an imperialist arrangement. Authoritarian capitalism consolidates as postcolonial states in the Global South become increasingly integrated into the global capitalist circuit. This process intensified after the slow death of social democratic and national liberation projects.

What has been at play here is not only the dismantling of post-1945 welfare state and institutions by neoliberal, free-market radicals, but also, to quote Margaret Somers, the institutional and political attacks on the predistributive power of the state and the concept of social citizenship. That is, even the very ideas that the state should prevent incipient inequalities in the first place and guarantee social rights as part of its social contract with its citizens and residents.

As a result, the economic and social gains made in the ‘golden age’ of welfare state and policies have been eroded or reversed and the democratic demand for such arrangements tamed and labelled as ‘irresponsible spending’. Moreover, the state has been refashioned according to the neoliberal imagination as a facilitator of balanced budgets (for citizens, but not for corporations and political elites), including austerity, privatisation, free trade, and a reliance on the ready supply of cheap labour.

This necessitates an outward expansion of capital and its disciplinary institutions and apparatus and the decline of the politics of solidarity with progressive political experiments in the Global South. Consequently, this changing configuration swings the geopolitical and economic pendulum in favour of imperialist interests.

This development has also led to the declining welfare of working people and the rise of authoritarian populism. In the US, for example, decades of trade liberalisation and de-industrialisation for the sake of ‘global competitiveness’ had impoverished rural communities and provided a receptive breeding ground for Trump-style authoritarian-leaning populism. Similarly, unrestrained globalisation has facilitated the success of reactionary politics of multiple strands such as Hindutva in India, oligarchy-backed Islamist populism in Indonesia, and antidemocratic libertarianism in Latin America. Despite their ‘anti-elite’ rhetoric, these currents effectively serve as vessels for authoritarian neoliberal policies.

This economic warfare on labour has a corrosive effect on popular democracy. In European democracies, political parties including social democratic ones, have become disconnected from the wider public — politicians are increasingly a professional political class with their own self-interests and divorced from their constituencies. Intellectuals, backed by big corporate lobbies, have concocted analytical justifications for deeper neoliberalism and oligarchic interests at the expense of democratic procedures, as can be seen in the US, Latin America, and Indonesia.

When this elusive control of democracy is insufficient to deter popular resistance, then political and economic elites will resort to repressive measures to save their neoliberal design and their interests. This is what authoritarian capitalism looks like.

Being aware of these intersecting historical processes of imperialism and authoritarian capitalism can help working people and progressive social movements to avoid two types of fallacies. First is the fallacy of vulgar anti-imperialism or ‘campism’, seeing the world through a simplistic, romanticised binary of the imperialist First World versus the eternally progressive Third World, where factors such as domestic politics, the state of democracy, and class composition and relations within these two blocs are glossed over. The consequences of this fallacy can be fatal: in the name of anti-imperialism, it is possible to provide uncritical support for ‘anti-Western’ authoritarian states, such as Russia and Syria, and even worse dismiss popular struggles, social movements, and those campaigning for socialism, greater democracy, and social rights in these states. This includes the Russian Marxist intellectual Boris Kagarlitsky, a noted critic of the far right and Putin’s authoritarianism, and Kurdish forces who fought the totalitarian Daesh terrorists and launched the Rojava revolution.

The second fallacy is that of inter-imperialist rivalry. This thesis argues that the current contour of international politics is a reflection of inter-imperialist rivalry between the West and China and Russia. This is also a form of simplistic thinking since it equates political and economic expansion of rising and middle-level powers, whether democratic or authoritarian, with past experiences of imperialist powers. Acknowledging the human costs of such expansionism should not make us lose sight of the horrifying records of Western imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, it shows a lack of understanding of what the integration into the global capital circuit and international order means for a major economic power such as China and maverick authoritarian middle powers such as Türkiye and Qatar, which includes strategic restraint, the need for new markets, international legitimacy for their domestic populations, and preserving the self-interests of the ruling elites.

Opening up the fractures of antagonistic cooperation

Building on diverse socialist traditions, the activist-scholar Promise Li describe this simultaneous process of confluence and conflict of interests between the US-led Western imperialism and an assortment of expansionist, sub-imperial, and emerging powers as ‘antagonistic cooperation’. While acknowledging the enduring influence of Western imperialism, Li and his interlocutor Federico Fuentes also point out the contradictions within the loose coalition of challengers to the US-led international order and the many social antagonisms that this coalition engenders, such as political repression at home and the environmental and social costs of its foreign investments.

