Looked Good for a Moment: the Story of the Red Labor International

Paul Buhle

 November 22, 2024
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The Founding of the Red Trade Union International: Proceedings and Resolutions of the First Congress is another remarkable volume in a series of remarkable documentary works. Edited ably by historian-archivist Mike Taber, this one is especially poignant because the “founding,” in the flush of the Russian Revolution still recent, proved to be very nearly the final note. The grand idea of a global unitary body bringing together revolutionary workers could not be achieved. Not that the failed or aborted founding of an international women’s communist movement, documented in a previous volume of the series, could be less poignant. But the failure of global labor support would prove determinant to the trajectory of the contemporary Left of a century ago. Despite the vital appeal to the people of the Global South, the Russian Revolution could only fall back upon itself.

But I am beginning in the wrong place. Like the other volumes in the series tracing the rise and early fall of revolutionary internationalism during the 1920s, this has been put together by a distinguished team of scholars behind Taber,  in the Historical Materialism group or collective. The process of locating, compiling, translating and annotating these proceedings is obviously staggering. The Glossary at the end offers a sort of history in itself because so many events and personalities are identified and explained over the course of forty or so pages. Not to mention the Bibliography!

The Introduction is another story because It is, despite the editor’s effort to be strictly objective, a narrative of declension pretty clearly in the Trotskyist tradition. This is not a flaw, but it is a feature. Things might have gone differently, perhaps, but the drift in the direction of Stalin and Stalinism can be seen as the underlying, tragic saga. More syndicalistic or even social democratic scholars would frame the story differently.

And so what. To take a case in point, consider Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky (1878-1952). A Bolshevik so skeptical or critical of Bolshevism that he had been expelled, he was accepted reluctantly as leader of the Red Labor International because no one else had the administrative skills and determination. Lozovsky had by this time become a loyalist. And remained so until he became a liaison with Yiddish writers after the Second World War and, with them, was shot dead in 1952.

Doom might have been written in the years that had passed since, say, 1920, when the anticipated world revolution had already begun to recede. By 1921, bourgeois law and order had been re-established in Hungary and in the section of Germany where a Red Republic had briefly been proclaimed. Mussolini’s victory lay just ahead. The Seattle General Strike of 1919 was already slipping from memory and the Communist factions engaged mainly in fighting each other—a serious matter because the US was not only the new center of the bourgeoisie but also because a leftwing challenge to capitalism there had been counted upon by revolutionaries around the globe.

The Russians and their allies who expected so much from the RTUI had also miscalculated in the most painful way. Many pages of this debate-rich volume document the conflict with syndicalism, a prevailing radical workerism in many parts of Europe and the US philosophically at odds with the centralization of authority that Bolshevism required. The day of anarchism had passed nearly everywhere by 1920, but the sense that something else, some revolutionary devolution of power to workers themselves sansrevolutionary party, remained strong in many places. In a word, nothing could replace the spirit, the culture and sensibility of the Industrial Workers of the World aka Wobblies. The moment that fled would not be regained.

Many other pages capture an alternative horn of the dilemma. The Russian Revolution’s effect upon workers in various European decisive locations prompted thousands of newly loyal communists to leave mainstream aka “bourgeois” union bodies. The new Russian leadership firmly rejected this solution. As the great British workers’ leader Tom Mann sought to explain to the puzzled delegates, it had never been the aim of labor revolutionaries in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland to abandon the majority of workers by leaving unions created with so much effort and sacrifice. “It is a serious mistake to build up a lot of smaller organizations, with a view to drawing members from the older ones.” (p.110).

With this proposition, the Russian leaders more than agreed. But their agreement could not smooth out the many contradictions. In some places, the mainstream union leaders simply expelled unions led by Communists.

The presence of a partially recuperated Second International was also troubling to the delegates. It was non-revolutionary! And yet it offered some syndicalist-minded unions a legitimate place to connect with workers of various countries. The Third International, soon to become the Comintern, had no such space available.

And this is the other most remarkable feature of the volume. Lozovsky was certainly not alone in his dogmatic insistence that all who disagreed with the Russian line had to be mistaken. But he was the most forceful and of course, the most authoritative. If the “inevitable capitalist breakdown” (p.129), arriving at a different speeds, would be certain to set the ground for Communist union advance, then the recovery of capitalism, above all in the USA, spelled trouble and worse.

