Reply to William Robinson’s critique of the ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Left

On August 7, 2023, William Robinson shared his article, “The Unbearable Manicheanism of the ‘Anti Imperialist’ Left,” on Science & Society’s editorial board email list. He triggered an intense — still ongoing — discussion. This was my first response to his article. All comments — especially critical ones — are welcome.

William’s thoughtful piece, “The Unbearable Manicheanism of the ‘Anti Imperialist’ Left,” has triggered a vital discussion in Science & Society’s editorial board listserv. This is a theme that recurs periodically in the socialist movement. My two-cent critical (perhaps excessively verbose) reflections follow.

William aims his critique at “a self-declared ‘anti-imperialist’ left that condemns capitalist exploitation and repression when practiced by the U.S. and other Western powers or the governments they support, yet turns a blind eye to, or even defends repressive, authoritarian, and dictatorial states simply because these states face hostility from Washington.”

Should one imply from this that leftists (such as Marxist socialists or communists) must criticize, denounce, and fight all exploitation, repression, and dictatorship equally, with the same intensity and urgency, regardless of socio-historical context? If so, then I cannot agree.

In abstract theoretical work, class relations can be viewed in their “pure” economic form, unmixed with other social and historical determinations. This work has direct practical use in that it helps us to grasp (in a broad historical sense) what is fundamentally required to uproot any form of systematic exploitation and abuse. But the radical ambition of building a socialist society worldwide cannot be accomplished overnight.

More concretion is needed for a socialist-enlightened workers’ movement to advance in the day to day. In our midst nowadays, it all seems to fall into either academic work or activism. But Marxists used to distinguish theoretical work from “propaganda” (educational work concerned with strategic orientation over longer periods) and “agitation” (work aimed at informing tactical actions in immediate local struggles). In the latter sense, the significance of capitalist production in — say — China and the US cannot be equated.

Similarly, “authoritarianism” (Putin’s, that of the Islamic clerics in Iran, that of China’s Communist-led state, etc.) cannot be evaluated in abstraction from the historical conditions in which each of these state formations emerged and from their specific insertion in today’s world. The natural resistance that capitalism engenders wherever it operates, the local struggles that confront it in each place and time, have to be considered case by case, evaluated in terms of their specific weight in the overall socialist movement.

In momentous times, it is not a philosophical inclination toward simplification or “manichaeism,” but the logic of head-on conflict that collapses a wide range of possible choices into inescapable disjunctives, where one necessarily falls on one side of the conflict. Because, by the law of cause and effect, actions and omissions have consequences. One votes the war budget up or down. One storms the Winter Palace or not. One supports the US’ attempt to derail China’s economic expansion or not. One sides with the coup in Niger or aids the French and US’s moves to suppress it.

William claims, “The left never saw capitalist development in the West as a victory for the working class nor did it lose sight of the link between this development and the law of combined and uneven accumulation in the world capitalist system.”

If Marx, Lenin, and followers are included in the “left,” then the first part of William’s sentence is not factually correct. In several historical instances, Marx and Lenin did regard the development of capitalist exploitation as a historically progressive step that assisted the workers’ struggle for socialism.

Examples abound. Vis-à-vis slave plantation production in the Southern US, Marx strongly supported the industrial capitalist Union in the US Civil War. Facing Russia’s “economic backwardness,” the prevalence of a rural “natural economy” and petty commodity production, Lenin’s late works insisted on prompting the Soviet state to promote the development of capitalist production in its state and private varieties. He viewed private and state capitalism as more conducive to socialist construction than “backward” economic forms. The NEP initiative was advocated on these grounds.

So what? Marx and Lenin may have been wrong then and now. Or they may have been right then but wrong now.

William notes that “The politics of capitalist exploitation and social control around the world are fundamentally shaped by the contradiction between a globally-integrated economy and a nation-state-based system of political domination. Economic globalization and the transnational integration of capitals provide a centripetal impulse to global capitalism whereas political fragmentation gives a powerful centripetal [I think William means ‘centrifugal’ here] counterimpulse that is resulting in an escalation of geopolitical conflict.”

This formulation seems essentially correct to me. It is indeed an ongoing contradiction. Much more acute today than in Marx’s or Lenin’s times. Even though this statement appears to be more hedged than William’s claims elsewhere, it still exposes what I believe is the theoretical underpinning of his argument against the “anti-imperialist” left.

If I understand him well, William views imperialism as capital’s drive to expand internationally, integrating the world into a tighter, more densely socialized world economy. It may not necessarily manifest as conflict between nation-states or exploitation of periphery by center. In his view, as presented elsewhere, imperialism flows from normal capitalist behavior, though under various forms along the different stages of capitalist development.

Therefore, what William means by anti-imperialism (without quotes) is opposition to regular surplus value extraction in the international sphere. This is not what some Marxists (myself included) mean by anti-imperialism. What some of us mean by it is something akin to what the 2nd Congress of the 3rd International (summer of 1920) conveyed in their pledge to support the struggle against colonialism and the fight of subordinated nations for liberation from the economic and political domination of richer capitalist nations.

