Lenin's State Monopoly Capitalism

THE THEORY OF STATE MONOPOLY CAPITALISM by Paul Wenlock

Nevertheless, the research focuses on Lenin and is not specifically concerned with the theory of state monopoly capitalism. Other contributors of note who ..

Whiterose.ac.uketheses.whiterose.ac.uk/370/1/uk_bl_ethos_291477.pdf

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Lenin's State Monopoly Capitalism

"The methods of Taylorism may be applied to the work of the actor in the same way as they are to any other form of work with the aim of maximum productivity."

_{Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, 1922}

In my post on Battleship Potemkin I posted about the Kronstadt sailors revolt of 1921. At the 10th Party Congress of the Bolshevik Party Lenin declared; "Enough Opposition", and the Red Army crossed the ice and attacked the revolting sailors.

At the Tenth Congress, as the Kronstadt soviet was being crushed by arms and buried under a barrage of slander, Lenin attacked the radical-left bureaucrats who had formed a “Workers’ Opposition” faction with the following ultimatum, the logic of which Stalin would later extend to an absolute division of the world: “You can stand here with us, or against us out there with a gun in your hand, but not within some opposition. . . . We’ve had enough opposition.”

Ironically their demands were then used by Lenin to create his New Economic Program.

"Our poverty and ruin are so great that we cannot at a single stroke create full socialist production" Lenin

Lenin came before the Congress in March 1921 and proposed the NEP. The NEP was in essence a capitalist free market. The NEP stated that requisitioning of food and agricultural surpluses, a doctrine of War Communism, must be ended. Instead, the government would tax the peasants on a fixed percentage of their production. Trotsky had already proposed a similar policy, but it was rejected by his fellow colleagues, including Lenin. Basically, this promoted a free agricultural market in Russia.

Lenin's N.E.P.

The Bolshevik revolutionary takeover in October 1917 was followed by over two years of civil war in Russia between the new Communist regime (with its Red Army) and its enemies--the conservative military officers commanding the so-called White armies. The struggle saw much brutality and excesses on both sides with the peasants suffering most from extortionate demands of food supplies and recruits by both sides. The repressive and dictatorial methods of the Bolshevik government had so alienated the mass of peasants and industrial working class elements that the erstwhile most loyal supporters of the regime, the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base, rebelled in March 1921 (see ob19.doc) to the great embarrassment of senior Bolsheviks. Though the rebellion was mercilessly crushed, the regime was forced to moderate its ruthless impulses. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was the result, a small concession to the capitalist and free market instincts of peasant and petty bourgeois alike. Moreover, victory in the civil war was assured by this stage, thus allowing a relaxation of the coercive methods symbolized by the War Communism of the previous two to three years.

The New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced by Lenin at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, represented a major departure from the party's previous approach to running the country. During the civil war, the Soviet state had assumed responsibility for acquiring and redistributing grain and other foodstuffs from the countryside, administering both small- and large-scale industry, and a myriad of other economic activities. Subsequently dubbed (by Lenin) "War Communism," this approach actually was extended in the course of 1920, even after the defeat of the last of the Whites. Many have claimed that War Communism reflected a "great leap forward" mentality among the Bolsheviks, but desperation to overcome shortages of all kinds, and particularly food, seems a more likely motive. In any case, in the context of continuing urban depopulation, strikes by disgruntled workers, peasant unrest, and open rebellion among the soldiers and sailors stationed on Kronstadt Island, Lenin resolved to reverse direction.

Lenin's economic model was like Trotsky's transitional program. It was the creation of state capitalism to create the conditions for monopoly capitalism to occur in Russia. His socialism as he liked to call it was state capitalism with electrification, and just a dash of Taylorism.

“Communism is the Power of Soviets plus the electrification of the whole country!”

In fact Lenin was a Taylorist and recognized that modern capitalism required fordist production which is what is currently occurring in China. It's failure in the Soviet Union of the seventies and eighties, was due to its use for military production rather than for consumer goods. In other words Reagan did bankrupt the Soviet Union by creating a competition between the U.S. Military Industrial Complex and its Soviet counterpart. The result was not just the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its collapse into a basket case economy. It did not have the production models required for consumer goods required for a market economy.

In terms of its impact on world politics, Lenin's State and Revolution was probably his most important work. This was derived from the theoretical analysis contained in his earlier work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin's theory of imperialism demonstrated to his satisfaction that the whole administrative structure of “socialism” had been developed during the epoch of finance or monopoly capitalism. Under the impact of the First World War, so the argument ran, capitalism had been transformed into state-monopoly capitalism. On that basis, Lenin claimed, the democratisation of state-monopoly capitalism was socialism. As Lenin pointed out in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (1917):

“For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly” (original emphasis, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm).

Lenin’s perspective may be briefly expressed in the following words: The belated Russian bourgeoisie is incapable of leading its own revolution to the end! The complete victory of the revolution through the medium of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” will purge the country of medievalism, invest the development of Russian capitalism with American tempos, strengthen the proletariat in the city and country, and open up broad possibilities for the struggle for socialism. On the other hand, the victory of the Russian revolution will provide a mighty impulse for the socialist revolution in the West, and the latter will not only shield Russia from the dangers of [feudal-monarchical] restoration but also permit the Russian proletariat to reach the conquest of power in a comparatively short historical interval.

Lenin unambiguously endorsed the view that the proletariat should use markets to prepare underdeveloped countries for socialism. It is common knowledge that his New Economic Policy used market mechanisms to stimulate economic recovery after the devastation of the Russian Civil War, but some do not realize that Lenin saw markets as more than just an expedient. He actually viewed market mechanisms as necessary for moving underdeveloped countries toward socialism. Lenin recognized that the economies of underdeveloped, agrarian countries in transition to socialism combine subsistence farming, small commodity production, private capitalism, state capitalism, and socialism, with small commodity production in the dominant role (1965, 330–31). These societies contain many more peasants than proletarians, and because peasants favor the petty-bourgeois mode of production, they tend to side with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. It is tempting to argue that this situation calls for an immediate transition to socialism, in order to force the peasantry to cooperate with the proletariat in defeating the bourgeoisie. But Lenin did not believe this. He argued that the attempt to push agrarian countries directly into socialism, that is, to eliminate markets before the build up of the productive forces had converted peasant agriculture and small commodity production into modern, large-scale industries, was a mistake that would actually hamper economic development and thwart socialist construction. The solution he proposed was for the proletarian state to use capitalism, i.e., commodity production, free markets, and concessions with foreign capitalists, to promote the growth of the productive forces, and to eliminate the conflict of interest between peasants and industrial workers by converting agriculture into a large-scale industry and the peasants into proletarians (1965, 330–33, 341–47).

LENIN'S SOCIALISM

The starting point must be Lenin's conception of 'socialism': When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organises according to plan the supply of raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when raw materials are transported in a systematic and organised manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds of thousands of miles from each other; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of processing the materials right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when the products are distributed according to a single plan among tens of millions of customers.

....then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere 'interlocking'; that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period ...but which will inevitably be removed Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.22, page 303.