The details of the discussions in this volume are too rich to be summarized and too various for quotations to do them credit. Perhaps it is best for the interested reader to look for the countries and movements that seem the most intriguing. Losovsky, in his frustration, quotes what Goethe put into the mouth of Mephistopheles: “When one lacks thoughts, words replace them. Debates are led by words and out of words, systems are constructed.” (p.429). But the words also belong to Losovsky, of course.

There is another issue just below the surface and often not below the surface. The Second International had perished in wartime as it deserved to perish. It could not be reconstituted as a fighting body by leaders who had sent their socialist comrades to kill each other. Leftish social democrats formed a new body in hostile response to the Communists, but no social democratic body could escape its own European limitations. Most of all, it could not come to an agreement on colonialism. Even leftwing social democrats, for the most part, considered the liberation of the Global South as a step too far.

The International Federation of Trade Unions, sometimes known as the “Amsterdam International,” was a worse than poor substitute for the RTUI, likewise limited almost entirely to Europe. Even so, US labor leaders pulled back, by this time renouncing even the vision of a post-capitalist society.

Anticipating all this, the debaters at the creation of the RTUI struggled in vain. As Taber explains in the Editorial Introduction, a United Front policy adopted in 1922 lifted the prospects of the RTUI from sectarian isolation. During 1922-23, Communists (that is, represented by the Russian unions) and Socialists met at the World Peace Congress in the Hague and further gatherings. Taber insists that the increasing isolation after 1923 can be traced to events after Lenin’s death. RUTI leaders wavered left and right, with many unions leaning toward Amsterdam.

Perhaps the founding of the RTUI, in 1921, had come too late, gaining tactical bearings too tardily to become successful. As a weapon in the hands of the emerging Russian bureaucracy, it survived for no good reasons, held no consistent positions, and folded formally in 1937.  Was there ever a real chance for revolution-minded class-conscious workers across the world to coordinate their actions? It’s a question that remains open.

Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.

 

Ilya Matveev: ‘Lenin’s theory only goes part of the way towards explaining Russian imperialism’

By Ilya Matveev

Published 22 November, 2024

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[Editor’s note: The following is an edited transcript of the speech given by Ilya Matveev on the “Imperialism(s) today” panel at the “ Boris Kagarlitsky and the challenges of the left today” online conference, which was organised by the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign on October 8. Matveev is a political scientist formerly based in St Petersburg, Russia. Currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Transcripts and video recordings of other speeches given at the conference can be found at the campaign website freeboris.info, from where the below is republished.]

Thank you. It is a pleasure to be speaking at this event, in such esteemed company, and to be able to support Boris in this way. To continue this theoretical discussion of imperialism, I want to take up some of the themes discussed by Robert Brenner in his presentation, but I think I have a slightly different perspective on the nature of Russian imperialism. What I propose to do is to use three authors who wrote about imperialism and to look at the Russian case through the lens of three different theories.

The first has already been mentioned, that is Vladimir Lenin’s theory. For Lenin, imperialism was ultimately an outgrowth of contradictions and tendencies inherent in capitalism, such as a tendency towards monopoly. The tendency towards overaccumulation of capital drives capital’s need for external expansion, and this in itself leads to inter-imperialist rivalries and ultimately world wars. This is Lenin’s theory in a nutshell.

Interestingly, a few years after Lenin published his famous essay on imperialism, the liberal thinker Joseph Schumpeter put forward a kind of liberal interpretation of imperialism in response to Lenin’s theory and the theories of other Second International Marxists such as Rudolf Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg. According to Schumpeter, imperialism is inimical to capitalism, especially capitalism in its pure form, and imperialist impulses represent ideologies and social structures from the pre-capitalist past. This was Schumpeter’s major thesis, namely that imperialism is essentially a legacy of the absolutist state and ruling classes and ideologies from the absolutist period. They survive in a new capitalist era. And this is why states adopt aggressive imperialist policies. For Schumpeter, imperialism could ultimately be compatible with capitalist interests, but it is a sort of artificial combination. And like other liberals, Schumpeter thought that the development of capitalism somehow would lead to the withering away of imperialism and war. So that is the second theory I want to look at.