This reading of contemporary imperialism is innovative and much-needed for analytical and activist reflections. However, social movements and activists on the ground do not always have the luxury to wait. Sometimes, they need to act at critical moments and in less-than-ideal geopolitical conjunctures. This includes seizing opportunities presented by rifts within this antagonistic cooperation and using resources from states which compete against US and Western dominance.

Take the examples of China and Qatar. China has abandoned its policy of supporting revolutionary movements, benefitted extensively from its integration into global capitalism, and introduced an extensive mechanism of internal repression of dissent and minorities in the name of domestic political and economic stability. Yet it has never engaged in foreign colonial adventures, military interventions, and ‘state-building’ projects practised by several of the former colonial powers and the US. Walden Bello notes that China largely maintains a strategic defensive military posture, avoids an arms race and only has one foreign military base in Djibouti.

Moreover, the negative impacts of China’s foreign economic investments, especially on labour rights, local community wellbeing, and the environment, are not the outcome of state-backed corporate expansion and militaristic/authoritarian control in the classical mode of imperialism.

First, despite its recent technological advancements, China’s geo-economic rise remains dependent on foreign capital via ‘the globalization of production via Western TNCs’. This shows the limits of China’s economic ambition and expansion and differentiates its development with that of existing imperialist powers in the Global North. To call China ‘imperialist’ in a Leninist sense is, therefore, a misnomer.

Second, China’s foreign investment and hunger for resources are an outcome of state-led outsourcing of domestic economic development involving varied state and private actors and companies with different levels of compliance with labour and environmental regulations.

In other words, the preference for domestic stability, the presence of competing development actors with different interests, and the relative dependence of post-Mao Chinese governments on foreign capital put a significant limit on capitalist, state, and party elites with imperialist interests in China. The lasting legacy of Maoist/leftist moral economy and political ethos in China’s labour and social movements also puts a brake on the expansionist drive of some sections of the Chinese elites.

Another curious example is Qatar, which occupies a different position than China in its dialectics of antagonistic cooperation with the West. Qatar is a maverick middle-level power while China is a rising dominant power with a socialist history. Yet, just like China, Qatar has its own share of antagonisms with US imperialism and global capital.

While it can be seen as just another petrodollar Gulf State with an authoritarian government and a problematic human rights record, with the largest US military base in the Middle East, Qatar’s support for Al-Jazeera has also broadened the scope of political debates in the Arab world and beyond, and provided an alternative media channel through which social movements and anti-imperialist causes can voice their aspirations. The importance of this role can be seen by the channel’s coverage of the Arab Spring and Israel’s war on Gaza and the creation of its US subsidiary, AJ+, a social media-based news channel with a left-leaning slant.

Qatar’s past diplomatic crisis with other US-allied Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt also suggests its own geopolitical and foreign policy preferences, which were used by Islamist and popular movements during the Arab Spring.

In short, Qatar’s self-interested moves do not represent a break from contemporary imperialism, but they can mitigate its excesses. Qatar’s decision to prohibit the US from using its military base to attack Iran is a telling example of such restraint. Moreover, its role as an active broker in the ongoing ceasefire process between Israel and Hamas has proven its salience as a tactical alternative to imperialist geopolitics.

These states’ geopolitical manoeuvring effectively serves to check contemporary imperialism. The geopolitical rivalry between them and the West offers opportunities for progressive social movements and their constituencies. This should not be controversial; for decades, these movements have strategically used funding from Western donors channelled through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the Global South. This strategic engagement can also be applied in tactical working relations with these ‘buffer states’ and their resources to challenge Western imperialism without becoming apologists for ‘anti-Western’ authoritarianism.

Strategies for social movements

The following sections highlight the creative ways social movements across three regions use in advancing their goals amidst this new contour of imperialism.

Case study 1: Unexpected alliances and networks in the Palestine solidarity movements

Let us begin with the latest case of anti-imperialist social movements: the Palestine solidarity movements. In response to the genocide, a broad, popular pro-Palestine and pro-peace alliance was immediately formed and consolidated, comprising a wide range of groups: leftist political organisations, progressive social movements, unions and workers from different sectors including students, anti-Zionist Jews, LGBTQ+, Muslim communities and Palestinian organisations and diaspora. The movement has followed a multi-pronged strategy pushing for a permanent ceasefire and Palestinian liberation, including mass mobilisation, diplomatic efforts, and media operations. These elements, in an ad hoc manner, support and reinforce each other and create unexpected, uncoordinated alliances between different groups, states, and networks. It has involved street demonstrations but also institutions of symbolic, intellectual, and material importance for Israel and its Western backers: the universities. This tactic has shifted public opinion, delegitimising the myth of Israel as a bastion of liberal and intellectual freedom, and severing institutional, financial, and military ties supporting its occupation and war crimes.

