Bogus Anti-imperialism and the Fight for Peace

Where VI Lenin in 1916 wove together a theory of imperialism that placed capitalist exploitation and accumulation at its core, explaining competition between greater and lesser powers and their coalitions and alliances as leading to war, a prominent Marxist, Karl Kautsky, asserted that war or the threat of war would persuade states to coexist, to put aside rivalries and create-- in Kautsky’s words-- “...a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.” 

Lenin believed that competition between great powers will inevitably result in war; Kautsky believed that competition between great powers will inevitably bring a settled peace.

Similarly, today’s advocates of multipolarity argue that the only obstacle to the world imagined by Kautsky is the United States. As the former Cold War leader of the capitalist order, the US is now the meddler, war monger, aggressor, and imperialist standing in the way of a multipolar world that will establish a more tolerant, cooperative, and peaceful world. 

Advocates see the agency for this Kautskyian utopia in the BRICS coalition, established formally in 2009, subsequently adding new members and partners along the way. Its supporters remind us that BRICS+ commands a greater share of global GDP than does the G7 nations or the EU. The original BRICS economies grew by a stunning 356.27% between 1990 and 2019. 

Despite these impressive economic numbers, BRICS’s most zealous proponents posture the alliance as representative of the peripheral “Global South” --as the arm of the ‘have-nots’-- in the struggle against the ‘haves’ of the core-- the US and its Eurasian allies.

While this may make a soothing story, a popular source of hope for peace and social justice, it completely fails the test presented by the realities of this moment. Measured by any rigorous standards of inquiry, multipolarity is a fraud.

On its face, the idea that an alleged powerhouse economic bloc is the advocate, the savior for the poorest, most disadvantaged countries is surely paradoxical. No one would take a similar claim seriously if it came from the mouths of foreign ministers of the G7 or the EU.

But the failure of the BRICS fantasy is best shown by examining BRICS and its member states' response to recent monumental world events.  

On the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israeli forces: BRICS and its member states voiced some stern objections, but took no substantial measures to stop it or to punish Israel. In fact, they continued their substantial economic relations with the rogue state, failed to defy the Israeli blockade, and offered no material aid to the Palestinians.

On the aggression against Venezuelan sovereignty: BRICS and some of its member states raised objections, but took no concrete action; some benefitted from the US action, some were set back by it. Security agents from material-poor Cuba heroically gave their lives resisting the invasion.

On the attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran (a BRICS member state) by the US and Israel: BRICS and its member states again voiced objections, but offered little or no material support. As The Wall Street Journal noted “Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.” 

On the escalating aggression against Cuba, suffering acute energy crises under the intensified US blockade: old beneficiaries of Cuban internationalist sacrifices-- including BRICS members and partners-- are offering marginal support for socialist Cuba as it faces possibly its worst existential crisis. 

If BRICS is the guarantor of the interests of the so-called Global South against US and Israeli aggression, if this is the counterforce to imperialism that US and European leftists imagine, then much of the world needs new, more militant friends. The facts contradict the false theory of multipolarity and its embodiment in the BRICS alliance. Rather than exhibiting a new spirit of cooperation, mutual interest, internationalism, and solidarity, the BRICS members seem bent on basing foreign policy on narrow self-interest.

Critics are, however, stepping forward, some with doubts, some with sharp and incisive rebukes of the multipolarity dogma and the BRICS myth. 

Many doubters were repelled by the recent UN Security Council vote crafted by the US and condemning Iran’s retaliation against US allies on the Arabian Peninsula, without calling out the war’s initiators, the US and Israel.

Betwa Sharma, writing in Consortium News, protests that “both Moscow and Beijing abandoned Tehran by abstaining on a March 11 U.N. Security Council resolution that falsely portrayed Iran as the aggressor. China and Russia’s own interests took precedence over a BRICS partner under attack.”

She concludes: 

The war on Iran has exposed the fragility of BRICS as a rising alternative to the U.S.-led global order.

U.S. economic pressure and geopolitical shocks, especially the attack on Iran, have revealed BRICS less as a unified bloc with a common strategic goal, than a collection of countries with overlapping interests that diverge sharply under pressure.

Focusing mainly on Gaza, Patrick Bond recently wrote a detailed, scathing exposé of BRICS hypocrisy.

Bond acknowledges that BRIC member, South Africa, provided 15% of Israel’s coal needs as of 2025. As for another BRICS founding member, “...in addition to wheat and metals, Russia sells coal and – in just the two years since the genocide began in 2023 – made 105 oil transfers comprising 30% of Israel’s total crude and 45% of refined petroleum imported, via Novorossiysk (originating from BRICS-partner Kazakhstan.”

Bond reports on another founding member: "Chinese drones (tens of thousands by now) made by DJI and Autel buzz Gaza and the West Bank, and are used to drop grenades on civilians… and moreover, a Chinese parastatal owns the new Haifa Bayport while another built the ‘union-busting’ Ashdod harbour, which together have facilitated a 5% annual increase in bilateral trade since 2021, confirming Netanyahu’s 2017 term for the two economies, namely, a 'marriage made in heaven.'"

Further: “New Delhi assures a strengthened Israeli-Indian military alliance, the September 2025 Bilateral Investment Treaty, and Modi’s ‘Special Strategic Partnership’ solidaristic visit to the Knesset featuring ‘immense progress’ in ‘defence, security, and more.’”

Bond reveals similar embarrassing economic ties between other BRICS members and Israel, including with Brazil, UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. He concludes by asserting that, in fact, the “BRICS Promote Global-Corporate Power Under the Cover of Multipolarism.” 

Facts, facts, facts… they often make for stubborn, unfriendly encounters with cherished theories and opinions. At least some of our friends on the left are paying attention.

In a moving “j’accuse”, Josué Veloz Serrade writes in his article translated and posted on Black Agenda Report of “un multilaterismo hipócrita”-- a hypocritical multilateralism toward Cuba.