The third theory is that of John Mearsheimer, a contemporary of ours, unlike Lenin and Schumpeter. His main point is that country-specific factors are ultimately irrelevant for this whole discussion; internal capitalist contradictions are irrelevant, and ideologies and social structures are irrelevant because imperialism, or what he calls “great power politics,” stems from the very nature of the international system. In this view, every state struggles for security and makes other states insecure. Thus inter-imperialist wars are built into the international system. When one state threatens another state, the threatened country will respond with aggressive measures. This is basically inevitable and does not depend on the domestic, social and geological structures in the threatened country.

So here we have three kinds of guiding ideas. And we can analyze Russian imperialism using these three perspectives.

I want to start with Mearsheimer because I think this is the easiest sort of case to consider. We can ask whether Russia was actually threatened when it initiated its aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Objectively speaking, Russia was not threatened by NATO. It was not threatened by Western imperialism. The major argument for the proposition that Russia and its security interests were somehow threatened by the West is the expansion of NATO. But this should be seen in the context of actual developments on the ground, which demonstrate that NATO was in fact becoming weaker as a conventional military alliance. It was expanding, but it was also becoming weaker.

NATO presence in Central/Northern Europe, 1991-2016

This chart shows that NATO armies were becoming smaller, and the US was withdrawing its troops from Europe. Back in the 80s, there were 300,000 American soldiers in Western Europe, and by 2014 it was something like 30,000, or ten times fewer. It is the same story with equipment. The chart comes from a report published by the Rand Corporation, a US national security think tank. The report states that Russia was, in fact, becoming stronger than NATO in the specific Eastern European potential theatre of war.

Mearsheimer himself admitted this fact. In his famous — or infamous — article in 2014, he stated that NATO was expanding, but that it was also very careful not to provoke or threaten Russia in terms of conventional military strength. But he went on to make an interesting argument. He said that it does not matter that NATO was not objectively a threat. What matters is that Russia felt threatened, so the Kremlin perceived the situation as threatening. But this is a different argument, of course. It is not about objective developments anymore. It is about perceptions and, therefore, about ideology. So, I think that Mearsheimer’s theory is actually the weakest of the three theories we are looking at in terms of explaining Russian imperialism.

Then we have Lenin. His theory is actually stronger, in my opinion. We can see the emergence of certain criteria for imperialism in Russia in the post-Soviet period, especially during the period of economic recovery in the 2000s and the early 2010s. The criteria that Brenner already mentioned began to appear in Russia: the concentration of capital, capitalist monopolies, the over accumulation of capital, and the need for external expansion. This was all present in Russia in the 2000s. 

Russian companies were extremely interested in post-Soviet countries because they could rebuild Soviet-era supply chains under their control. They could benefit from those old Soviet industrial economic ties. And they also sought new markets in post-Soviet countries. This economic expansion created pressure for political assertiveness as well. I would argue that any Russian government, and not just Putin’s government, would feel some pressure to be more assertive, maybe even more aggressive, in the post-Soviet space because of the needs of capital accumulation. So, this argument is valid to a certain extent.

But at the same time, what is different from the pre-1914 period, for example, is that Russia was integrated into global capitalism in a very specific way. On the one hand, it was quite influential in its region, the post-Soviet region. On the other hand, Russian capitalism was a dependent form of capitalism. In fact, it is dependent on Western centres of capital accumulation. And so Russia was in an intermediate position: a classic case of semi-periphery. So, I do not believe that the impulse for this extreme confrontation with the West could have come from the economic sphere, from the sphere of capital accumulation. Russian capitalism was just not built for this confrontation.

The impetus could only come from outside the economic sphere, probably from the political sphere. So, the impulse not just towards imperialism, but towards a specific form of imperialism that would not only break with the West but engage in this extreme confrontation with the West, could only come from elsewhere, not from Russian capitalism, because Russian capitalism really benefited from the way it was integrated into the global economy.

The Russian ruling class derived huge benefits from this intermediate position, or what we could call its sub-imperialist position in post-Soviet countries, where Russian corporations were very influential and sometimes even dominant. At the same time, Russian corporations had deep ties with Western companies and Western centres of capital accumulation. In fact, Western capital was exploiting the post-Soviet region through Russian capital — not directly, but through Russian capital. And this is the essence of a sub-imperialist position. So, speaking strictly in economic terms, that was the essence of Russia’s global integration. 