Just like the pulling out of US troops from Vietnam and the boycott of apartheid South Africa, this pressure from below has pushed key countries such as South Africa and Colombia to express strong support for the Palestinian cause, as shown in the former’s historic genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It has even pushed several European countries such as Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Belgium to speak up for Palestinian human rights.

One could argue that this is a repeat of the anti-WTO protests, when radical anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements momentarily joined force with Global South states and succeeded in stopping the advance of a neoliberal trade agenda. International condemnation of Israel at the United Nations General Assembly is supported by almost every Global South nation.

Here, some diplomatic manoeuvres of China and Qatar also played a role. China maintains consistent support for the two-state solution and recently brokered a unity deal between Hamas, Fatah, and 12 other Palestinian factions for national reconciliation and Palestinian statehood. Meanwhile, Qatar has served as a mediator in the ceasefire negotiations, and the release of Israeli hostages in return for the release of Palestinians detained in Israel, with a specific leverage as it has provided refuge to some of the Hamas leadership. Needless to say, we should be aware of the limits of Chinese and Qatari foreign policies. China has deepening economic and military ties with Israel, while Qatar hosts the US Al-Udeid Air Base.

Effectively, there is sometimes a convergence of interests, if not visions, between the grassroots movements for Palestine and peace in the Middle East with the more progressive sections of state elites in key Global South and several European countries, China, and Qatar. This, coupled with the popular support in the Middle East for Palestine and even the guerrilla operations of many armed groups fighting Israeli and US forces, consolidates a broad alliance of social movement and state actors, albeit in an uncoordinated fashion.

Aiding this is the collective media resistance against Western imperialist narratives and the Hasbara propaganda. Despite the blatant pro-Israel bias in major Western news outlets and lavish funding for the Hasbara campaign whitewashing Israel’s war crimes, Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza has been an important counterbalance in this information battle as a media giant that can match the coverage and resources of its Western rivals.

Case-study 2: Anti-authoritarian movements in East and Southeast Asia

In East and Southeast Asia, we see an example of how social movements confront authoritarian capitalism and its transnational expansion. The most recent wave is the Milk Tea Alliance (MTA), a loose network of anti-authoritarian/pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Myanmar, which was active from 2020 to 2021. Youth-driven, this alliance combined mass mobilisation and massive online presence to defy different types of authoritarianism: Chinese party-state authoritarianism in Hong Kong and Taiwan, military-backed royalist despotism in Thailand, and the military junta in Myanmar. There is a strong transnational dimension and exchange of norms and practices within this alliance.

But there is also a longer history of anti-authoritarian movements in East and Southeast Asia, whose narratives have a long-lasting influence and have been committed to counter authoritarian capitalism/developmentalism and the imperialist power structure supporting it. Consider, for example, anti-Marcos and anti-Suharto movements in the Philippines and Indonesia, the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, and the many cases of agrarian justice, land rights, and anti-dam protests, labour strikes and struggles, pro-democracy activism, and even progressive religious mobilisation in the region. These movements highlighted the complicity of international capital and its support from the West as well as the international financial institutions in propping up authoritarian rule and its domestic capitalist supporters in the Philippines and Indonesia. Though implicit, the spirit of anti-imperialism was present in these past anti-authoritarian and social movement mobilisations.

Today’s anti-authoritarian movements in the region used various political strategies from mass mobilisation to online campaigns and pop culture. They also innovated new tactics. Hong Kong’s protesters, for example used black umbrellas and shields to ‘block rubber bullets and police batons’, organised roving rather than stationed occupations of targeted areas, and experimented with counter-surveillance of police informants, and coded communications.

The MTA’s demand for greater democratisation posed a serious challenge to authoritarianism in East and Southeast Asian states, including China. By doing so, it disrupted these governments’ antagonistic cooperation with Western imperialism and opened the way to push for a more progressive politics beyond electoral democracy, such as the popular control of capital.

Sadly, in the face of the repressive apparatus of the Chinese government, this movement was crushed and its leaders were recently jailed or went into exile. Nevertheless, its creative tactics in confronting police violence could be applicable and more effective for social movements operating in less repressive environments.

The limitations of these movements have also been rooted in their poor awareness of the role of international capital and imperialist dynamics in perpetuating authoritarianism in the region, which has allowed them to be hijacked by opportunistic Western elites and simplified as an affirmation for the (neo)liberal project. It is unfortunate, for instance, that some Hong Kong dissidents, in their opposition to Chinese party-state authoritarianism, seek inspiration from a sanitised version of ‘the liberal West’, even to the point where they embrace the Trumpist reactionary project. This historical and analytical myopia weakens the dissidents’ capacity to challenge a major pillar of the authoritarian development model in East and Southeast Asia, namely the complicity of Western imperialist and capitalist interest in maintaining such model.