Veloz Serrade casts scorn on all of the nations that could respond to Cuba’s abandonment before an existential threat from the US Empire, especially those who preach multipolarity and hail BRICS as the anti-Empire:

In their rhetoric, Russia and China demand an end to unipolarity, the construction of a multipolar world, respect for international law, and, in particular, for the sovereignty of each country. But their real desire, revealed by their actions rather than their words, is the gradual integration into the rules of the very system they claim to contest…

As bitter as it may be to hear, by abandoning Cuba, they are not simply being pragmatic; they are admitting that their real goal is not the transformation of the world order, but the negotiation of a more comfortable place within it…

…they have incorporated the logic of the imperial playing field—its institutions, its markets, its values, its rules, its default ideology—to such an extent that they have become incapable of imagining political action that breaks with that field, even though they proclaim it necessary in their rhetoric…

The Empire supports its allies to the very end because it understands that loyalty to its own is a condition of its own power. But Cuba’s allies do the opposite: they abandon it when the political cost of supporting Cuba outweighs the benefit of not doing so…

Those who today are abandoning Cuba are not only calculating their own narrow interests; they are also, in a way, renouncing their own desire for transformation. The abandonment of Cuba is the renunciation of the possibility of another world… 

Progressive Latin American governments, the BRICS, American and Western European left-wing parties, solidarity organizations that today look the other way: all have found, in one way or another, their niche within the order. They have obtained their share of recognition, their space for comfortable dissent, their permitted or simply tolerated gestures. And in that process, they have ceased to see Cuba as a mirror of what they could be, instead viewing it as an uncomfortable reminder of what they have ceased to be, but above all of what they never were…

Those who today betray Cuba are betraying themselves. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a strategic one. A world order that claims to be multipolar but fails to protect the most vulnerable when the Master tightens the screws is not an alternative order; it is a decentralized extension of unipolarity, a system in which the ritual invocation of multipolarity is a rhetorical exercise in futility… 

Veloz Serrade’s bitter eloquence speaks not only to the fraud of multipolarity and the hypocrisy of BRICS, but to the possible loss of the last outpost of authentic solidarity, internationalism, and anti-imperialism. The hope of a just world may well be extinguished for millions who saw Cuba as a beacon.

Multipolarity is neither anti-imperialist nor a substitute for fighting the imperialist system. Those who are invested in multipolarity and the ‘promise’ of BRICS do grave disservice to the fight for global justice and for peace. The shame of BRICS failure to resist brazen, death-dealing aggression against weaker parties will fall on them as well.

There can be no effective anti-war movement in this time without clarity on the imperialist system. Peace is only attainable if we understand and resist the causes of war, while not deferring or relying on a group of countries committed to protecting or improving their place in that system. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

BRICS Will Fail to Deliver Anti-imperialism

Multipolarity-- the idea that there are more than one decisive economic actors in the global economy-- is an important fact. More than anything else, the rise of the People's Republic of China demonstrates that fact. The size and rate of growth, along with the expansive Belt and Road Initiative, establishes that the PRC functions somewhat independently of the world’s most powerful player in the global market-- the US. While the PRC spurns the language of rivalry, characterizing its desired relationship with the US as one of cooperation or partnership, the mere fact that the US rejects that relationship creates another competitive pole in the global economy, centered on the PRC.

Similarly, the US ruling class has sought to absorb the post-Soviet world-- Russia, Eastern Europe, and other former Soviet collaborators-- into the US-dominated economic order. The US demands that they play the same game and by the same rules or be banished from participation. When they object or defy accepting these terms, they, too, necessarily become alternative poles.

As other formerly minor or compliant participants-- Brazil, India, etc.-- have risen in economic stature, they can also represent counters to US unipolarity.

The tendency away from the US’s complete dominance of the international market economy is a reality of our time. No rational person can dispute this fact (though the tendency could easily reverse).

Since the origin of international trade, there have been conflicting tendencies and counter-tendencies toward concentration and diversity, toward monopoly and competition, and toward unipolarity and multipolarity. It is the very nature, the very essence of market exchange that a privileged trader will arise to dominate, only to be challenged by rivals who subsequently share or dominate the market, with the process repeating or reversing. As Friedrich Engels insisted: “In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition-- indeed, it itself breeds competition.”

History shows many empires or countries rising to dominate an arena of commerce or trade over its trading “partners”: Venetian dominance in the Mediterranean, Dutch dominance in European trade with the Spice Islands, successive European empires’ dominance of the trading in slaves, British dominance of the opium trade with China, etc. In nearly all cases, other empires or nations challenge and often prevail.

With the rise of the Cold War, the immensely powerful US assumed and maintained the leading role in ruling and protecting the capitalist order, then over half of the world’s population. After the fall of the Soviet Union, US leaders sought to extend their dominance over the entire world, envisioning a new order codifying and guaranteeing the existing inequalities and the established uneven development. Of course, this status privileges US interests.

If this state of affairs constitutes what people consider to be unipolarity, then it is clear that it is not sustainable. Competitors unfailingly will rise to challenge US dominance. Rivals will strive to break the US economic reign, through innovation, deception, trickery, market manipulation, alliances, and even open conflict. That is the way of capitalism.

And that is what is happening.

Thus, the alternating tendencies toward multipolarity and unipolarity are inevitable consequences of market exchange in a world of private ownership and national self-interest.

It should be noted that-- everything else remaining the same-- this dynamic will guarantee neither that working people will benefit nor be disadvantaged by changes in existing poles. Changes in the relative economic position of nation-states in the global economy is neutral with regard to the fate of those living in class societies. A worker or peasant may gain little from a trend from unipolarity to multipolarity-- any gain will be determined by other factors.

*****

There is, however, an entirely different understanding of multipolarity, unrelated to the factual tendency of competition to drive the global economy toward a unipolar or multipolar world. Since the time of Karl Kautsky, leftists have invested in multipolarity as a moral response to imperialism, an antidote to economic exploitation, as anti-imperialism. Nation-states were and are believed to rationally accept a stable order based on common interests and fair and equitable relations (if only the predators were tamed!). Lenin mocked this view and World War I crushed it. 

But it doesn’t go away! The illusion of a brotherhood of capitalist powers accepting fair and equitable relations stubbornly persists!

Liberals and social democrats invested heavily in the League of Nations, a reset of the rules of international politics and economics after the disaster of World War I. Both little nations and big nations were expected to live amicably under its umbrella. The League promised to stifle the aggression and domination of great powers. Within two decades World War was again on the agenda.

Once again, after World War II, a new “multipolar” institution came into being-- the United Nations. Dominated by capitalist powers (most also beholden puppets of the US ruling class), the promise of diverse poles ensuring peace, harmony, and fairness gave way to manipulation, indecision, and-- on the best day-- impotence. The UN-- today, a multipolar institution governing capitalist-oriented nation-states-- is a modern-day farce.