An illustration of this was Russia’s participation in the Davos forum. Take Dmitry Medvedev, for example; he was not a bloodthirsty nationalist back then. He was a kind of a moderate semi-liberal politician. And he spoke at Davos. This demonstrates that the Kremlin’s intention was to maintain its sub-imperialist role.

In sum, Lenin’s theory goes some of the way towards explaining Russian imperialism, but not all the way, in my opinion. Then we have Schumpeter, who offers not just a non-Marxist explanation, but to some extent an anti-Marxist explanation. Nevertheless, I think it is compelling in some respects, because Schumpeter emphasises historical elements in imperialist policy. He sees it as a kind of revenge of the past.

And if we look at Russia’s imperialist discourses we find in them an echo of the Soviet and especially the imperial past. The arguments that the Kremlin and Putin use resemble the arguments of the Russian Empire and specific ideological tropes about how Ukrainian identity was somehow invented by foreign intelligence specifically to weaken and destroy Russia. All that was already present some 120 years ago. These discourses have made their reappearance in Russian politics. So, the idea that Russian imperialism is a product of the past is compelling.

One obvious argument is that Putin is preoccupied with the past. He is constantly reading history books, and his obsession with Russia’s place in history and his own place in history is evident in his thinking, in his public speeches, and in the articles that he publishes. In terms of ideology, the influence of the past is very clear.

But then there’s the question of Putin’s transformation from a cynical materialist into an ideological imperialist. Why did he suddenly develop this interest in historical ideas? For me, that points to limitations of Schumpeter’s theory, as it does not really explain how the past reasserted itself in the present in Russia. I think that the explanation ultimately lies in contemporary events and not just some kind of metaphysical revenge of the past.

More specifically, the Kremlin’s ideology is based on the experience of primitive accumulation in the 1990s, when people, including Putin, participated in a kind of dog-eat-dog free for all in which you need to be on the offensive all the time or else you will be destroyed by your competitors. This was the essence of Russian capitalism in the 1990s, and this kind of experience was projected by the Kremlin elites onto the world stage. In Putin’s view, the world works just like Russian capitalism in the 90s: it is the Wild West. You cannot show weakness. You need to take the offensive at every opportunity, and you can never bluff. Bluffing is a sign of weakness, and weakness means you will be destroyed.

Based on this kind of experience and habitus, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term, the ideology was fashioned after the Kremlin was radicalised by the Arab Spring and by the colour revolutions in the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin felt threatened by these events, and they interpreted them as an attack by the West — not as genuine popular protests, but as something inspired by the West to weaken these countries and destroy these political regimes. The conclusion was that the West is plotting the same thing against Russia, and so the Kremlin needs to strike first in order to neutralise the threat of a colour revolution or something similar to the Arab Spring. These were the triggers that dredged up those discourses and ideologies from the past and made them so relevant to the Kremlin in the present moment.

This ultimately explains the ideological consolidation of the Kremlin. In my opinion, ideology is the crucial factor in Russia’s aggression in 2014 and 2022. It cannot be accounted for simply with reference to objective contradictions, such as the contradictions of capital accumulation or geopolitical contradictions. By themselves they cannot explain the Kremlin’s decisions and actions, such as the decision to annex Crimea or the decision to invade Ukraine. Ultimately, the explanation lies in the sphere of ideology.

 

Geopolitical conflicts, anti-imperialism and internationalism in times of ‘reactionary acceleration’

By Jaime Pastor

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published in Spanish at Viento Sur. Translation from Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

Within the general framework of the multidimensional crisis in which we find ourselves, now aggravated by the stimulus that Trump’s recent electoral victory represents for the rise of an extreme right on a global scale, it seems even more evident that we are witnessing a profound crisis of the international geopolitical (dis)order, as well as of the basic rules of International Law that have been established since the end of the Second World War. The most tragic manifestation of this crisis (which calls into question even the future of the UN) is found in the genocidal war against Gaza (Awad, 2024), to which are currently added around 56 wars across the planet.