In addition, four years after the alliance burst onto the regional political scene, its major demands continue to be centred around electoral democracy and human rights protection. While important, the packaging of these demands can be detached from labour and the broader call for social justice and democratic class struggle.

Case-study 3: The Latin American left’s strategic engagement with China

Finally, the left in Latin America shows an example of how progressive social movements can strategically seize opportunities from geopolitical competition, in this case US–China rivalry. Looking towards China for alternative sources of foreign investment reduces Latin American countries’ dependence on US political and economic power, delinks the region from the US imperialist grip, and could be used to fund broadly socialist-inspired economic programmes.

The option to pursue Chinese foreign investment facilitated the electoral path pursued by leftist movements in Latin America, famously known as the ‘Pink Tide’. Combining left-wing populism with different degrees of socialist and social democratic economic policies, this political articulation pushed for a range of anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist economic projects, ranging from extensive social welfare programmes, attempted the nationalisation of major economic enterprises, and alternative financial institutions such as Bank of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and BRICS’s New Development Bank.

The implementation of these schemes has clearly been a complex and tough political and technocratic process and faced considerable criticism, but delinking and improving the productive force of the economy was nevertheless a necessity for left-wing forces to seek to advance a socialist programme and democratisation in a region dominated by Washington and with a history of US-backed dictatorships. As noted by Ivo Ganchev, Chinese trade, investment and loan deals provided alternatives to US-led financial institutions for Ecuador and Bolivia, marking a significant break with with US-led economic imperialism. It also contributed to a revitalisation of the spirit of South–South cooperation during the high tide of the decolonisation period.

Obviously, not all types of Chinese investments can be seen as fundamentally benign. Records have shown that Chinese capitalist enterprises have questionable labour and environmental rights records. Nor does Chinese capital guarantee a greater democratisation of the economy, especially the means of the production, by labour. There is a need to critically assess and ensure how relationships with China benefit working people, while acknowledging that the task of building non-capitalist, humane alternatives is a gruelling one.

Since the first wave of the ‘pink tide’ governments, there have been setbacks such as the victory of reactionary forces in Argentina and Ecuador and the crisis in Venezuela that has trapped popular sectors between Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarianism and US imperialist coup plots. There are, however, still important lessons to learn and new opportunities in the second wave of the ‘pink tide’, notably in Brazil and Mexico.

Concluding thoughts

The story of today’s geopolitics is still a story of a US-led, Western international order, but one that increasingly faces challenges from other contending states and popular movements. Recent shifts in global politics, economy, and military power, marked most recently by the broad popular opposition to the Western-backed Israel’s war in Gaza, seem to confirm this assessment.

The rise of potential state challengers to US dominance does not necessarily mean the ushering in of a new progressive era. Nevertheless, it represents opportunities for social movements to challenge Western imperialism. These varied sub-imperial, emerging, and expansionist states may in practice be tied into the dialectic relations of antagonistic cooperation with the old imperial centre and authoritarian rule, but under certain circumstances, they might share the same interests as the working people’s.

This is a convergence of interest, if not values, between their foreign policy orientation and the anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal goals of many social movements in the Global South. Without having to become apologists for authoritarianism, these are exactly the opportunities that social movements should seize to advance their goals and effectively confront imperialism.

The Palestine Solidarity Movement, the East and Southeast Asian Anti-Authoritarian Movements, and the Latin American Left have all resisted authoritarian capitalism and/or imperialism. Some of their strategies and tactics are still in their infancy and full of contradictions, but they provide reference points for future actions and policies. Equally important, these movements have shown, with varying degrees of clarity and success, the links between domestic despotism and imperialism or the rule of international capital.

The current conjunctures of global geopolitics might also open up opportunities for a broader transnational solidarity, as exemplified in the solidarity statement of anti-Putinist Ukrainian activists with the Palestinian people.

The major challenge ahead, however, remains the task of dismantling economic imperialism. The three examples of social movements we have highlighted have mainly focused on opposing the political power of imperialism and authoritarian capitalism. What is more difficult is to challenge and provide alternatives to the economic power of imperialism, especially in increasing the productive force of Global South economies, establishing alternative international development financing schemes, and democratising workplaces in large-scale enterprises. These must be some of the future tasks for any progressive social movements with an anti-imperialist orientation.