SOCIALISM?

This is an important passage of Lenin's. What he is describing here is the economic set-up which he thought typical of both advanced monopoly capitalism and socialism. Socialism was, for Lenin, planned capitalism with the private ownership removed.

Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employees unions. Without the big banks socialism would be impossible.

The big banks are the state apparatus which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready made from capitalism; our task is merely to lop off what characteristically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality.

A single state bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. This will be country-wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society. Lenin, Ibid, Vol.26 page 106.

HEY PRESTO!

This passage contains some amazing statements. The banks have become nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. All we need to do is unify them, make this single bank bigger, and Hey Presto, you now have your basic socialist apparatus.

Quantity is to be transformed into quality. In other words, as the bank gets bigger and more powerful it changes from an instrument of oppression into one of liberation. We are further told that the bank will be made even more democratic. Not made democratic as we might expect but made more so. This means that the banks, as they exist under capitalism, are in some way democratic. No doubt this is something that workers in Bank of Ireland and AIB have been unaware of.

For Lenin it was not only the banks which could be transformed into a means for salvation. Socialism is merely the next step forward from state capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 25 page 358.

State capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no immediate rungs. Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 24 page 259.

BUILDING CAPITALISM

This too is important. History is compared to a ladder that has to be climbed. Each step is a preparation for the next one. After state capitalism there was only one way forward - socialism. But it was equally true that until capitalism had created the necessary framework, socialism was impossible. Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership saw their task as the building of a state capitalist apparatus.

...state capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will become invincible in our country Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 27 page 294.

While the revolution in Germany is still slow in coming forth, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 27 page 340.

Socialism or State Capitalism?

So what did the Bolsheviks aim to create in Russia? Lenin was clear, state capitalism. He argued this before and after the Bolsheviks seized power. For example, in 1917, he argued that "given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state-monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!" He stressed that "socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly . . . socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly."³

The Bolshevik road to "socialism" ran through the terrain of state capitalism and, in fact, simply built upon its institutionalised means of allocating recourses and structuring industry. As Lenin put it, "the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates, an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and registration work . . . This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrestled from the control of the capitalists," it "must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets" and "it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide." This meant that the Bolsheviks would "not invent the organisational form of work, but take it ready-made from capitalism" and "borrow the best models furnished by the advanced countries."⁴

Once in power, Lenin implemented this vision of socialism being built upon the institutions created by monopoly capitalism. This was not gone accidentally or because no alternative existed. As one historian notes: "On three occasions in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory] committees leaders sought to bring their model [of workers' self-management of the economy] into being. At each point the party leadership overruled them. The Bolshevik alternative was to vest both managerial and control powers in organs of the state which were subordinate to the central authorities, and formed by them."⁵

Rather than base socialist reconstruction on working class self-organisation from below, the Bolsheviks started "to build, from the top, its 'unified administration'" based on central bodies created by the Tsarist government in 1915 and 1916.⁶ The institutional framework of capitalism would be utilised as the principal (almost exclusive) instruments of "socialist" transformation. "Without big banks Socialism would be impossible," argued Lenin, as they "are the 'state apparatus' which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big . . .will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. This will be country-wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods." While this is "not fully a state apparatus under capitalism," it "will be so with us, under socialism." For Lenin, building socialism was easy. This "nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus" would be created "at one stroke, by a single decree." ⁷

Lenin' State Monopoly Capitalism is the model being used by the former state capitalist regimes in Asia like China and Viet Nam. They are full filing Lenin's dictum. And ironically in China's case they have become a new Imperialist power.

Lenin: 1917/ichtci: Can We Go Forward If We Fear To Advance ...

Everybody talks about imperialism. But imperialism is merely monopoly capitalism.

That capitalism in Russia has also become monopoly capitalism is sufficiently attested by the examples of the Produgol, the Prodamet, the Sugar Syndicate, etc. This Sugar Syndicate is an object-lesson in the way monopoly capitalism develops into state-monopoly capitalism.

And what is the state? It is an organisation of the ruling class — in Germany, for instance, of the Junkers and capitalists. And therefore what the German Plekhanovs (Scheidemann, Lensch, and others) call "war-time socialism" is in fact war-time state-monopoly capitalism, or, to put it more simply and clearly, war-time penal servitude for the workers and war-time protection for capitalist profits.

Now try to substitute for the Junker-capitalist state, for the landowner-capitalist state, a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way. You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state- monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism!

For if a huge capitalist undertaking becomes a monopoly, it means that it serves the whole nation. If it has become a state monopoly, it means that the state (i.e., the armed organisation of the population, the workers and peasants above all, provided there is revolutionary democracy) directs the whole undertaking. In whose interest?

Either in the interest of the landowners and capitalists, in which case we have not a revolutionary-democratic, but a reactionary-bureaucratic state, an imperialist republic.

Or in the interest of revolutionary democracy—and then it is a step towards socialism.

For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

To apply the Lenin's theory on state capitalism in the renovation cause of Vietnam 10:18 28-07-2005

 Role of the State in applying the theories of State capitalism in Vietnam 16:05 09-05-2005

From a review of Lenin's ideas and concepts of State capitalism and State capitalist economy as seen from Vietnamese perspective, the paper reaffirms an indispensable role of the State in the present development of market economy.

 The new Economic Policy of V.I. Lenin with the use of state capitalism in our country nowadays 10:21 28-07-2005

 The awareness of the socialist-oriented market economy in Vietnam 12:43 04-07-2006

Realizing the market economy under socialist regulation in Vietnam is a major content in the economic model in the transitional period toward socialism. The article analyzes and elaborates the theorical and practical sides of the socialist regulated market economy, through which to make the following conclusions. 1. In the context of globalization and international economic integration today. The model of the socialist regulated market economy which has been pursued since the IX National Party Congress is a correct policy both theoretically and practically. 2. However if we regarded the model of the socialist regulated market economy as Vietnam's creative policy, it would lead us to fall into subjective thinking. 3. Through theory and practice the author of this article concludes that. a. According to Marxist doctrine the view that socialism emerged after capitalism still remains scientific b. Human elements in socialism contradicts with those in the previous societies; as a result if the criteria that were applied to solve social problems of socialist society to be imposed on the period of market economy being in existence, it would naturally stand in the way of the development of market economy. c. The key for Vietnam at present is how to solve the relations between growth and development, in other words economic growth should go along with social development d. Vietnam's economy should be broken just into two sectors, namely, state run and private run. It should not be divided into 6 sectors as presently applied. e. The role of the private owned sector i!1 the national economy should be appreciated.

Even the right wing occasionally gets it right but for the wrong reasons. In this case another red scare, red baiting, reds under the bed, commies out to get us, article reveals;

In his "Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International," Lenin explained the basis for NEP. He said that Russia needed capitalism before it could have socialism. The form of capitalism Lenin advocated was called "state capitalism." As early as 1918 Lenin had stated, "State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs."