Now, we have BRICS-- an alliance of a motley assortment of states with different ideologies, different modes of governance, different economies, different levels of development, and different commitments to social justice, but a common interest in finding some benefit from rearranging the existing world order. Centrists and leftists of every stripe have adopted BRICS and BRICS+ as an anti-imperialist front. With little reflection on history, with little appreciation of diversity, and especially with little understanding of market-based economies, they imagine that nation-states driven by self interest will somehow construct a common organization governed by mutual interest. Kautsky would embrace this shallow hope. Lenin would summarily dismiss it.

Persistently and consistently, I have challenged this misguided concept of anti-imperialism. BRICS is no more an answer to imperialism than an alliance of corporations is an answer to capitalist exploitation. 

And that is the tragedy of the BRICS solution to imperialism. It fails to address the foundation of imperialism: the capitalist mode of production. It distracts social justice warriors, and even some Marxists, from the root cause of growing inequality within and between nations. Through ignorance or frustration, it creates the false hope of tempering exploitation without confronting capitalism.

*****

Where theoretical arguments fail, I have proposed a practical test of multipolarity and, specifically, BRICS. If BRICS is an anti-imperialist alternative, then it-- or its most committed members-- must stand tall against the most glaring, most egregious acts of imperialism. I have suggested that the response of BRICS members to the atrocities in Gaza are a litmus test of commitment to anti-imperialism, a test which BRICS has failed abysmally.

One might think that the recent UN Security Council vote on the US/Israeli plan to further maintain Gaza as a semi-colony-- brazenly ruled as brutally as the old Belgian Congo-- might have ignited a resistance from the “anti-imperialism” of BRICS. Instead, BRICS’s most vocal friends of Gaza choose to abstain from the vote. 

And, yes, one would think that these scandalous abstentions would cause many multipolaristas to pause, and rethink their delusion of an anti-imperialist BRICS.

And many on the left have recoiled from this plan and criticized the Russian and Chinese abstentions. The Palestinian Communist Party denounced the vote, as did other Communist and Workers parties.

In an article entitled “BRICS Are the New Defenders of Free Trade, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank” and Support Genocide by Continuing to Trade with Israel, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism vigorously challenges BRICS on Gaza, and cites others, including left podcaster Fiorella Isabel and left journalist Vanessa Beeley’s similar critiques.

Nonetheless, apologists like the Friends of Socialist China defend China and Russia’s abstention. They argue bizarrely that: “For China, or Russia, to have exercised the veto would only have weakened their position vis-à-vis the Arab and Islamic nations and correspondingly further strengthened that of the United States.” As though voting against the Security Council resolution would have cost them friendship with some of the backstabbers of the Palestinian cause and defying the US plan would have somehow strengthened the already compliant US relationship with these same traitors to Gaza’s fate.

Since the Gaza resolution, the US has launched an offensive against Venezuelan sovereignty. US military might is staged in waters offshore from Venezuela, insisting that the Venezuelan people bow to US pressure. The threat is real and accompanied by the disgusting demonstration of US power by the murderous killing of boats’ crews in international waters, killings that have no established legitimacy. 

How have the PRC and Russia-- the “spear” of BRICS anti-imperialism-- responded?

Kejal Vyas and James T. Areddy, writing in The Wall Street Journal, state smugly: “For two decades, Venezuela cultivated anti-American allies across the globe, from Russia and China to Cuba and Iran, in the hope of forming a new world order that could stand up to Washington. It isn’t working.” They understand that Cuba and Iran are in no position economically to help Venezuela. As for Russia and China, the authors conclude: “Both countries are trying to negotiate major diplomatic and trade deals with Trump now, giving them little incentive to waste political capital on Venezuela.” 

It should be clearly understood that Russia, the PRC, and other BRICS states have the sovereign right to forge their own or an independent collective foreign policy, regardless of what others might want. Sadly, unlike in the throes of the Cold War against socialist states, no great power or alliance is willing to risk confrontation with other great powers, where willingness to do so is historically the measure of authentic anti-imperialism.

It should be equally clear that those who elevate the BRICs countries to the status of anti-imperialist icons are doing the left a disservice. However well-meaning some of the BRICS leaders may be, they fall far short of constituting an anti-imperialist bloc. To continue the fantasy that rallying around BRICS is the basis for an anti-imperialist front only deflects the left from attacking the foundation of imperialism: capitalism. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

“Settling Accounts” on the Question of Imperialism

Writing in 1908-- six years before the first great inter-imperialist war and eight years before writing his landmark text on imperialism-- Lenin reminded us of the many ideological roadblocks that Marxism had to overcome before consolidating its position in the working-class movement.

First, Marx had to “settle accounts” with the Young Hegelians, then with Proudhonism, Bakuninism, and so on until scientific socialism became the dominant left factor in the workers’ movement in the late 1800s. 

Subsequently, the danger to ideological unity came from left and right-- largely right-- revisions of the revolutionary kernel that Marx and Engels had left us. “And the second half-century of the existence of Marxism began (in the nineties) with the struggle of a trend hostile to Marxism within Marxism itself.”

Today, all of those misguiding tendencies have become unsettled both outside and inside the Marxist movement. Ironically, as interest in Communism has become more acceptable with young people in reaction’s heartland-- the US-- confusion over once-settled matters grows more widely; the legacy of those hard-fought ideological struggles becomes lost to the dim past. 

It is a formidable task to rebuild the Marxist tradition that dominated the anti-capitalist workers’ movement in the twentieth century, but one necessitated by the inequality, the chaos, and the destruction wrought by unbridled capitalism and its champions.

Essential to that project is ideological clarity.

One critical issue facing the left today is the nature and behavior of contemporary capitalism on the international level-- what Lenin characterized as imperialism.

Over the recent period, I have offered several interventions on the question, primarily to shed light on the two most recent and dangerous wars-- the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Understanding these wars is impossible without understanding imperialism today and understanding contemporary imperialism is not possible without subjecting that understanding to the practical test of explaining these two brutal wars.

My most recent intervention on this question has been challenged by Rainer Shea via Rainer’s Newsletter posted on Substack and X. His article, The KKE/Trotskyist effort to redefine imperialism, and how it undermines the global workers struggle, is largely a defensive rehash of the position taken by Carlos Garrido and addressed in my article. While it offers little new, it does provide an opportunity to clarify further.

Shea faults my article for failing “to find alleged examples of Russia or China engaging in imperialist actions.” But that is not what I promised to do, since I chose instead to clarify imperialism, to reject multipolarity as anti-imperialism, and to suggest that action in defense of Palestinians was a good litmus test of anti-imperialism.