Now, if the condition of peripheral nations is to be distinguished from regular capitalist exploitation, then imperialism must entail systematic super-exploitation. I posted here my view on the importance of this shift in the strategic perspective of Marxists (pushed mainly by Lenin).

This strategic shift recognized that the struggle of the large mass of the world’s direct producers for self-determination in nations under colonial and imperial subjugation belonged in the front and center of the socialist struggle.

The record of the 2nd International is mixed. But, in 1900, Rosa Luxemburg denounced the German support of the war against China. It’s also known that Karl Kautsky (and August Bebel, whom William cites) vacillated between support for Eduard Bernstein’s pro-colonial stance and Luxemburg’s radical anti-colonial stance. In tune with the widespread racist prejudices prevailing at the time that viewed people in most of the world as incapable of autonomous agency, Bebel believed that a “humane” but ultimately patronizing form of colonialism was necessary.

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels had noted that “not in substance, but in form,” the workers’ struggle against the bourgeoisie was “at first a national struggle.” Others have argued persuasively that the 3rd International’s shift in perspective was, in a sense, the logical conclusion of Marx’s intellectual evolution, taking him from viewing (ca. 1850) resistance to colonialism in China and India as favorable to the European workers to (ca. 1870) viewing Irish independence as the necessary precursor of the revolution in England, and to (ca. 1880) reassessing the role of Russia in the struggle for socialism in the world.

The preexisting historical inequalities in economic and political (military) power across nations, baked during the colonial period, reinforced and widened under capitalism, from which the abuse of the weaker nations by the powerful ones flowed, created massive obstacles to the unity of the global working class. The first order of business for socialism was to remove these obstacles. The struggle against the economic and political subordination imposed by imperialism in most of the world would now be regarded as a necessary precondition for global socialist construction. For the time being, socialism (and proletarian internationalism in particular) would take the form of anti-imperialism.

The development of the productive force of global labor as a force productive of socialism involved the unity of a critical mass of the workers of the world. The global unity of the workers required, as a necessary preparatory step, giving priority to the development of the mass of humanity in the oppressed nations, a development that could only take place through their own agency, agency that antagonized colonial tutelage and imperialist domination. It was indeed a corollary of the motto of the 1864’s 1st International: “The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves.”

In practice, in some historical episodes more than in others, the effective subordination of Communist activity in the world to the interests of the Soviet state vitiated the implementation of these strategic principles. But, in principle, this strategic vision didn’t have to limit, in general, the ability of workers in the richer capitalist nations to confront their local rulers or conquer political power. (Lenin argued that imperialist super-profits permitted the capitalists in the richer countries to bribe and pacify their workers, thus granting those states with privileged stability. The “weakest links of the chain” were to be found elsewhere.) What this strategy did impose on them was a general obligation to wage their battles in ways that, if not helpful, at least would not harm the wider anti-imperialist struggle.

Though people’s ability to contribute to the socialist struggle in the longer run involved their overcoming racist and jingoist prejudices and practicing solidarity with those conducting direct anti-imperialist struggle, taking part in tactical battles against the rulers in the imperialist centers did not require that people checked those prejudices at the door. In the broader movement, people didn’t have to share the entire socialist strategic vision, with anti-imperialism at its core.

In the periphery, for historical reasons, opposition to colonialism and imperialism was not necessarily led or capitalized by workers, peasants, and other popular classes and their more radical political representatives. A broad coalition of classes, including local bourgeoisies, might form and be required to have a fighting chance in confronting colonial and imperialist forces. Each sector of the coalition had its own set of priorities. Radical dispositions varied widely among them.

By its heterogeneous character, an anti-imperialist coalition would be subject to internal vying for hegemony between radical and conservative wings. Often, a coalition would form around the existing state of a peripheral nation, even if “authoritarian,” when it resisted outside imperialist pressure. (The quotes are to indicate that states, by definition, are authoritarian; though, yes, there are degrees and important formal differences.)

Inherent to this socialist strategic vision was a tension between strengthening the broader coalition and asserting the specific demands of workers and other popular classes. Navigating this tension was not going to be easy. What was clear was that the resolution of the internal struggle for hegemony in an anti-imperialist coalition was incumbent on the locals. The minimal and safest obligation for socialists in the richer nations (or in nations where socialists had state power) was to oppose the actions of their own states insofar as these actions contributed to reproduce the economic and political subjugation of the poorer nations, thereby supporting the coalition, trusting in the local forces’ ability to resolve their internal disputes in favor of socialism.

Naturally, many aspects of the complex and even contradictory theoretical framework that supported anti-imperialism — as contributed by, say, Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Evgeni Preobrazhensky, and — later on — Mao, Fanon, Che, etc. — proved to be historically perishable. For example, Lenin’s emphasis on instability in international relations escalating to the military resolution of inter-imperialist conflict, insinuation that monopolies overrode the laws of capitalist competition, and claim that imperialism was in its terminal agonizing stage were largely falsified by subsequent developments.