By 1922, when Lenin delivered his report, state capitalism was still the order of the day. "This sounds very strange," admitted Lenin, "and perhaps even absurd." Russia was unready for socialism and lacked the strength to create communism. In his report Lenin said that socialism in Russia had been adopted "perhaps too hastily."

Does this mean Lenin, like the Chinese and Russian leaders after him, had abandoned the ultimate communist goal?

"I repeat," said Lenin in his 1922 report, "it seems very strange to everyone that a nonsocialist element should be ... regarded superior to socialism in a republic which declares itself as socialist republic. But the fact will become clear if you recall that ... the economic system of Russia [is backward]."

This exact formulation could be applied to communist China. In fact, this is the line that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted for itself. And what Mr. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore has mistaken for China's commercial objectives, are actually communist objectives. Talk of a future war with America is not simply a question of Taiwan. China's leaders look ahead to a day when a socialist civilization will be possible -- thanks to what Lenin called "state capitalism."

The purpose of state capitalism, as it exists in today's China and Lenin's Russia, is to pave the way for socialism. "The state capitalism that we have introduced in our country is of a special kind," noted Lenin. "It does not correspond to the usual conception of state capitalism. We hold all the key positions."

Lenin emphasized that all land in Russia belonged to the state. "This is very important," said Lenin, "although our opponents think it of no importance at all."

This is a revealing statement. Politicians like Lee Kuan Yew seem to be clueless. China is a communist country that practices state capitalism. China is following the Leninist path. "We have already succeeded in making the peasantry content and in reviving both industry and trade," boasted Lenin. Furthermore, the communist form of state capitalism not only owns the land which the peasants use, but "our proletarian state owns ... all the vital branches of industry."

The market economists of all political stripes fail to understand that State Monpoly Capitalism results from the fact that all capital must create monopoly. There is no free market, there is a market and it is dominated by monopolies, or oligopolies. These can be owned privately or by the state it matters little since both are forms of capitalism. The neo-con political scientists, divorcing themselves as they do from economics, decry capitalist models that are not based upon their American model.

In this they fail to understand the historical development political economy of the 20th Century which was Fordism and Capitalist Monopoly. The later requires state intervention as the American Military Industrial Complex and the development of capitalism in South Korea shows. Something that Lenin reading Marx understood.

In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.
Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy

See:

40 Years Later; The Society of the Spectacle

China: The Truimph of State Capitalism

State Capitalism By Any Other Name

 

Fascism: What’s in a Word?

by Greg Godels / June 1st, 2024

The word “fascism” is a lightning rod. No one wants to be called a fascist. Everyone is ready to call someone else a fascist.

Like many highly charged words, the more common its usage becomes, the more inexact its meaning becomes.

Today, Trump is a fascist, Putin is a fascist, Modi is a fascist, Radical Islam is Islamofascism, the House and Senate members who passed the FISA renewal are fascists, Ukraine is a fascist country, political correctness is fascism, anti-Zionists are fascists, Zionists are fascists, and so on….

Clearly, the word “fascism” in these contexts is most often an expression of extreme disapproval– a kind of expletive.

A problem arises when the claimant– the person using the word– has something more definite in mind, something more exacting. A problem arises when the user of the word intends to draw an association with the real, historically concrete phenomena of fascism that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and rose tragically to ravage and terrorize nearly the entire world.

The idea that people or organizations are preparing to organize Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Silver Shirts or whatever to intimidate or overthrow conventional political processes is understandably reprehensible. But to conjure such an image in order to influence the political process, though without sufficient warrant, is misleading.

In a highly charged political context, it is not only misleading, but also unhelpful, and even incendiary.

Even a policy as sanctified by much of the left as the New Deal has been called fascist, proto-fascist, or fascist-tinged by commentators from across the political spectrum. And the “sainted” FDR has been labeled fascist by many. Critics from both left and right have seen parallels between elements of the New Deal and Mussolini’s corporatism. Still others have found similarities between the Rooseveltian Civilian Conservation Corps and Hitler’s German Labor Services. Since the New Deal was a mish-mash of trial-and-error pragmatism, it is a disservice to wed it with any particular ideology.

Of course, “fascism” depends on how we define it. Problems of definition arose immediately after World War II and the defeat of the major fascist powers. The emerging Cold War led to the US and its allies accepting a narrow definition when it came to new-found allies among former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In its conflict with the Soviets, US leaders relied on Germans and Eastern Europeans with dubious, fascist ties to advance weapons programs, utilize intelligence, and bolster anti-Communism. Vetting of fascists by ideology was a haphazard process at best.

On the other hand, attempts to link fascism to Communism was an ongoing project. Determined efforts to find common features to justify anti-Communism led to a construct called “totalitarianism.” Popularized by Hannah Arendt, Cold Warriors wanted and got a tally of supposed similarities that served their purposes and served to generate a common definition of two disparate ideologies.

Thus, the Cold War created both a narrow and broad interpretation of fascism– one for practical purposes, the other for propaganda purposes.

As the Cold War warmed in the 1980s, academics like Stanley Payne (Fascism, Wisconsin, 1980), made attempts at more independent, nuanced, and objective definitions of “fascism.” Payne engaged in comparative historical analysis and arrived at his typological description of fascism. Unfortunately, it suffered somewhat from raw empiricism and a failure to properly weigh the factors disclosed. To its credit, it undercut the Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism by emphasizing anti-Communism as a common feature of fascism, and not conflating it with Communism.

Further, Payne in 1980 recognizes the historically met concept of “liberal authoritarianism” — a form of illiberal liberalism– that might serve to explain much of the confusion of our anti-Trump left today, who are anxious to dispense with the Bill of Rights to save “our” democracy.

In a recent essay regarding the “fascism is eminent” fashion of today, noted liberal commentator, Patrick Lawrence, riffs on the concept of “liberal authoritarianism.” Lawrence declares in his article “This Isn’t Fascism,” posted on Consortium News, that “I cannot quite tell what people mean when they speak of fascism in our current circumstances. And [as] far as one can make out, a lot of people who use the term, and maybe most, do not know what they mean, either.”

Unfortunately, while Payne still serves as a keystone for contemporary Western academic scholarship, the old Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism has resumed, particularly under a new wave of retro-Cold Warriors like Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder.

But more consequentially, the charge of fascism — invoked irresponsibly — has served as a weapon in electoral politics. Specifically, many in the Democratic Party — bereft of an appealing program — charge that a vote for Biden is a vote against fascism. Given that Biden’s failure on inflation and his bloody war-mongering are rejected, especially by youth and the Party’s left wing, portraying Trump as a fascist is an act of desperation, but an act that will ultimately do little to forego the rise of Trump and his ilk.

Again, invoking Lawrence:

Much of this, let’s call it the pollution of public discourse, comes from the liberal authoritarians. Rachel Maddow, to take one of the more pitiful cases, wants us to think Trump the dictator will end elections, destroy the courts, and render the Congress powerless. The MSNBC commentator has actually said these things on air.

One-man rule is the theme, if you listen to the Rachel Maddows. The evident intent is to cast Donald Trump in the most fearsome light possible, as it becomes clear Trump could well defeat President Biden at the polls come Nov. 5.