I have consistently argued that imperialism is a system and capitalist-oriented nation-states participate in that system in various ways, as perpetrators, victims, and many times, both. What fundamentally determines imperialism is the maturation of capitalism into monopoly capitalism, along with the merging of bank capital with industrial capital. Marxists like Eugen Varga in the Soviet Union elaborated on these developments in the 1920s and 1930s. US Marxists like Anna Rochester and Victor Perlo carefully and thoroughly tracked the merging of industrial and bank capital through intermarriage, membership on interlocking boards of directors, stock purchases, mergers, etc. They tracked the various groups in the US organized around affinitive financial institutions, industries, and monopolies. 

The hyperaccumulation of capital generated by both industrial and financial monopoly corporations necessitates the export of capital, as well as risky financial schemes that promise new investment horizons or, almost inevitably, great crashes. 

The agents of this process are predatory monopoly corporations-- both industrial and financial-- and their action inevitably leads to spheres of interest (what Lenin calls “the division of the world among the international trusts”). It is the most powerful nation states that enforce this division of the entire world to the advantage of the favored monopoly corporations through occupation, force, threat, or other schemes.

This, in essence, is Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It is an explanation of how a global capitalist system operates under specific, evolving conditions. It is not a criterion for which nation-state is or is not imperialist or anti-imperialist. Imperialism is capitalism beyond its infancy operating on the international stage and not merely a club of exclusive members. That is why today, as in Lenin’s time, it will not disappear as long as capitalism exists. 

Lenin can shed further light on the flawed “new imperialism” embraced by Shea and Garrido. Writing late in 1916 in Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Lenin scorns Kautsky’s claim that, with an anticipated weakened England (the overwhelmingly dominant global capitalist power of the time, like the US today), ‘there is nothing to fight about’.

On the contrary, not only have the capitalists something to fight about now, but they cannot help fighting if they want to preserve capitalism, for without a forcible redivision of colonies the new imperialist countries cannot obtain the privileges enjoyed by the older (and weaker) imperialist powers. [Lenin’s emphasis]

Lenin was right and Kautsky was wrong. After World War I, England continued to descend as the dominant power in the imperialist system, to be supplanted by the US within decades. And the US behaved with an even more overbearing global swagger than its predecessor.

Is there any compelling reason-- contra Lenin--- to believe that “In this era, one of our foremost missions is to defeat U.S. dominance in particular, which would thereby cause the imperial system as a whole to unravel” [my emphasis], as Shea contends? Like Kautsky, Shea believes that with the US knocked off the system’s pedestal, there would be nothing to fight about…

Our best efforts to defeat imperialism is not to applaud rivals to US domination, but to fight capitalism at home, the engine of both US domination abroad and the imperialist system. 

Both Garrido and Shea-- in their determination to cast Russia and the PRC as bulwarks against imperialism-- distract from the fight against capitalism. While we all --that is, all peace-loving people-- must stand against US aggression against Russia, the PRC, or any other country; we should not confuse that stance with the struggle against imperialism which is, in its essence, a fight against capitalism.

For those of us who profess Marxism, socialism, or Communism, nothing is gained by detaching imperialism from capitalism; nothing is gained by imagining that there can be a capitalist world without imperialism, if only the US were brought to its knees. 

Exploitation of labor and the appropriation of profit are still the engine of the capitalist mode of production, including in its current stage: imperialism. We are not, as Garrido contends, in a new stage, with imperialism based upon “debt and interest.” The workers in the so-called “Global South” are primarily exploited by their bourgeoisie and/or multi-national corporations (Lenin’s cartels), not by banks issuing credit cards or mortgages or by greedy insurance companies. The national debt and costly interest payments that plague less developed nations are akin to the personal debt of workers insofar as their subjugation will not be resolved by reforming banks or international institutions. The idea that debt, onerous interest payments, or labor exploitation will disappear under any restructuring of the global capitalist order is naïve, at best. Does anyone believe that debt, interest, or exploitation would dissolve if banks were reformed on the national level? If Goldman Sachs were dissolved?

It was a dream of post-World War II social democrats and many “popular-fronters” to construct a global trade architecture that would be “fair” to large and small, powerful and weak. They imagined institutions that would guarantee a fair playing field, while retaining capitalist exchange relations. Of course, those institutions have failed as they did with the earlier post-World War I project, the League of Nations. In both cases, the big and powerful came to dominate the institutions and continued to dominate the small and the weak. Why would anyone-- including Garrido-- expect a different result if the US would vacate its current position of dominance? Does history teach us nothing? 

Garrido has fallen under the sway of bourgeois economists like Michael Hudson, who dream of a debt jubilee under existing national and international conditions, thought to be attainable with the dethroning of the US as imperialism’s hegemon. Such memories of an ancient practice are distractions from today’s most urgent struggles.

It would be unconscionable to leave this question without noting Shea’s gratuitous slander of the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Shea’s identification of KKE with Trotskyism shows that he has little understanding of either. 

While the KKE is certainly more than capable of defending its position on issues that are critical for the left without my help, I must remind tweet-Communists of the long, principled, and illustrious history of Greek Communism, the Party’s role in defeating German, Italian, and Greek fascism, its sacrifices for national liberation and socialism, its ideological steadfastness, and-- most recently-- its determined effort to build Communist unity.

One can be critical of KKE without associating it with Trotskyism, without resorting to an anti-Communist slur. It diminishes the discussion and diminishes a participant with little or no experience or knowledge of the Communist movement.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com  

Imperialism, Multipolarity, and Palestine

It is a continuing source of frustration that an important segment of the left holds the view that weakening the United States’ long-established grip on the top rungs of the hierarchical system of imperialism is-- in itself-- an attack on imperialism. 

Many of our friends, including those who claim to aim at a socialist future, mistakenly see an erosion in the US position as the imperialist system’s hegemon as necessarily a step guaranteeing a just future, lasting peace, or a step towards socialism.

While it is true that those fighting the most powerful nation-state in the imperialist system for sovereignty, for autonomy, for a path of their own choosing always deserve our enthusiastic and complete support, victory in that fight may or may not secure a better future for working people. They may, as happened so often in the anti-colonial struggles of the post-war period, find themselves cursed with a power-hungry, exploitative, undemocratic local ruling class continuing or expanding the oppression of the people, but maybe with a more familiar face.

