No Quarter for Imperialism: Holding the Line in Our Discourse
by Comrade Lissitsky
One of the key divisions within the so-called left occurs around the question of criticizing official enemies. There is an array of states in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism — China, Venezuela, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, etc. — and a corresponding array of self-proclaimed leftists who join with the U.S. in demonizing them. They denounce said country’s political system, calling it imperialist, totalitarian, and so on, or they denounce such and such a crime, like the chemical attack in Douma or the detention program in Xinjiang. Then there is a second group of people who point the finger back at the first: the demonizers are pro-imperialist, doing the U.S.’s work for it, abandoning the socialist imperative of international solidarity. The first group fire back: we are the ones practicing true anti-imperialism and international solidarity.
Unraveling this debate, the key question is: when, if ever, should we join with the Amerikan settler government in denouncing the enemy? Is it possible that the U.S., for all its flaws, sometimes picks deserving targets for regime change? If so, what do we lose or gain by conceding that both sides deserve criticism?
Don’t legitimize the premises of imperialism
Joining with the imperialists to critique their enemies means switching sides in the global class war. It is nothing short of treachery, and the practical implications are no less dire.
We must begin by grasping that this discourse does not occur in a vacuum. Ideological warfare is just another front of the global class war, and the imperialists understand this all too well. These days regime change is less an affair of violence and more of “peaceful” protest, where the weapons are CIA-backed media outlets and nonprofits. Resistance at home is corralled through psychological operations, including a variety of undercover media infiltration campaigns. William Casey, the CIA director who oversaw Iran-Contra, famously stated that “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
This is achieved through a vast apparatus of information warfare. A small circle of capitalists own all the leading television outlets and newspapers. Many of these capitalists have relationships with the national security state — for example the Washington Post is famously friendly with the intelligence community, as are both its current and former owners. Many media moguls without direct ties to intelligence also toe the national-security line out of economic rationality, understanding that their investments are more valuable under an expansive U.S. empire. Censorship comes either from the corporate bosses or the national security state itself. Sometimes writers are directly employed by U.S. intelligence.
The result is to bathe the imperial core in an ocean of propaganda. The Amerikan way of life is sanitized for its obedient consumers; California’s holocaust, CIA drug-running, and the Donbas war, along with thousands of other key historical events, are wiped away to make room for the idea that although the world is a violent place, at least the good guys are winning. (In fact, because the world is such a violent place, a lot of blood must be shed to make peace.) On the other side, life behind the iron curtain is made to look like a Pandora’s box of horrors, too scary to even learn about. Any whiff of criminality in the enemy states is seized on with Watergate-level indignation. These countries are demonized for their broken economies, with scarcely a mention of the role of the U.S. sanctions. Even attempts to circumvent the illegal sanctions are reported on like an act of war.
In this context, adding to the imperialist chorus of criticism means, quite literally, serving as a volunteer employee of the State Department. We can see this dynamic play out in real time. The national security state has a volunteer army of “leftist” propagandists. They are the make-or-break segment that allows the survival of the mainstream consensus on, for example, arming Ukraine or blockading Syria.
Let us examine Syria as a case study. The anti-Assad “leftists” deny the charge of “imperialist.” They claim to dissent from aspects of U.S. policy in Syria. They claim to support a grassroots democratic movement, without violent intervention by the U.S., or they uphold “Rojava” (the Kurdish independence movement in the north of Syria) as an alternative to both U.S. occupation and the central government. However, despite their best efforts, this camp is still doing valuable work for the empire. They validate the U.S.’s central contention: that Assad’s “crimes” caused U.S. intervention. In so doing, they either forgive or obscure a litany of U.S. state terror on the people of Syria. U.S. sanctions have collapsed the Syrian economy. The U.S. and Israel have expropriated over 80% of Syria’s oil capacity, either through direct occupation or use of the Kurdish proxy force. The U.S. flooded the jihadist community with weapons, sowing the seeds of ISIS, and it tacitly supports the al-Qaeda affiliate that occupies Idlib province. In the wake of the devastating 2023 earthquake, House Democrats voted unanimously to maintain the sanctions, and Israel bombed civilian targets in Damascus. Even the U.S.-backed democratic movement of 2011 turns out to have been more violent and more jihadist than the Western press had ever let on. The U.S. has destroyed a sovereign, prosperous country, creating a war that killed 350,000 people. There is simply no comparison to Assad’s alleged crimes (if they even occurred at all).