In this context, the imperialist hierarchical system based on US hegemony is openly questioned and challenged by other major powers, such as China and Russia, as well as by others on a regional scale, such as Iran. This global geopolitical competition is clearly evident in certain war conflicts, the evolution of which will determine a new configuration of the balance of power within this system, as well as of the blocks present or in formation, such as the BRICS. In light of this new scenario, in this article I will focus on a summary description of the current panorama, then characterise the different positions that appear within the left in this new phase and insist on the need to build an internationalist left that is opposed to all imperialisms (main or secondary) and in solidarity with the struggles of the attacked peoples.

Polycrisis and authoritarian neoliberalisms

There is broad consensus on the left regarding the diagnosis we can make of the global crisis that the world is currently going through, with the eco-social and climate crisis as a backdrop. A polycrisis that we can define with Pierre Rousset as “multifaceted, the result of the combination of multiple specific crises. So we are not facing a simple sum of crises, but their interaction, which multiplies their dynamics, fueling a death spiral for the human species (and for a large part of living species)” (Pastor, 2024).

A situation that is closely related to the exhaustion of the neoliberal capitalist accumulation regime that began in the mid-1970s, which, after the fall of the bloc dominated by the USSR, took a leap forward towards its expansion on a global scale. A process that led to the Great Recession that began in 2008 (aggravated by austerity policies, the consequences of the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine), which ended up frustrating the expectations of social advancement and political stability that the promised happy globalization had generated, mainly among significant sectors of the new middle classes.

A globalization, it must be remembered, that was expanded under the new neoliberal cycle that throughout its different phases: combative, normative and punitive (Davies, 2016), has been building a new transnational economic constitutionalism at the service of global corporate tyranny and the destruction of the structural, associative and social power of the working class. And, what is more serious, it has turned into common sense the “ market civilization” as the only possible one, although this whole process has acquired different variants and forms of political regimes, generally based on strong States immune to democratic pressure (Gill, 2022; Slobodian, 2021). A neoliberalism that, however, is today showing its inability to offer a horizon of improvement for the majority of humanity on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

We are therefore in a period, both at the state and interstate level, full of uncertainties, under a financialized, digital, extractivist and rentier capitalism that makes our lives precarious and seeks at all costs to lay the foundations for a new stage of growth with an increasingly active role of the States at its service. To do so, it resorts to new forms of political domination functional to this project that, increasingly, tend to come into conflict not only with freedoms and rights won after long popular struggles, but also with liberal democracy. In this way, an increasingly authoritarian neoliberalism is spreading, not only in the South but increasingly in the North, with the threat of a “reactionary acceleration” (Castellani, 2024). A process now stimulated by a Trumpism that is becoming the master discursive framework of a rising far right, willing to constitute itself as an alternative to the crisis of global governance and the decomposition of the old political elites (Urbán, 2024; Camargo, 2024).

The imperialist hierarchical system in dispute

Within this context, succinctly explained here, we are witnessing a crisis of the imperialist hierarchical system that has predominated since the fall of the Soviet bloc, facilitated precisely by the effects generated by a process of globalization that has led to the displacement of the center of gravity of the world economy from the North Atlantic (Europe-USA) to the Pacific (USA, East and Southeast Asia).

Indeed, following the Great Recession that began in 2007-2008 and the subsequent crisis of neoliberal globalization, a new phase has begun in which a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical order is taking place, tending to be multipolar but at the same time asymmetrical, in which the United States remains the great hegemonic power (monetary, military and geopolitical), but is weakened and challenged by China, the great rising power, and Russia, as well as by other sub-imperial or secondary powers in different regions of the planet. Meanwhile, in many countries of the South, faced with the plundering of their resources, the increase in sovereign debt and popular revolts and wars of different kinds, the end of development as a goal to be achieved is giving way to reactionary populisms in the name of order and security.

Thus, global and regional geopolitical competition is being accentuated by the different competing interests, not only on the economic and technological level, but also on the military and values level, with the consequent rise of state ethno-nationalisms against presumed internal and external enemies.