Or they might suffer the replacement of a former, declining or defeated great power by another more powerful great power. Germany and Turkey, defeated in World War I, lost many of their colonies to the victors; after World War II, some of Japan’s colonies were recolonized, falling into the clutches of another superior power; and, of course, Vietnam defeated France, only to be oppressed into the US sphere of interest-- a result decisively overturned by heroic Vietnam.

To contend that the decline or fall of the US as the leading great power in the imperialist system could close the book on imperialism is to grossly misunderstand imperialism. Imperialism lingers as a stage of capitalism as long as monopoly capitalism exists.The ultimate battle against imperialism is the struggle against capitalism.

We must not confuse the participants in the global imperialist system with the system itself, any more than we should equate individual capitalist corporations with the capitalist system itself.

History offers no example of a global or semi-global power falling or removed from the heights of its domination leading to a period of world-wide peace and prosperity. Neither the fall of the Roman or the Eastern Roman Empire or the Holy Roman Empire ushered in such a period of harmony. Nor did the rise and fall of the Venetian Republic, the Dutch Republic, or the Portuguese or Spanish colonial empires of the mercantilist era. In Lenin’s time, the rivalries challenging Britain’s global dominance brought world war rather than peace. And its aftermath brought no harmony. Instead, capitalist rivalries with Germany and Japan generated even more devastating aggression and war. And with the dissolution of the once dominant British Empire after the war, the US assumed and brutally enforced its position at the top of the hierarchy of global powers.There is no reason to believe that matters will change with the US knocked off its reigning perch. Capitalism and its tendency toward war and misery persist.

Thus, history provides no evidence for the supplanting of a unipolar world with a sustainable multipolar capitalist world of mutual respect and harmony. Multipolarity alone, as a solution to the oppression of imperialism, is, in fact, never found in world history.

Of course it may be factually true that United States dominance of the world imperialist system may be on the wane. Certainly, the decisive defeat in Vietnam was an enormous setback to the US government’s ability to dictate to weaker states. Further the defeat in Afghanistan after a twenty year war shows a weakening. The defiance of the DPRK and Cuba’s resilience also show limitations to US imperialism today.

Further, the rise of Peoples’ China as an economic powerhouse and as a sophisticated military power is perceived by the US government as both an economic and military adversary, though there is no reason to believe that the PRC presents any greater threat to the imperialist system than does the Papal State. Both today express well-deserved outrage at the worst excesses of imperialism, but make little material contribution to its overthrow.

Marginalizing, weakening, or defanging the arch-imperialist power is to be welcomed, though the left should suffer no illusion that the action would be an end to imperialism, a decisive blow against the capitalist system, or of long-lasting benefit of working people.

A recent example of the multipolarity fallacy-- the romantic illusion that imperialism is only US imperialism-- is the many leftist reports on the early September meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) attended by President Xi, President Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other Eurasian leaders. Professor Michael Hudson enthused that:

The principles announced by China’s President Xi, Russian President Putin and other SCO members set the stage for spelling out in detail the principle of a new international economic order along the lines that were promised 80 years ago at the end of World War II but have been twisted beyond all recognition into what Asian and other Global Majority countries hope will have been just a long detour in history away from the basic rules of civilization and its international diplomacy, trade and finance.

Hudson foresees a new economic order fulfilling a promise made eighty years ago. But he doesn’t tell us how a new capitalist international order will be different from the earlier capitalist international order, apart from the idealistic words of its advocates. He doesn’t explain how the inter-imperialist rivalries associated with capitalist great powers are to be avoided. He fails to show how the competitive, cut-throat nature of capitalist social-relations can be somehow tamed. He builds his case around high-minded words uttered at a conference, as if those or similar words were not uttered eighty years ago at the Bretton Woods conference.

Much has been made of the warm announcement by Xi and Modi that they are “partners not rivals”. But as the insightful Yves Smith relays:

A new Indian Punchline article, India disavows ‘Tianjin spirit’, turns to EU, reviews the idea that India is jumping with both feet into the SCO-BRICS camp is overdone. Key section from that post: 

….no sooner than Modi returned to Delhi, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had lined up the most hawkish anti-Russia gang of European politicians to consort with in an ostentatious display of distancing from the Russia-India-China troika.

To underscore the skepticism of the Indian Punchline article, Modi chose not to attend the virtual BRICS trade summit subsequently called by Brazilian President Lula da Silva.

In his place, minister Jaishankar chose the occasion to raise the issue of trade deficits with BRICS members, noting that they are responsible for India’s largest deficits and that India is expecting to secure a correction-- hardly a gesture of mutual confidence in India's BRICS brothers and sisters. It is more an example of geo-political bargaining.

Nor does Peoples’ China embrace the romantic idealism of our leftist friends”, as the following quote asserts:

“China is very cautious about working with these two countries [Russia and PDRK]. Unlike what is depicted in the West as them being allies, China is not in the same camp. Its view of warfare and security issues is very different from theirs,” said Tang Xiaoyang, chair of the department of international relations at Tsinghua University, pointing out that Beijing hasn’t fought a war for more than four decades. “What China wants is stability on its borders.”

One might conclude that the left’s hope in a BRICS led new, more just international order is little more than a chimera. BRICS appears to be, at best, an opportunistic economic alliance, with neither the political or military weight to press multipolarity on a unipolar world.

*****

There is. as well, a theoretical argument for a left investment in the idea of multipolarity as an answer to imperialism. It is an old argument. It was crafted by Karl Kautsky and advanced in an article entitled Ultra-imperialism and published in Die Neue Zeit in September, 1914, just a month after the beginning of World War I.

In short (I deal with the arguments more fully here, here, and here), Kautsky argued that the great powers would divide the world up among themselves and resolve to avoid further competition and rivalry. They would recognize the irrationality and counterproductiveness of aggression and war, opting for a harmonious imperialism that Kautsky called “ultra-imperialism”. He maintained that:

The frantic competition of giant firms, giant banks and multi-millionaires obliged the great financial groups, who were absorbing the small ones, to think up the notion of the cartel. In the same way, the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.

Similarly, today’s multipolaristas/ultra-imperialists envision a world in which a covey of powerful countries will expel the US from its leadership of the global capitalist system for its bad behavior, with its EU satrapy falling in line. In its place, they will create a new “harmonious”, “win-win” order that will eliminate the inequalities between the “global north” and the “global south”. The en-actors and enforcers of this new order will be a motley crew of class-divided, capitalist-oriented states led by an equally motley crew, including despots, theocrats, and populists. All but one of the BRICS+ espouse anything other than a firm allegiance to capitalism; most are hostile to any alternative social system like socialism.