We can mark this stuff down to crude politicking in an election year, surely. There is nothing new in it. But this is not the point.

Opportunistic voices on the left will often draw a crude analogy with the rise of Nazism. They argue the simplistic and false case that disunity on the left opened the door for Hitler’s ascendency to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933. They repeat an old whitewash of history — dismissing Hitler’s backing by the German capitalists, the perfidy of the weak government, and the betrayal of the Social Democrats. They ignore the economic crisis, the rulers’ failure to address the crisis, and the peoples’ desperate search for a radical answer to that failure. An unquestionable sign of that desperation was the continuing growth of the votes for the Communist Party, along with the decline in votes for the Social Democrats, and other centrist parties.

Nazism was not inevitable, but ushered in on a fear of revolution, of workers’ power, by a despairing ruling class. That was the reality wherever fascism seized power in twentieth-century fascism.

Today, the answer to a deepening crisis of capitalist rule that is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses is not rallying support around the failed policies that created and deepened the crisis. The answer is not to cry wolf or remind the people that matters could get worse. They know that!

The answer is to develop real answers to the despair facing working people– reducing inequality, raising living standards, guaranteeing health care, increasing social benefits, improving affordable public transportation, protecting the environment, improving public education, and so on. These issues have existed for many decades, worsening with each passing year. There is no mystery. We are offered only two parties and they are determined to evade these issues.

Lawrence makes a similar point:

I suppose it might make America’s many-sided crisis — political, economic, social — more comprehensible if we name it [fascism] to suggest it has a frightening antecedent. But this is profoundly counterproductive. So long as we, some of us, go on persuading ourselves we face the threat of fascism or Fascism, either one, we simply obscure what it is we actually face.

We name it wrongly… I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively.

But that still leaves us with the question: What is fascism? Is there no cogent definition?

Indeed, there is one that springs forth from a deep and thorough study by the late Marxist thinker, R. Palme Dutt. Published in 1934, soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers) locates fascism in the cauldron of the rise of Communism, a deep economic crisis, and the collapse of capitalist class legitimacy.

Dutt, unlike servile academics weaving a bizarre, historically challenged link between Communism and fascism, discovers direct ties between capitalism and fascism (p. 72-73).

Fascism manufactures its ideology around its practice. Dutt explains:

Fascism, in fact, developed as a movement in practice, in the conditions of threatening proletarian revolution, as a counter-revolutionary mass movement supported by the bourgeoisie, employing weapons of mixed social demagogy and terrorism to defeat the revolution and build up a strengthened capitalist state dictatorship; and only later endeavoured to adorn and rationalize this process with a “theory” (p. 75).

Dutt’s operational definition contrasts favorably with the failed attempt by writers like Payne who attempted to engage comparative studies in order to arrive at a superficial typography of fascism.

Dutt further adds the class dimensions, absent in nearly all non-Marxist definitions:

Fascism, in short, is a movement of mixed elements, dominantly petit-bourgeois, but also slum-proletariat and demoralized working class, financed and directed by finance-capital, by the big industrialists, landlords and financiers, to defeat the working-class revolution and smash working-class organizations (p. 82).

Elegant in its simplicity, robust in its comprehensiveness, Dutt’s explication of fascism aptly characterizes historic fascism from the march on Rome to the Generals’ coup in Indonesia and Pinochet’s regime in Chile. When social conditions deteriorate drastically and workers and their organizations threaten the capitalist order, the rulers throw their support behind counter-revolutionaries prepared to defend and strengthen the capitalist order, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy.

These institutions and organizations fester within bourgeois society as latent counter-revolutionary forces ready to be unleashed at the right moment by a desperate capitalist ruling class.

Clearly, Dutt’s study and elucidation of fascism clears the muddy waters stirred by today’s alarmists and opportunists. There is no imminent threat of revolution; the revolutionary left and the workers’ organizations currently pose little threat to the capitalist order, unfortunately.

There is no emergent organized mass movement responding to a counter-revolutionary call. The mass movements of the right — the Black Legions, the KKK, the Proud Boys, the militias, etc. — do exist, should conditions ever ripen for a mobilization against the working class; but for today, they remain unacceptable to most of the ruling class.

For the most part, the capitalist class, especially its dominant monopoly sector, is satisfied to conduct its business within the confines of bourgeois democracy. “Finance-capital… the big industrialists, landlords and financiers…” defend and protect the two-party system because they regard it as functioning adequately, though the “lawfare” attacks piling up on Trump and the rabid media attacks against him show that an important section of the ruling class considers his unpredictability to be a threat to stability.

Others think that his buffoonery and bluster serve as a safety valve for the discontent infecting the citizenry, much as Berlusconi’s clown-act pacified and entertained Italians unhappy over their political fate for three decades.

In any case, Trump does not pose the threat of fascism that many would like us to believe.

We need to find other words to describe the deep crisis of bourgeois legitimacy that we are enduring, words that do not force us into a frenzied defensive posture that deflects us from finding real solutions to a real and profound problems facing working people.Facebook

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Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.

Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today

BY ASHLEY SMITH -   MAY 29, 2024

 MAY 29, 2024

Image by Zyanya Citlalli.

LONG READ

Capitalism produces imperialism—the competition between the great powers and their corporations for the division and redivision of the world market. This competition generates a dynamic hierarchy of states, with the most powerful at the top, middling or sub-imperial powers beneath them, and oppressed nations at the bottom.

No hierarchy is permanent. Capitalism’s law of uneven and combined development, its booms and busts, its corporate competition, its interstate conflict, and its uprisings by the exploited and oppressed destabilize and restructure the state system.

As a result, the history of imperialism has had a sequence of orders. A multipolar one characterized the period from the late 19th century to 1945. It produced the great colonial empires and two world wars. It was supplanted by a bipolar order from 1945 and 1991, with the United States and Soviet Union struggling for hegemony over the newly independent states liberated from colonial rule.

With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States oversaw a unipolar order of neoliberal globalization, faced no superpower rival, and fought a series of wars to enforce its so-called rules based order of global capitalism from 1991 through the early 2000s. That order ended with the relative decline of the United States, the rise of China, and the resurrection of Russia, ushering in today’s asymmetric multipolar order.

The United States remains the dominant power, but it is now locked in competition with China and Russia, above increasingly assertive sub-imperial states such as Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil, as well as subject nations that suffer both political and economic oppression. Faced with a looming epoch of crisis, wars, and revolts, the global Left must build international solidarity from below among workers and the oppressed in a struggle against imperialism and for socialism throughout the world.

Global capitalism’s multiple crises

Global capitalism has produced multiple intersecting crises that are intensifying conflict between and within states. These crises are a global economic slump; sharpening interimperial rivalry between the United States, China, and Russia; climate change; unprecedented global migration; and pandemics, of which COVID-19 is only the most recent example. These crises have undermined the political establishment, caused political polarization in most countries of the world, opening the door to the Right and the Left, and triggering waves of explosive yet episodic struggles from below. We have not witnessed such a period of crisis, conflict, wars, political instability, and revolts in decades.