However, one must not forget the high degree of economic, energy and technological interdependence that has been developing across the planet in the context of neoliberal globalisation, as was clearly highlighted both during the global pandemic crisis and the lack of an effective energy blockade against Russia despite the agreed sanctions. Added to this are two new fundamental factors: on the one hand, the current possession of nuclear weapons by major powers (there are currently four nuclear hotspots: one in the Middle East (Israel) and three in Eurasia (Ukraine, India-Pakistan and the Korean peninsula); and, on the other, the climate, energy and materials crisis (we are in overtime!), which substantially differentiate this situation from that before 1914. These factors condition the geopolitical and economic transition underway, setting limits to a deglobalisation that is probably partial and which, of course, does not promise to be happy for the great majority of humanity. At the same time, these factors also warn of the increased risk of escalation in armed conflicts in which powers with nuclear weapons are directly or indirectly involved, as is the case in Ukraine or Palestine.

This specificity of the current historical stage leads us, according to Promise Li, to consider that the relationship between the main great powers (especially if we refer to that between the USA and China) is given through an unstable balance between an “antagonistic cooperation” and a growing “inter-imperialist rivalry”. A balance that could be broken in favour of the latter, but that could also be normalised within the common search for a way out of the secular stagnation of a global capitalism in which China (Rousset, 2021) and Russia (Serfati, 2022) have now been inserted, although with very different evolutions. A process, therefore, full of contradictions, which is extensible to other powers, such as India, which are part of the BRICS, in which the governments of its member countries have not so far questioned the central role of organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, which remain under US hegemony (Fuentes, 2023; Toussaint, 2024).

However, it is clear that the geopolitical weakening of the United States — especially after its total fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan and, now, the crisis of legitimacy that is being caused by its unconditional support for the genocidal State of Israel — is allowing a greater potential margin of manoeuvre on the part of different global or regional powers, in particular those with nuclear weapons. For this reason I agree with Pierre Rousset’s description:

The relative decline of the United States and the incomplete rise of China have opened up a space in which secondary powers can play a significant role, at least in their own region (Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, etc.), although the limits of the BRICS are clear. In this situation, Russia has not failed to present China with a series of faits accomplis on Europe’s eastern borders. Acting in concert, Moscow and Beijing were largely the masters of the game on the Eurasian continent. However, there was no coordination between the invasion of Ukraine and an actual attack on Taiwan (Pastor, 2024).

This, undoubtedly facilitated by the greater or lesser weight of other factors related to the polycrisis, explains the outbreak of conflicts and wars in very different parts of the planet, but in particular those that occur in three very relevant current epicentres: Ukraine, Palestine and, although for now in terms of the cold war, Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, we have seen how the US took advantage of Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to relaunch the expansion of a NATO in crisis towards other countries in Eastern and Northern Europe. An objective closely associated with the reformulation of NATO’s “new strategic concept”, as we were able to see at the summit that this organisation held in Madrid in July 2022 (Pastor, 2022) and more recently at the one held in Washington in July of this year. At the latter, this strategy was reaffirmed, as well as the consideration of China as the main strategic competitor, while any criticism of the State of Israel was avoided. The latter is what is showing the double standards (Achcar, 2024) of the Western bloc with regard to its involvement in the war in Ukraine, on the one hand, and its complicity with the genocide that the colonial State of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people, on the other.

Again, we have also seen NATO’s growing interest in the Southern flank in order to pursue its racist necropolitics against illegal immigration while continuing to aspire to compete for control of basic resources in countries of the South, especially in Africa, where French and American imperialisms are losing weight against China and Russia.

In this way, the strategy of the Western bloc has been redefined, within which US hegemony has been strengthened on the military level (thanks, above all, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and to which a more divided European Union with its old German engine weakened is clearly subordinated. However, after Trump’s victory, the European Union seems determined to reinforce its military power in the name of the search for a false strategic autonomy, since it will continue to be linked to the framework of NATO. Meanwhile, many countries in the South are distancing themselves from this bloc, although with different interests among them, which differentiates the possible alliances that may be formed from the one that in the past characterized the Non-Aligned Movement.

In any case, it is likely that after his electoral victory, Donald Trump will make a significant shift in US foreign policy in order to implement his MAGA (Make America Great Again) project beyond the geoeconomic level (intensifying his competition with China and, although at a different level, with the EU), especially in relation to the three epicentres of conflicts mentioned above: with regard to Ukraine, by substantially reducing economic and military aid and seeking some form of agreement with Putin, at least on a ceasefire; with regard to Israel, by reinforcing his support for Netanyahu’s total war; and finally by reducing his military commitment to Taiwan.

What anti-imperialist internationalism from the left?