Lenin, in a 1915 introduction to Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Revolution, mocked Kautsky’s argument and ideas like ultra-imperialism:

Reasoning theoretically and in the abstract, one may arrive at the conclusion reached by Kautsky… his open break with Marxism has led him, not to reject or forget politics, nor to skim over the numerous and varied political conflicts, convulsions and transformations that particularly characterise the imperialist epoch; nor to become an apologist of imperialism; but to dream about a "peaceful capitalism." "Peaceful" capitalism has been replaced by unpeaceful, militant, catastrophic imperialism… In this tendency to evade the imperialism that is here and to pass in dreams to an epoch of "ultra-imperialism," of which we do not even know whether it is realisable, there is not a grain of Marxism… For to-morrow we have Marxism on credit, Marxism as a promise, Marxism deferred. For to-day we have a petty-bourgeois opportunist theory -- and not only a theory -- of softening contradictions (quoted in my article cited above)

The key relevant thoughts here are “peaceful capitalism”, “Marxism on credit”, and “softening contradictions”. Lenin is shocked at Kautsky-- a self-styled Marxist-- even entertaining the notion of a peaceful capitalism, an idea that violates the very logic of capitalist social relations; it should be a wake-up call to multipolaristas.

“Marxism on credit” is a mockery of the notion that counting on some hoped for agreement between capitalist great powers to tame imperialism is as foolish as running your credit card to its limit. For multipolaristas, it is pushing the day of reckoning with capitalism off into the far, far distant future.

Likewise, Kautsky “softens” the contradiction between rival capitalist states by imagining an impossible agreement to guarantee “harmonious” relations, a proposition Lenin completely rejects. Concisely, Lenin sees Kautsky’s opportunism as a retreat from the socialist project. The same can be said for the multipolarity project.

Far too many on the left refuse to look at multipolarity through this lens of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, especially as expressed with considerable clarity in his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism.

Regarding the promise of multipolarity, Lenin here offers a hypothetical scenario where imperialist powers do manage to cut up the world and arrive at an alliance dedicated to peace and mutual prosperity. Would that idealized multipolar system-- what Kautsky calls “ultra-imperialism”-- succeed in eliminating “friction, conflicts and struggle in all and every possible form”?

The question need only be stated clearly enough to make it impossible for any other reply to be given than that in the negative… Therefore in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons [Hobson], or of the German “Marxist,” Kautsky, “inter-imperialist” or “ultra-imperialist” alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a “truce” in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one is a condition for the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle out of one and the same basis of imperialist connections and the relations between world economics and world politics. [Lenin’s emphasis]

Thus, while capitalism persists, Lenin makes the case for unabated intra-class struggle on the international level, struggles that manifest as inter-imperialist rivalry and war.

Of course it is possible to reject Lenin’s argument, even Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It is also possible to praise Lenin’s views as relevant for its time, but inapplicable today, in light of the many changes in global capitalism. That would be to say that the system of imperialism that Lenin set out to analyze no longer exists, replaced by a different system.

There is a precedent for correcting Lenin’s theory. Kwame Nkrumah, writing in 1965, showed that imperialism had largely abandoned the colonial project in favor of a more rational, efficient, but still brutally exploitative form of imperialism: neo-colonialism. His book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism makes that case persuasively.

One cannot assume that Lenin’s is the final word on today’s imperialism.

And that is the tactic that Carlos Garrido takes in his recent essay, Why Russia and China are NOT Imperialist: A Marxist-Leninist Assessment of Imperialism’s Development Since 1917. Garrido ambitiously explores many subjects in this brief essay, including the errors of “Dogmatic Marxist-Leninists”, the place-- if any-- of Russia and the PRC in the imperialist system, Marxist methodology, the contemporary status of finance capital, Michael Hudson’s notion of super imperialism, the significance of Bretton Woods and the abandonment of the gold standard, as well as the relevance of Lenin’s theory of imperialism to today’s global economy.

Addressing all of these issues would take us far away from the current discussion, though they deserve further study.

To the point, he writes:

It appears to me that the imperialist stage Lenin correctly assessed in 1917 undergoes a partially qualitative development in the post-war years with the development of the Bretton Woods system. This does not make Lenin “wrong,” it simply means that his object of study – which he correctly assessed at his time of writing – has undertaken developments which force any person committed to the same Marxist worldview to correspondingly refine their understanding of imperialism. Bretton Woods transforms imperialism from an international to a global phenomenon, embodied no longer through imperialist great powers, but through global financial institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) controlled by the U.S. and structured with dollar hegemony at its core.

He adds that with Nixon’s move from the gold-standard, “imperialism becomes synonymous with U.S. unipolarity and hegemonism.”

This is wrong. As Garrido affirms, “Imperialism [in Lenin’s time] was not simply a political policy (as the Kautskyites held), but an integral development of the capitalist mode of life itself.” [my emphasis]

Likewise imperialism today is not a set of political policies, but an essential expression of contemporary capitalism.

Yet Garrido follows Kautsky in confusing today’s imperialism with a set of political policies: Bretton Woods and the US withdrawal from the gold- standard. The entire post-war trade and financial infrastructure was the result of policy decisions. They were shaped not by a “new” imperialism, but by the overwhelming economic power of the US after the war. As Garrido knows, that asymmetry is being challenged today, but it is a challenge to the policies or the power enjoyed by the US and not to the imperialist system.

The “transformation” that Garrido believes he sees is simply a reordering of the international system that existed before the war with New York now replacing London as the financial center of the capitalist universe. It is the replacement of the vast colonial world and the bloody rivalries and shifting alliances and hierarchies of the interwar world with the creation of a neo-colonial system dominated by the US and reinforced by its assumption of the role of guardian of capitalism in the Cold War. The monopoly capitalist base is qualitatively the same, but its superstructure changes with historical circumstances. The Bretton Woods system and the later discarding of the gold standard reflect those changing circumstances.

How does Garrido’s “new” imperialism function?

What matters is that capitalism has developed into a higher stage, that the imperialism Lenin wrote of is no longer the “latest” stage of capitalism, that it has given way – through its immanent dialectical development – to a new form marked by a deepening of its characteristic foundation in finance capital. We are finally in the era of capitalist-imperialism Marx predicted in Volume Three of Capital, where the dominant logic of accumulation has fully transformed from M-C-M’ to M-M’, that is, from productive capital to interest-bearing, parasitic finance capital.