All of this is a challenge and an opportunity for an international Left and workers’ movement still suffering from the consequence of several decades of defeat and retreat. It is also an opening to a new far right that offers authoritarian solutions promising to restore social order by scapegoating the oppressed at home and whipping up reactionary forms of nationalism against enemies abroad.

Once in power this new far right has failed to overcome any of global capitalism’s crises and inequalities but has exacerbated them. As a result, neither the establishment nor its far right opponents offer any way out of our epoch of catastrophe.

The asymmetric multipolar world order

Amid these metastasizing crises, the United States no longer stands atop a unipolar world order. It has suffered relative decline as a result of the long neoliberal boom, its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Great Recession. Those developments have enabled the rise of China as a new imperial power and Russia’s resurgence as a nuclear-armed petro-power. At the same time, a host of sub-imperial powers have become more assertive than in the past, playing the great powers off one another, and jockeying for advantage in their region.

All of this has created today’s asymmetric multipolar world order. The United States remains the world’s most powerful state, in possession of the biggest economy, the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with the most powerful military, largest network of alliances, and therefore greatest geopolitical power. But it faces imperial rivals in China and Russia and sub-imperial ones in every region of the globe.

These antagonisms have not led to coherent geopolitical and economic blocs. Globalization has bound most of the economies of the world tightly together, preventing the return of blocs like the ones during the Cold War.

Thus, the two biggest rivals, the United States and China, are also two of the most integrated in the world. Think of Apple’s iPhone—designed in California, manufactured in Taiwanese-owned factories in China, and exported to vendors in the United States and throughout the world.

The new sub-imperial powers are not loyal either to China or the United States, but opportunistically forge pacts with one or the other power in pursuit of their own capitalist interests. For example, while India strikes deals with China in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) alliance against the United States, it participates in Washington’s QUAD alliance (United States, Australia, India, Japan) against China.

That said, the global economic slump, the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, and especially Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine and US/NATO sanctions against Moscow are beginning to pry apart globalization as we have known it. Indeed, globalization has plateaued and begun to decline.

For example, through the so-called Chip War, the United States and China are segregating the top end of their high tech economies. In another, Western sanctions against Russia over its imperialist war on Ukraine have excluded it from U.S. and European Union (EU) trade and investment, forcing it to turn to markets in China and Iran.

As a result, we are on a trajectory toward increasing economic division, geopolitical rivalry, and even military conflict between the United States, China, and Russia, as well between them and sub-imperial powers. At the same time, the deep economic integration of especially the United States and China, as well as the fact that each possesses nuclear weapons, counteracts the tendency toward open war, which would risk mutually assured destruction and global economic collapse.

Washington rearms for great power rivalry

Since the Obama administration, the U.S. state has been trying to develop a new strategy to counter the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia. Obama announced his so-called Pivot to Asia and Trump openly placed great power rivalry with Beijing and Moscow at the center of his National Security Strategy, but neither developed a comprehensive approach to these conflicts or others in the new asymmetric multipolar world order.

President Barack Obama remained preoccupied with the Middle East, wrapping up the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and then shoring up the region’s existing order after the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS. Trump proclaimed his strategy for great power rivalry, but it was incoherent in practice. It included a chaotic mix of far right nationalism, protectionism, threats to abandon historic alliances like NATO, and transactional bilateral deals with both designated rivals and traditional allies. His erratic years of misrule led to the further relative decline of the United States.

President Joe Biden has developed the most coherent strategy to date. He hoped to co-opt class and social struggles with minor reforms, implement a new industrial policy to ensure U.S. competitiveness in high tech manufacturing, and rehabilitate Washington’s alliances like NATO and expand them through launching a so-called League of Democracies against Washington’s autocratic rivals.

In the end, centrist Democrats, Republicans, and the courts blocked many of his reforms designed to ameliorate social inequality. But he succeeded in implementing his industrial policy through multiple bills. Biden also has begun to refurbish and expand U.S. alliances through new pacts and economic initiatives. The goal of all this is to contain China, deter Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe, and pull as many sub-imperial powers, subordinate states, and oppressed nations back under U.S. hegemony and its preferred international order.

Biden has continued his predecessors’ attempt to extract the United States from its failed occupations. He finally ended Washington’s twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan in shambolic style, committing war crimes in the process and abandoning the country to the Taliban. He then tried to stabilize the Middle East by continuing Trump’s Abraham Accords and further efforts to normalize Israel by establishing formal relations between the Arab regimes with Tel Aviv. Of course, this gave the greenlight to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue the siege on Gaza, the settler expansion in the occupied West Bank, and the deepening of apartheid within Israel, now given horrific expression in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. In Europe, Biden recommitted the United States to NATO, sending a signal to Russia that Washington, not Moscow, would remain the predominant hegemon in the region.

But the main target of Biden’s strategy for great power rivalry is China. On the economic front, his industrial policy is designed to restore, protect, and expand U.S. economic supremacy against Beijing, especially in high tech. It aims to onshore or friend shore high tech manufacturing, impose a high fence of protectionism around U.S. design and engineering of computer chips, and fund U.S. high tech companies and universities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields to lock its dominance in AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other cutting-edge tech, especially because of their military applications.

On the geopolitical front, Biden has consolidated existing alliances with Japan and expanded them to include especially those antagonized by China, including Vietnam and the Philippines. He also reiterated the One China policy that recognizes only Beijing and the policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, which commits the United States to arming the island nation like a “porcupine” to deter Chinese aggression but remains vague about whether it would come to the island’s defense in the event of an attack or invasion.

On the military front, Biden doubled down on U.S. military alliances such as the QUAD and the Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States), and established new ones, notably the deal between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (AUKUS) for the deployment of nuclear submarines in Australia.  Washington is in the process triggering an arms and base building race with China throughout the Asia Pacific.

Washington’s imperialist rivals: China and Russia

China and Russia have implemented their own strategy to project their imperial ambitions. These three powers form what Gilbert Achcar has called the “strategic triad” of world imperialism.

Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has aimed to restore its standing as a great power in global capitalism. It has implemented an economic strategy to leap up the value chain to compete at the highest level of design, engineering, and manufacturing. It has funded both state and private capital through programs such as China 2025, which aims to establish select corporations as national champions in high tech.

This has been highly successful with Huawei and BYD among others establishing themselves as global competitors. China is now an industry leader in whole fields such as solar energy and electric vehicles, challenging U.S., European, and Japanese capital.

With its massive economic expansion, China has tried to export its surplus capital and capacity abroad through its $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a vast plan for infrastructure development throughout the world, especially in the Global South. None of this is altruistic. Most of this investment is designed to construct infrastructure, rails, roads, and ports to export raw materials to China. China then exports its finished products back to those countries in a classic imperialist pattern. But a combination of its slowing economy, banking troubles, and debt crises in countries it had loaned to has led China to retreat from its grandest ambitions for BRI.

Nevertheless, China is trying parlay this investment into geopolitical influence through economic formations like the BRICS, as well as political/security pacts like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (including China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and a host of Central Asian states). It has also asserted its influence in the Middle East by encouraging normalization of diplomatic relations between its ally Iran and Saudi Arabia, which it depends on for the bulk of its oil.