In this context of the rise of an authoritarian neoliberalism (in its different versions: the reactionary one of the extreme right and that of the extreme centre, mainly) and of various geopolitical conflicts, the great challenge for the left is how to reconstruct antagonistic social and political forces anchored in the working class and capable of forging an anti-imperialism and a solidarity internationalism that is not subordinated to one or another great power or regional capitalist bloc.

A task that will not be easy, because in the current phase we are witnessing deep divisions within the left in relation to the position to maintain in the face of some of the aforementioned conflicts. Trying to synthesize, with Ashley Smith (2024), we could distinguish four positions:

The first would be the one that aligns itself with the Western imperial bloc in the common defense of alleged democratic values against Russia, or with the State of Israel in its unjustifiable right to self-defense, as has been stated by a majority sector of the social-liberal left. A position that hides the true imperialist interests of that bloc, does not denounce its double standards and ignores the increasingly de-democratizing and racist drift that Western regimes are experiencing, as well as the colonial and occupying character of the Israeli State.

The second is what is often described as campism, which would align itself with states such as Russia or China, which it considers allies against US imperialism because it considers the latter to be the main enemy, ignoring the expansionist geopolitical interests of these two powers. A position that reminds us of the one that many communist parties held in the past during the Cold War in relation to the USSR, but which now becomes a caricature considering both the reactionary nature of Putin’s regime and the persistent state-bureaucratic despotism in China.

The third is that of a geopolitical reductionism , which is now reflected in the war in Ukraine, limiting itself to considering it to be only an inter-imperialist conflict. This attitude, adopted by a sector of pacifism and the left, implies denying the legitimacy of the dimension of national struggle against the occupying power that the Ukrainian resistance has, without ceasing to criticize the neoliberal and pro-Atlanticist character of the government that heads it.

Finally, there is the one that is against all imperialisms (whether major or minor) and against all double standards, showing itself ready to stand in solidarity with all attacked peoples, even if they may have the support of one or another imperial power (such as the US and the EU in relation to Ukraine) or regional power (such as Iran in relation to Hamas in Palestine). This is a position that does not accept respect for the spheres of influence that the various major powers aspire to protect or expand, and that stands in solidarity with the peoples who fight against foreign occupation and for the right to decide their future (in particular, with the leftist forces in these countries that are betting on an alternative to neoliberalism), and is not aligned with any political-military bloc.

This last position is the one that I consider to be the most coherent from an anti-capitalist left. In fact, keeping in mind the historical distance and recognizing the need to analyze the specificity of each case, it coincides with the criteria that Lenin tried to apply when analyzing the centrality that the struggle against national and colonial oppression was acquiring in the imperialist phase of the early twentieth century. This was reflected, in relation to conflicts that broke out then, in several of his articles such as, for example, in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” written in January-February 1916, where he maintained that:

The fact that the struggle for national freedom against an imperialist power can be exploited, under certain conditions, by another ’great’ power to achieve equally imperialist ends cannot force social democracy to renounce recognizing the right of nations to self-determination, just as the repeated cases of the use of republican slogans by the bourgeoisie for the purposes of political fraud and financial plunder (for example, in Latin countries) cannot force social democrats to renounce their republicanism (Lenin, 1976).

An internationalist position that must be accompanied by mobilisation against the remilitarisation process underway by NATO and the EU, but also against that of other powers such as Russia or China. And which must commit to putting the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament and the dissolution of military blocs back at the centre of the agenda, taking up the baton of the powerful peace movement that developed in Europe during the 1980s, with the feminist activists of Greenham Common and intellectuals such as Edward P. Thompson at the forefront. An orientation that must obviously be inserted within a global eco-socialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.

References

Achcar, Gilbert (2024) “Anti-fascism and the Fall of Atlantic Liberalism”, Viento Sur, 19/08/24.

Awad, Nada (2024) “International Law and Israeli Exceptionalism”, Viento Sur, 193, pp. 19-27.

Camargo, Laura (2024) Discursive Trumpism . Madrid: Verbum (in press).

Castellani, Lorenzo (2024) “With Trump, the Age of Reactionary Acceleration”, Le Grand Continent, 11/08/24.

Davies, William (2016) “Neoliberalism 3.0”, New Left Review , 101, pp. 129-143.

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