Garrido’s reference to volume III of Capital would seem to be at odds with mine and others’ reading of that volume. In chapter 51, the last complete chapter, Marx, via Engels, brings matters back to the beginning, to commodity production. He dispels the view that there is any independent source of value in distribution-- in circulation, rent or “profit”. It is wage labor in commodity production that produces value in the capitalist mode of production. That is why Marx notes in Volume III that “The real science of modern economy only begins when the theoretical analysis passes from the process of circulation to the process of production.” (Vol. III, International Publishers, p.337).

Of course Marx acknowledges stock markets and would not be shocked by the financial sector's suite of exotic instruments like derivatives and swaps. Marx explains them under the rubric: "fictitious capital”. By “fictitious” Marx means forward-looking-- promissory notes against future value or “bets”. They circulate among capitalists and are acquired as contingent value. They become attractive in times of overaccumulation-- the super-concentration of capital in few hands-- when investment opportunities in the productive economy grow slim. And they disappear miraculously when the future that they depend upon does not materialize.

Garrido’s misunderstanding of the international role of finance capital leads him to make the claim that “...the lion's share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest.” At its peak before the great crash of 2007-2009, finance (broadly speaking, finance, insurance, real estate) accounted for maybe forty percent of US profits; today, with the NASDAQ techs, the percentage is likely less. But that is only US profits. With deindustrialization, industrial commodity production has shifted to the PRC, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other low-wage areas and the US has become the center of world finance. If commodity production sneezes, the whole edifice of fictitious capital collapses, along with its fictitious profits.

As all three volumes of Capital explain in great detail, commodity production is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and wage-labor is the source of value, not the mystifying maneuvers of Wall Street grifters.

Garrido joins many leftist defenders of multipolarity in decoupling imperialism from the capitalist system, whether through revising the mechanism of exploitation, denying the logic of capitalist competition and rivalry, or redefining its characteristics. Garrido’s unique contribution to this maneuver is to locate the injustice of imperialism not in labor exploitation, but in “debt and interest”.

In the world of left multipolaristas, the real anti-imperialists are the BRICS states (for Garrido, Russia and the PRC). But for those of a lesser theoretical bent, for those reluctant to go into the weeds of theoretical debate, we have a handy litmus test: Palestine. If a genocidal assault on the Palestinian people by a greater-Israel theocratic state is the signal imperialist act of this moment, where are these anti-imperialists? Have they organized international opposition, stopped trade, imposed sanctions, withdrawn recognition or cooperation, sent volunteer fighters, or otherwise offered material resistance?

In the past, Chinese and Soviet material, physical aid benefited Vietnam fighting imperialism; the Soviets pushed to the brink of war to support Cuba against imperial threats in the early 1960s; the Cubans fought and died in Angola against imperialism and apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. Even the US joined the Soviet Union in thwarting British, French, and Israeli imperial designs on the Suez Canal in 1956.

Will today’s acclaimed “anti-imperialists” step up or is multipolarity all talk?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Antonio Gramsci: Theirs and Ours

It has been forty-eight years since Eric Hobsbawm delivered a paper, Gramsci and Political Theory, before the Gramsci Conference held on March 5-6, 1977 (Reprinted as an article in Marxism Today, July, 1977).

Hobsbawm, contemplatively, reviews the forty years that had transpired since Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937 after over a decade in a fascist prison. For the first ten years (1937-1947) Gramsci was virtually unknown outside of Italy, where Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti sought to integrate Gramsci-thought into the PCI’s work. 

The next decade (1947-1957) found Gramsci’s influence in Italy expanding even beyond Communist circles, establishing him as an important national cultural figure. 

It is with the third decade (1957-1967) that Gramsci became familiar to many people outside of Italy, with interest especially strong in the English-speaking world as noted by Hobsbawm. The recent strong critique of Stalin in the world Communist movement and the post-war strength and independence of the Gramsci-influenced PCI played a role in expanding the influence of Gramsci. Though not mentioned by Hobsbawm, the first (1957) limited US publication of Gramsci’s works was a brief (64 page) translation/commentary by Carl Marzani, Man and Society, published by the indomitable, Cold War-defiant publisher Cameron Associates. Marzani’s admiration and view of Gramsci as a model and contrast to Soviet practices is readily apparent.

With the fourth decade (1967-1977), Hobsbawm maintains that “Gramsci has become part of our intellectual universe. His stature as an original Marxist thinker-- in my view the most original such thinker produced in the west since 1917-- is pretty generally admitted… Such typically Gramscian terms as ‘hegemony’ occur in Marxist and even in non-Marxist, discussions of politics and history as casually, and sometimes as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars”. 

By 1977, Hobsbawm’s thinking was converging with the emergent school of Eurocommunism, perhaps helping to explain his estimation of Gramsci’s importance.

Would Hobsbawm-- if he were alive today-- be surprised that, nearly a half century after he made his address in London, Antonio Gramsci’s most influential admirers were thinkers on the Trump right? Would he be shocked to see an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist? 

The WSJ reports:

Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S… For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Author Kevin T. Dugan notes that many international right-populist leaders pay homage to Gramsci, including Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Jair Bolsonaro, while Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, told Tucker Carlson that “he had to wage a culture war every single day” against opponents who “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques; seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”

Other right-wing intellectuals have adopted Gramsci, according to the WSJ:

Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”

More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President JD Vance, have talked about how to capture power through a culture war.

Regardless of how selectively MAGA appropriates Gramsci-thought, however differently right-populists interpret Gramsci from his original intent, the mere fact that Gramsci is taken far more seriously by the right than by all but the Marxist left is cause for deep reflection. 

The right sees politics as a contest-- even a war-- over how people interpret the world. They borrow this notion from how Gramsci writes about ideology. They intend to conduct that war with fervor. 

Conversely, the center-left and even some “Marxists” embrace a market-model that imagines a forum of idea-sellers, who fairly exchange and value ideas. In this fantasy, everyone has an equal voice. They imagine that institutions like universities and media forms are neutral social and political instruments that objectively pursue, project, and protect the unvarnished truth.

Like Gramsci, the populist-right recognizes that the ideological superstructure-- what the right broadly and cynically calls “culture” -- is always captured by social forces. For Gramsci, following Marx, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Gramsci roughly quotes this from memory often, throughout The Prison Notebooks). Unlike the populist-right, Gramsci sees the forces shaping ideas as those constructed and maintained by the ruling capitalists.