To back its newfound economic clout with military might, China is modernizing its armed forces, especially its navy, specifically to challenge U.S. naval hegemony in the Pacific. As part of that, it has seized islands claimed by other states, creating antagonisms with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and many others. It has militarized some of these, especially in the South China Sea, to project its power, protect shipping routes, and assert rights to undersea oil and natural gas reserves.

Finally, Beijing is enforcing historic claims to what it considers its national territory as part of a project of national rejuvenation. Thus, it has imposed its dominion over Hong Kong with brute force, carried out its own war on terror and cultural genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and escalated threats of invasion of Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province.

Under Vladimir Putin’s rule, meanwhile, the Russian ruling class has aimed to restore its imperial power, so devastatingly undermined by the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe and its disastrous implementation of neoliberal shock therapy. It has watched the United States and European imperialism gobble up its former sphere of influence through the expansion of NATO and the EU.

Putin rebuilt Russia as a nuclear armed petro-power with the aim of reclaiming its former empire in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, while imposing order domestically against any popular dissent and especially against its sometimes recalcitrant republics. It has tried to consolidate its hold over its former sphere of influence through collaboration with China in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

That imperialist project has led it to launch a succession of wars in Chechnya (1996, 1999), Georgia (2008), and Ukraine (2014, 2022–) as well as interventions in Syria and several African countries. Russia’s imperial assertion has precipitated resistance from states and peoples it has targeted and also imperialist counter-offensives from the United States, NATO, and the EU.

Russian imperialist war on Ukraine

Three strategic flashpoints have brought these interimperial rivalries to a head—Ukraine, Gaza, and Taiwan.

Ukraine became the site of a major war in Europe for the first time since World War II. Russia invaded the country in 2014 and then again in 2022 in a clear act of imperialist aggression, attempting to seize the entire country and impose a semicolonial regime on it. Putin justified this with lies about de-Nazification (hardly believable from one of the most reactionary states in the world and an ally of the far right internationally).

Of course, its aggression was in part in response to U.S., NATO, and EU expansion, but that does not make its war any less imperialist in nature. It aimed to use the conquest of Ukraine as a stepping stone to reclaim its former sphere of influence in the rest of Eastern Europe.

The Ukrainian state, military, and people rose up against the invasion in a fight for national self-determination.

Biden has supplied Ukraine with economic and military aid for Washington’s own imperial reasons. It is no ally of national liberation struggles, as its long history of imperialist wars from the Philippines to Vietnam and Iraq attests. Washington has aimed to weaken Russia, prevent its encroachment on its expanded sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and wield its NATO allies together against, not only Moscow, but also China, which NATO has designated as a strategic focus for the first time in its history.

The United States and its NATO allies imposed the most severe sanctions in history on Russia and pressured Western Europe to wean itself off Russian energy supplies and instead rely on U.S. natural gas exports. Russia in reaction has become increasingly dependent on China for trade and tech, as well as North Korea and Iran for missiles, drones, and other military hardware.

Washington also tried to use Russia’s aggression to gather the Global South under its rubric. But it has not had much luck with the governments of those states, despite popular identification of most of these formerly colonized countries with Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination. Nonetheless, Biden used Ukraine to shore up Washington’s global alliances and soft power as it postured as the defender of self-determination and its so-called rules based order against Russian imperialism.

Israel’s U.S.-backed genocidal war in Gaza

Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has upset Washington’s imperial plans for the entire Middle East and precipitated its biggest geopolitical crisis since Vietnam. Faced with slow strangulation by the total siege in Gaza, Hamas led a desperate jailbreak on October 7, seized hostages, and killed large numbers of soldiers and civilians.

Its attack exposed the weaknesses of Israeli intelligence and border control over its apartheid wall. In response, Israel launched its biggest military incursion into Gaza with the stated aim of retrieving the hostages and destroying Hamas. It has succeeded in neither. Instead, it has laid waste to Gaza in a war of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The Biden administration has supported this every step of the way, funding it, providing it political cover with vetoes in the United Nations, and arming it to the teeth.

But there is a schism between the United States and Israel. While Washington supports Israel’s goal of destroying the Palestinian resistance, it has tried to cajole Israel into shifting its strategy from carpet bombing Gaza and killing civilians to special operations to target Hamas. The Biden administration’s strategic disagreement with Israel has come to a head over its assault on Rafah with the US pausing shipments of some of its most destructive bombs.

The U.S. government also does not approve of Israel’s widening attacks in the region, which include the bombing of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Washington has not openly opposed these strikes but has instead tried to pressure the targeted regimes from responding.

The United States has been unable to restrain Netanyahu, who is captive to fascists in his coalition government who are calling for genocide and regional war, especially against Iran. Netanyahu has followed their lead to preserve his coalition government, because if it falls, he will likely be jailed on corruption charges.

Thus, Israel’s genocidal war and regional aggression could trigger a wider war. Already, it provoked the Houthis in Yemen to stage attacks on oil and commercial ships, threatening the world economy, and leading the United States to pull together a coalition to protect their vessels and threaten the Houthis.

But the sharpest and most dangerous of all the conflicts Israel has staged is with Iran. It bombed Tehran’s embassy in Damascus, killing one of the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Washington went into overdrive to pressure Iran from striking Israel and thereby triggering a full-scale war.

In the event, Iran carried out a largely symbolic attack on Israel. It telegraphed its plans to the United States and Arab nations, enabling Israel and its allies to shoot down almost all the drones and missiles. The United States then leaned on Israel to limit its counter-attack. But Tel Aviv nevertheless sent an ominous message with a limited strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In response, Tehran will move forward with plans to develop nuclear weapons and Israel will respond with military strikes to protect its regional nuclear monopoly, threatening Armageddon in the region.

Amid this spiraling conflict, Israel’s barbarity has triggered mass protest throughout the Middle East and North Africa and globally, exposing and isolating both it and the United States as architects and perpetrators of genocide. South Africa brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, charging it with genocide, a case that the Court ruled as plausible.

China and Russia have taken advantage of the crisis to posture as an ally of Palestine, despite their deep economic and diplomatic relations with Israel and their support for stabilization of the status quo in the region. The oppressors of Xinjiang and Ukraine have no grounds to say they support national self-determination.

Nevertheless, the United States has suffered an enormous setback. Its soft power has been fundamentally undermined. No one can scarcely believe its claims to support “a rules based order” or “self-determination” or even “democracy.”

Plans for the normalization of Israel through the Abraham Accords have been disrupted for the moment. With their populations out in the streets and at least expressing sympathy with Palestinians, no Arab regime will publicly cut a deal with Israel, despite their increasing economic integration with the apartheid state, though a number are still advancing those plans behind closed doors

None of these regimes or Iran can be considered allies of the Palestinian struggle. Except for the Houthis, all of them have restricted military responses against Israel. None have cut off oil shipments to the great powers.