The heart of the matter is not even the nature of the allegations against Assad, but the reason the allegations were made in the first place. The U.S. and all its various clients, from Israel to Indonesia, are all implicated in crimes of overwhelming magnitude. Saudi Arabia bombed Yemeni water treatment plants to manufacture a cholera epidemic, under the approving gaze of a Democratic president. South Korea’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship lasted from 1948 to 1987, and the Gwangju massacre of 1980 is just one fraction of its crimes. There is no loud, public campaign to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia or to prosecute the former leaders of South Korea. Such campaigns are reserved — by both the U.S. government and the Western “left” — for a certain kind of country: any which has the audacity to chart its own course, independent of U.S. hegemony. By conceding so much as an inch to the campaign against Assad, we have already lost the whole game. We have legitimated the regime-change project.
Indeed, the debate over “Assad’s crimes” misses the mark. We can all agree that there should be democratic reforms and rising living standards in Syria. But the question is, how? The planners in Washington think U.S. military occupation should be the vehicle of change, aiming to repeat their track record in Iraq. Anti-imperialists, by contrast, seek a peaceful transition to a yet more sovereign, yet more independent, yet more socialist society on the road to a classless, stateless society. Westerners thought they could make a tactical alliance with the imperialists, for the temporary goal of removing an oppressive “regime.” They did not appreciate the consequences. They thought they were pushing democracy, but in actual fact — in the real movement of political power — they were pushing tyranny.
Understand that “foreign policy” isn’t “foreign”
What about the argument that we should be against oppression in all its forms? Yes, Washington is a brutal oppressor, but what about those other oppressors out in the world? Don’t their victims deserve our solidarity, in line with socialist internationalism? Raising slogans like “Neither Washington nor Beijing,” this camp attempts to escape the factional maze and return to Marxist basics, like supporting workers’ struggle for economic rights.
The problem with this approach is that it obscures the actual map of political power. The settler bourgeoisie is quite pleased by all this concern over the plight of Chinese workers. The imperialists gin up concern to power a New Cold War, with the end goal of China’s collapse and re-enslavement. Who stands to benefit from Washington’s supposed campaign to empower Chinese workers and end the “Uyghur genocide”? It is only rational to assume that it will
As Lenin pointed out in 1916:
[a socialist] cannot expose the government and bourgeoisie of a country at war with “his own” nation, and not only because he does not know that country’s language, history, specific features, etc., but also because such exposure is part of imperialist intrigue, and not an internationalist duty.
Crucially, as the empire extends its power over China and the rest of the world — adding to its 800 military bases, squeezing out new superprofits, snuffing out independent economic arrangements — it tightens the boot on its worker’s necks. The campaign against Syria, China, and the other enemy states is fundamentally a campaign against the U.S.-based working class. In 1870 Marx pointed out the utility of national chauvinism to the bourgeoisie, stating that the antagonism of the English working class towards the Irish is “the secret of its impotence.” He wrote:
Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the N*groes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
The same dynamics repeat themselves in our present day. Taught to hate the leaders of China and Syria and their respective political projects, the masses natural turn toward hatred of the Chinese and Syrian people, as seen in the recent rash of terrorism against Chinese people in the imperial core, or the white supremacist backlash against Syrian refugees in Europe. The principles underlying the Chinese and Syrian national project, namely sovereign, independent, and self-sustaining development, are trashed at the expense of American exceptionalism: the attitude that every corner of the world is better off (if not well off) under U.S. stewardship. Under such political persuasion, the masses in the imperial core are steered away from international solidarity and national consciousness. And yet these are the key principles which must underly any liberation movement in the imperial core. The revolution here will be made by the vast array of colonized nations that make up the bedrock of exploited labor.