When “Reaganism” arrived on the scene decades ago, astute left observers noted that “class war had broken out, with only one side fighting,” a commentary on the ineffectual labor movement. 

Today, with the Trump-right attacking the universities, public media, school books, publishers, law firms, and other aspects of the superstructure, it can be said that “cultural” war has broken out, with only one side fighting, a commentary on the ineffectual center-left.  

Quite obvious, the populist-right has-- crudely appropriating Gramsci-- launched a cultural war on hollow, complacent institutions blind to their own vulnerability.

Lessons for the Left

As Hobsbawm points out, by 1977 Gramsci-thought was becoming as popular and used “as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars.” Subsequently, Gramsci quote-mongering became fashionable and academic hipness was often assured by grounding discourse in the more enigmatic writings of Gramsci. “Hegemony” became one of the most used and misused words in the academic lexicon. Since most of Gramsci’s prison writings were necessarily cast in coded language, his thought lent itself to broad interpretation and misinterpretation. 

Too often “hegemony” was understood as a writer’s personal interpretation of ruling-class dominance: something richer and more extensive than the simple statement in the Manifesto that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Gramsci is explicit in exposing “the hegemony of a social group [‘beyond the dictatorship of coercive apparatus’] over the entire national society exercised through the so-called private organizations such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.” -- not exactly an earth-shaking conclusion for Leninists in his time, but well worth endorsing. 

As Hobsbawm points out: “What is new in Gramsci is the observation that even bourgeois hegemony is not automatic but achieved through conscious political action and organization.” That is the lesson that the MAGA right draws, even if Gramsci’s left acolytes miss it.

In addition, hegemony is not merely an analytic tool for understanding capitalist-class rule, but, in Hobsbawm’s words, it is a “struggle to turn the working class into a potential ruling class” that “must be waged before the transition to power, as well as during and after it.” Liberals and social democrats who pay homage to Gramsci’s grasp of the mechanisms of class power, show no interest in Gramsci’s primary interest in establishing competitive, alternative mechanisms: media, entertainment, schools, activities, recreation, governance, and social life. He saw a need for preserving and protecting what was good and useful in existing working-class ethos and culture, while constructing what was even better for the future. Togliatti and the PCI sought to establish that hegemony in Italy’s Red Belt with different degrees of success. Italian Communist--influenced cinema, from Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Bitter Rice to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 Novecento, represent that attempt made available to international audiences.

Nothing like this conscious collective attempt to nourish and promote working-class cultural life has been attempted on any scale in the US since the demise of the pre-neutered Congress of Industrial Organizations. Even the days of an independent radio station (WCFL, in Chicago) are past.

As Hobsbawm explains, “The basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though that question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guide and rulers.” Two examples from Hobsbawm are telling: “The Polish communists in 1945 were probably not accepted as a hegemonic force, though they were ready to be one… The German social-democrats in 1918 would probably have been accepted as a hegemonic force, but they did not act as one.”

Marxist-Leninists in many, but not all, capitalist countries are cut off today from working-class life-- they are led by intellectuals, but not organic intellectuals, paraphrasing Gramsci-- with no vital connection to working-class life. 

Apart from the Communist Parties, leftists have willfully or from ignorance failed to acknowledge that Gramsci wrote as a Leninist, accepting the critical importance of a vanguard party (The Prince), though he had ideas about party organization that reflected conditions peculiar to Italy in his time (e.g., the Turin movement). Without a party, no sense can be made of an “organic” connection to the working class. 

John Womack reminds us that Gramsci’s “original” thoughts are often elaborations on ongoing debates in the Marxist movement. For example, the military-sounding contrast between wars of position and wars of maneuver predate Gramsci’s argument, with the Kautsky-Luxemburg dispute over the strategy of attrition versus the strategy of overthrow. These debates were carried forward into the early Comintern and played an important role in shaping Communist strategy.

It is commonplace on the left to view Gramsci’s idea of a “war of position” as a passive interregnum between the “wars of maneuver” where the working class and its allies can directly challenge the capitalist class from a position of relative strength. Too often this idea of positional warfare has been interpreted to be a period of defensive treading water. In the US, Gramsci’s war of position has often been used as a justification for supporting the Democratic Party in its turf war with the other bourgeois party or as grounds for taking a back seat to other organizations in an unnegotiated united front.

Hobsbawm addresses this misreading of Gramsci:

[T]he failure of revolution in the West might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress by means of what he called “passive revolution.” On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and ward off revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system… In short, the “war of position” had to be systematically thought out as a fighting strategy rather than something to do for revolutionaries when there is no prospect of building barricades. (my emphasis)

Today’s left often neglects the essential questions of place and time in evaluating Gramsci’s thinking. Hobsbawm is careful to point out that Gramsci was writing about specifically Italian conditions and lessons for the Italian left: “Italy in Gramsci’s day had a number of historical peculiarities which encouraged original departures in Marxist thinking.” Hobsbawm discusses six “peculiarities” in great detail.

In addition, it is necessary to note when Gramsci was writing, as well as when Hobsbawm was commenting on Gramsci.

Writing from prison with Italian fascism securing its hold over Italy, Gramsci was understandably motivated to take a critical eye toward the tactics and strategy of the PCI, as much forward looking as retrospectively. Hence, his revisiting the Southern question. It would be ill-advised to generalize his conclusions to every revolutionary project under different conditions.

Further, Hobsbawm writes at a time (1977) when the PCI’s electoral share was growing (34%, up 7%, 1976), when the PCI committed to a Gramsci-inspired historical compromise, and Eurocommunism was on the rise. At the same time, the Portuguese revolution-- met with great expectations by the socialist left-- appeared to be dashing those expectations and heading toward conciliation with the mainstream European community. Hobsbawm, like others favoring the Eurocommunist road, turned to Gramsci for an explanation: “...we see in countries in which there has been a revolutionary overthrow of the old rulers, such as Portugal, in the absence of hegemonic force even revolutions can run into sand.” History was not kind to Eurocommunism and the PCI project.

Perhaps the most cited Gramsci quote is: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The great blacklisted, expatriate director, Joseph Losey, used the Gramsci quote, to good effect, as the preamble to his film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Others have used it to introduce the many crises that have afflicted the capitalist system.

One could argue that we are in just such an interregnum today, with the capitalist system struggling to continue ruling in the “old way.”

Therefore, there may be much that we can learn from Gramsci. But we must remember that he remained a Leninist. If he were alive today, he would be searching for the party capable of giving birth to the new.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com