There is no real “axis of resistance.” All these states are posturing to keep a lid on popular solidarity with Palestine from tipping over into opposition to their own despotic rule. And when faced with any domestic resistance, all, from Egypt to Iran, have repressed it with brute force. They are all counter-revolutionary capitalist regimes.

Israel’s genocidal war has, however, fundamentally undermined Washington’s attempt to woo sub-imperial states and countries in the region and throughout the Global South. These states and their peoples’ memories of their own liberation struggle leads them to identify with Palestine and to oppose both the United States and Israel. This has produced an unprecedented global wave of popular protest in solidarity with Palestine. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s lockstep support of Israel has triggered relentless protest for the last six months, culminating in a student rebellion on campuses across the country. Further undermining Washington’s claims to be a model of democracy, both political parties in collaboration with liberal and conservative university administrations have repressed that student rebellion with the utmost brutality.

Israel has thus undone all the geopolitical advances the United States made through its posturing around Ukraine, thrown U.S. imperialism into crisis, and put Biden’s reelection in jeopardy. It has also given great space for Washington’s global and regional rivals to become increasingly assertive of their own interests, escalating conflicts throughout the world.

Taiwan: epicenter of the US-China rivalry

Taiwan has become the epicenter of the rivalry between the United States and China. China has set reunification, that is the seizure of Taiwan, as one of its core imperialist objectives. While Biden has promised to maintain its One China Policy and strategic ambiguity, he has repeatedly promised to come to the defense of Taiwan in the event of a war.

To prepare for such a conflagration, he is trying to overcome historic antagonism between regional allies Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and others to unite them in various multilateral and bilateral pacts against China. All of this is ratcheting up conflict over Taiwan.

At the same time, the economic integration of the United States, China, and Taiwan dampens the drift toward war. One of Taiwan’s multinationals, Foxconn, manufactures Apple’s iPhone in giant factories in China for export throughout the world, including the United States. Taiwan’s TSMC is also the manufacturer of 90 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips, which are used in everything from toaster ovens to high tech military weapons and fighter bombers such as the F-35.

Despite this integration, the conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan has intensified throughout Biden’s tenure, with U.S. representatives ratcheting it up even further with provocative visits. For example, Nancy Pelosi staged a diplomatic trip promising U.S. support for Taiwan, prompting China to respond with threatening military exercises. For its part, China has also engaged in provocations to impact Taiwanese politics and send a message to Washington.

In reality, neither great power respects Taiwan’s right to self-determination. China wants to annex it and Washington only uses Taipei as part of its imperial offensive against Beijing. While war is unlikely, because it could trigger nuclear conflagration and wreck the world economy by interrupting the production and trade of microchips, commodities that are just as important as oil to the functioning of global capitalism today, given the sharpening imperialist conflict, it cannot be ruled out.

Slump intensifying interimperial rivalry

Capitalism’s global slump is intensifying the rivalry between the United States, China, and Russia over everything from trade to geopolitics and these strategic flashpoints. The global slump is also exacerbating inequality within and between nations throughout the world.

As the dominant imperialist power in control of the world reserve currency (the dollar), the United States has recovered more successfully than its rivals from the pandemic recession. It is the exception, not the norm in the advanced capitalist world. Despite this, inflation has hammered working-class people and intensified social and class divisions.

Europe and Japan teeter between recession and slow growth, with deepening class inequality. China continues to grow but at a much reduced rate. Russia has implemented a war economy to escape the worst impact of sanctions and maintain growth rates, but that is unsustainable. In both countries, inequality is growing.

The global slump is having similar effects among sub-imperial powers, many of which rely on diminished export markets in the advanced capitalist world. And a severe sovereign debt crisis has exploded in the oppressed and indebted countries of the Global South. The combination of slow growth, weak export markets, inflation, and hiked interest rates has made them unable to repay their loans. While private capitalist lenders as well as the International Monetary Fund/World Bank and China’s state-owned or controlled banks have agreed to partial deals with the indebted countries, they still want their loans repaid and have imposed various conditions to secure repayment. All this exacerbates class and social divisions, in some cases causing the growth of extreme poverty, which had shrunk during the neoliberal boom.

Polarization, revolt, and revolution

The fact that the capitalist establishment, whether in liberal democracies or autocracies, is unable to overcome this slump, will drive greater and greater political polarization, providing an opening to both the Left and the Right.

Given the weaknesses of the far left and the organizations of class and social struggle, various forms of reformism have been the main expression of an alternative on the Left. But predictably reformists in government have been constrained by the capitalist state bureaucracy and their sluggish and crisis ridden economies, leading them to either fail to deliver on their promises or betray them and adopt traditional capitalist policies.

The paradigmatic example is Syriza in Greece. It betrayed its promise to stand up to the EU and international creditors and capitulated to their austerity program, leading it to being voted out of office in favor of a right-wing neoliberal government.

The failures of the capitalist establishment, as well as their reformist opponents, are opening the door globally to the electoral far right and incipient fascist forces. However ethnonationalist, authoritarian, and reactionary, most of this new right is not fascist. They are not building mass movements to topple bourgeois democracy, impose dictatorship, and crush struggles by workers and the oppressed. They are instead trying to win elections within bourgeois democracy and use the state to reimpose social order through law and order policies against various scapegoats, especially migrants fleeing poverty, political crises, and climate change.

In the United States, Europe, India, China, Russia, and other states, the far right is particularly obsessed with attacking Muslims. Almost without exception, the right promises to restore social order by enforcing “family values” against feminists, trans people, and LGBTQ activists.

The right has already made historic gains in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. And in 2024, with elections in 50 countries involving 2 billion people, right-wing parties are well positioned to make more advances.

Perhaps the most consequential of these for world politics is in the United States, where Biden is running on consolidating U.S. imperialism’s alliances and projects abroad and supposedly defending democracy at home. Trump threatens to abandon U.S. imperialism’s project of superintending global capitalism, withdraw from its multilateral alliances, impose more economic nationalist policies, and scapegoat the oppressed at home and abroad to get away with it. In doing so, he would accelerate Washington’s relative decline, intensify domestic inequality, and exacerbate interimperial and interstate antagonisms.

Neither Trump nor the far right anywhere offer the exploited and oppressed any solutions to the crises in their lives. As a result, their victories will not lead to stable regimes, opening the door for the reelection of the establishment parties.

The combination of crises and the failure of governments of any kind to solve them has driven workers and the oppressed into waves of struggle since the Great Recession. Indeed, the last 15 years have included some of the largest revolts since the 1960s.

Almost every country in the world has experienced some form of mass struggle from below, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. All these have been hampered by the defeats and retreats of the last few decades, which have weakened class and social organization and shattered the revolutionary left.

As a result, even the most powerful revolts have not been able to carry out successful political or social revolutions. That has left an opening for the ruling class and its political representatives to maintain their hegemony, often with the backing of this or that imperial or sub-imperial power.

For example, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah saved Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime from revolution. And in another, the U.S. strategy of regime preservation helped Egypt’s ruling class reimpose a brutal dictatorship under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But these regimes have in no way stabilized their societies. The persistent crises and grotesque level of inequality and oppression keep stoking resistance from below throughout the world.