Again, we are faced with an objective political reality that stubbornly exists, despite the best intentions of the Western critic.
“Hide nothing from the masses of our people”
Dialectical materialism is the intellectual weapon of the oppressed, the basis of the Marxist world outlook. In explaining dialectics Stalin writes,
[I]nternal contradictions are inherent in all things and phenomena of nature, for they all have their negative and positive sides, a past and a future, something dying away and something developing. . . . [T]he process of development from the lower to the higher takes place not as a harmonious unfolding of phenomena, but as a disclosure of the contradictions inherent in things and phenomena, as a “struggle” of opposite tendencies which operate on the basis of these contradictions.
Taking a dialectical view, one can never state that a thing possesses only a good or a bad quality. When bourgeois essayists claim that Amerika has an unalloyed “hunger for freedom,” we know they’re lying; Amerikan freedom has always had a dark side. When a pundit calls Russia’s invasion “completely unprovoked,” this is likewise dishonest, implying that Putin acts in a vacuum with malice and the West only reacts. In reality, both sides were locked in dialectical motion from the beginning. Up through late 2021, the U.S. was offering NATO membership to Ukraine, thus flirting with a red line that Moscow had laid down publicly.
Amílcar Cabral famously wrote “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. . . . Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” Indeed, as socialists we can always do the bourgeois propagandist one better. When we “defend” a country from imperialist attacks, we do so with full candor that the country has its flaws. In fact, each society internalizes great contradictions, resulting in fierce protest and sometimes transformative change. Repression and suffering will exist everywhere, but all societies must undertake their own independent reckoning with their own contradictions. Under the leadership of a people’s goverment, contradictions among the people can be mitigated and eventually resolved, but even those countries without rule by the people will get there sooner if they are free of U.S. intervention. The path to liberation is not painless, but under U.S. domination all roads lead to misery and oppression.
Remember how high the stakes are
We are organizing to win, not to live the activist lifestyle. Choices that dictate how our organizations grow, form coalitions, or identify enemies and allies will make or break both the short-term and long-term course of our movement.
The Bolshevik Party began as a small circle of exiled revolutionaries, corresponding by mail. Even in that era, critical choices were made that formed the bedrock of Lenin’s party-building project. In particular, the 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? prescribes a series of principles that would become mainstays of the communist movement. The most relevant for our purposes is political discipline. Denouncing so-called “freedom of criticism,” Lenin wrote:
“Freedom” is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labour, the working people were robbed. The modern use of the term “freedom of criticism” contains the same inherent falsehood. (Sec. I.A.)
“Freedom of criticism” was, then as now, a watchword of opportunism. By replacing that false freedom with revolutionary discipline — controlling speech and messaging in concert with the most advanced revolutionary strategy — the Russian Social Democrats, and later Bolsheviks, were able to stamp out opportunism and form a robust vanguard party.
Similar to Lenin’s time, we are in the throes of a bloody class war, and those who seek liberation find themselves under brutal repression. Though our circles are small now, the choices we make in defining those circles can make or break our movement. The question of theoretical integrity is not an academic one. With an opportunist stance, we invite enemies to infiltrate our organization, and we channel the popular energy in a direction that supports rather than threatens settler power. With a revolutionary stance, we become the polestar of the masses, sharpen the popular energy into a weapon, and aim it at the heart of settler imperialism. The difference between the two is critical. Will we seize the time, like the Bolsheviks did in 1905 and 1917? Or will we watch the upsurge come and go, like the long hot summer of 2020?
Conclusion: Hold the line against imperialism
At every turn we anti-imperialists are smeared as apologists for demons, and in every era some of us have seized that tempting opportunity to save face by joining the imperialist camp. But we knew this wouldn’t be easy. The revolution will only be made with iron discipline, firm commitment to principle, and an unwavering love for the masses. We will continue to glorify those signal events where the people became the masters of their own destiny. Eventually, we will have our own victory against settler capitalism, and the colonized and oppressed masses in all corners of the empire will stand up and breathe the fresh air of freedom.