Three traps for anti-imperialism

The new asymmetric multipolar world order with its growing interimperial rivalries, interstate conflicts, and waves of revolt within societies have challenged the international left with questions it is ill-prepared to answer. In the belly of the beast, the United States, the Left has mainly adopted three mistaken positions, all of which undermine building international solidarity from below against imperialism and global capitalism.

First, those with an orientation on the Democratic Party have fallen into the trap of social patriotic support for the United States against its rivals. They have supported Biden’s call for countries to form a “league of democracies” against China and Russia. This is especially prominent among followers of Bernie Sanders, who, however critical of this or that “mistaken” U.S. policy, see Washington as a force for good in the world.

In reality, as Biden’s support of Israel’s genocidal war proves, the United States is one of the principal enemies of national liberation and social revolution throughout the world. It is the main hegemon that aims to enforce a wretched status quo and is therefore an opponent, not an ally, of collective liberation internationally.

Second, other sections of the Left made the opposite mistake of treating “my enemy’s enemy as my friend.” Variously called vulgar anti-imperialism, faux anti-imperialism, or campism, this position backs Washington’s imperial rivals as a so-called axis of resistance. Some of its advocates go even further claiming that obviously capitalist states like China represent some kind of socialist alternative (even as, for example, Xi Jinping praises far right Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and touts China and Hungary’s “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership for the new era”). Thus, they support rising great powers, sub-imperial states, and various dictatorships in subordinate countries.

In the process, they ignore the imperialist nature of states like China and Russia and the counter-revolutionary nature of regimes like those in Iran and Syria, no matter how repressive they are to workers and the oppressed. And they oppose solidarity with popular struggles from below within them, dismissing them as faux “color revolutions” orchestrated by U.S. imperialism.

They also provide alibis for, and in some cases openly support, Russia’s war on Ukraine and China’s crushing of the democratic uprising in Hong Kong. In the end, they position themselves on the side of other imperialist and capitalist states, going through mental gymnastics to deny their capitalist, exploitative, and oppressive character.

Finally, some on the Left have adopted a position of geopolitical reductionism. They recognize the predatory nature of the various imperialist states and do not support any of them. But when these powers come into conflict over oppressed nations, instead of defending those nations’ right to self-determination, including their right to secure arms to win their liberation, they reduce such situations to the sole axis of interimperial rivalry. In the process they deny the agency of the oppressed nations.

Of course, imperialist powers can manipulate struggles for national liberation to such an extent that they become nothing more than proxy wars. But geopolitical reductionists use that possibility to deny support to legitimate struggles for liberation today.

This has been the position of many on the Left regarding Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine, reducing it to a mere proxy war between Moscow and Washington. But as Ukrainian polls and its national resistance demonstrate, Ukrainians are fighting for their own liberation, not as some cat’s paw of U.S. imperialism.

Based on their mistaken assessment of war, the geopolitical reductionists have opposed Ukraine’s right to secure arms for its liberation from Russia imperialism and opposed shipments, with some going so far as to celebrate actions to block them. A successful blockade of such arms would lead to a victory for Russian imperialism, something that would be a disaster for the Ukrainian people, dooming them to the fate of those massacred in Bucha and Mariupol.

None of these three positions provide the international left a guide to address the questions posed by the new asymmetric multipolar world order.

Internationalist anti-imperialism

A far better approach is internationalist anti-imperialism. In place of siding with this or that imperialist or capitalist state, advocates of this position oppose all imperialisms as well as less powerful capitalist regimes, even if we oppose imperialist interventions against them. We build solidarity with all popular struggles for liberation, reform, and revolution throughout the world and without exception.

In cases of national liberation, we unconditionally but critically side with the oppressed in their struggle for freedom. In those struggles, however, we do not confuse national liberation with socialism, rejecting the temptation to paint such battles with a red brush.

Instead, we adopt an independent approach of building solidarity with the workers and the oppressed within those struggles and cultivating political relationships with their progressive and revolutionary forces to turn struggles for national liberation into ones for socialism.

That leads us to take distinct positions compared with much of the Left on the three strategic flashpoints in today’s imperial order.

First, in the case of Ukraine, we support its liberation struggle and defend its right to secure arms, even from the United States and NATO, but we do not support Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s neoliberal government. We also oppose Western imperialism’s use of Ukraine to advance its own predatory ambitions to open the country and region to its banks and corporations.

Instead, we cultivate relations with the Ukrainian left and the country’s trade union movement. We raise their demands against neoliberalism, debt driven reconstruction, and the opening of Ukraine’s economy to multinational capital. We support their call for a popular reconstruction of the country based on public sector investment with all labor paid livable wages and done by unionized workers.

In the case of Palestine, we oppose U.S. imperialism’s support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and support the Palestinian resistance unconditionally. But that does not mean we support its existing political leadership or its strategy and tactics. We adopt a critical position toward its bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties, whether that is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or its Islamic fundamentalist alternative Hamas.

The PLO’s main leadership, Fatah, abandoned armed struggle for the illusion of a diplomatically crafted two-state solution. Three decades of such diplomacy has failed, leaving the West Bank occupied, Gaza under siege, and Israel ruling through apartheid over Palestinians within its 1948 borders.

Hamas filled the vacuum in the resistance left by Fatah’s capitulation. It, however, did not develop an alternative strategy, instead continuing Fatah’s old strategy of relying on supposedly friendly Arab and Iranian allies to aid its military struggle against Israel. There is no reason to think that that strategy, which failed when pursued by the PLO, will succeed today.

Backed by U.S. imperialism and buttressed by alliances with most of the Arab regimes, Israel will not be defeated militarily alone. Only a strategy that combines Palestinian resistance against Israel, revolutionary struggle against all the region’s regimes, and anti-imperialist movements in all the great powers can free Palestinians from Israeli apartheid and establish a secular, democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all, including the right of Palestinians to return to their stolen homes and land.

Finally, in the case of Taiwan, we oppose China’s threat to annex the island and defend Taiwan’s right to self-determination, including armed self-defense, and at the same time oppose Washington’s attempt to weaponize the country in its imperial rivalry with China.

We do not support any of the bourgeois parties contending for the leadership of Taiwan, but instead build solidarity with the country’s emergent left, popular organizations, and trade unions. Only they have an interest and the power to challenge both imperial powers and Taiwan’s capitalist class and build solidarity with workers and the oppressed in China, the region, and the United States.

Thus, internationalist anti-imperialism offers a strategy to build solidarity from below among workers and the oppressed against all the great powers and all the world’s capitalists states. We have an enormous opportunity and responsibility to advocate this approach among a new generation of activists who are instinctively opposed to U.S. imperialism and suspicious of other great powers and oppressive states.

We can only prove the superiority of these ideas in practice, in the living struggles–from domestic class and social struggles, to ones in solidarity with Palestine, Ukraine, and other oppressed nations. In doing so, we can help forge a new international left committed to building solidarity from below in the fight against global capitalism and for international socialism.

This piece first appeared at Tempest.