Three generations of high-caliber Marxist theoreticians around the world debated the specific processes or “mechanisms” of imperialist super-exploitation, but the existence of imperialist super-exploitation itself was not in question. If the specific structures and processes involved in rationalizing the anti-imperialist stance were in dispute, its fundamentals proved to be much more robust. The general material and social conditions that the appeal of the 3rd International aimed to address — namely, vast international inequality, with the productive force of labor highly concentrated in rich countries and stubborn economic backwardness and poverty in the rest of the world, allowing the systematic expropriation and abuse of the poor nations by the richer ones — has not since disappeared or been historically resolved or superseded.

The original terms of this struggle may need updating or adjustment to account for what has changed, but the main goals have not — in essence — been attained yet. True, capitalist production has since become much more globalized, internationally integrated. Also, to repeat a point William has stressed, nation-states are not necessarily immediate political vehicles of the capitals that operate locally. Yet, the conditions in the world today have not dissolved the substratum of international inequality on which imperialism rests. Therefore, the anti-imperialist struggle has not been rendered irrelevant or unnecessary in our times. It has not lost its importance as a precondition for the construction of global socialism. The struggle against imperialism, in the sense in which some of us define it, continues to stand at the center of the struggle for socialism.

William’s thesis, that on the grounds of a more globally integrated productive apparatus, a TCC has arisen, a class that now rules the world (even if contradictorily, internally fragmented, stressed out by myriad systemic crises and with more or less intense tactical or strategic differences in their midst), in spite of the numerous qualifications that William adds to hedge it, is not convincing to me.

It seems to me that a TCC proper would have to be distinguishable from more or less ideologically cohesive and politically organized cosmopolitan capitalists (or groups thereof). Cosmopolitan capitalists may manage operations that cross national borders more or less smoothly, operations one may call “transnational,” relying — with a lesser or greater degree — on this or that national state to advance their interests. This cannot surprise Marxists who, after all, view state activity as a politically-mediated, historical form of the class struggle and competition. But a ruling TCC would be something else.

The thesis of a dominant TCC capitalizing the increased globalization of production that William emphasizes seems to collide with the sudden rise in the influence of the neoconservatives in the conduct of the US military, State Department, and spooking apparatus, their control over foreign policy, their effective ditching of the neoliberal globalization program, their adamant opposition to a multipolar world, antagonizing Russia and China, from Bush 2 to Obama, Trump, and now Biden.

But, let’s say that the emergence and assertion of rule of the TCC, and the reduction of traditional nation-states to tools of transnational capitalist power (the formation of a transnational proto-state), took place as a silent coup in the global commanding heights. Still, in their transition from formal to real, a TCC would have already forged effective and visible transnational political and legal vehicles — well-resourced institutions with teeth, capable of enforcing rules, focused on stabilizing conditions for transnational capital accumulation, and imposing the TCC’s collective will as (mutatis mutandis) national states currently do. Where is the evidence? And, to paraphrase Stalin (allegedly), how many divisions does the TCC have?

This is of the essence. Once persuasion, manipulation, soft coercion, or economic inertia fails, the ability to appropriate resources and impose conditions depends on force. A centralized treasury and a transnational military force (key pieces of any viable transnational state) seem to be a sine qua non condition for the rise of a ruling TCC. There is no way that a capitalist class can exercise effective rule without directly wielding a proportionally-sized apparatus of force.

True, today’s production is globally intertwined as it’s never been before. However, as William notes, political domination is still based on nation states with divergent and even conflicting interests. Capital, insofar as it necessitates a legal and political superstructure for its social validation and protection, cannot be transnational — or at least not fully transnational. Capital that operates internationally remains tethered to the legal and political superstructure of nation states.

And it is not simply that, in convulsed times, nation-state bureaucracies and militaries gain more autonomy from the political apparatus, which the TCC may more directly influence or even control. Of necessity, any TCC or globalist interest would enter into outright conflict with the ultimate logic of any nation-state, because the latter is necessarily tied to local mechanisms of ideological and political legitimation.

If one views post-Soviet conditions as conducive to the formation of a de-facto transnational state under US hegemony, then the ongoing collision of the US-led West with Iran, Russia, China, and to a lesser extent India, Brazil, and South Africa exhibits how irreducible this contradiction is. A TCC would be compelled, not simply to recycle existing nation-states, but to reorganize them or dissolve them and replace them with a proper transnational state, even if the embryo of such an ultra-state were to be found in the structures of the hegemonic nation-state and those of its closest allies.

History may not exclude the formation of a transnational state as an abstract possibility. A transnational state would not be formed out of nothing. It would have to start somewhere — say, as a coalition of nation-states, most likely under the aegis of a leading nation-state, just like — for example — Germany’s modern nation-state started as a coalition of the Prussian junker class and the modernizing liberal industrial bourgeoisie, then shoved down the throats of the southern German states. Or like the EU proto-state formed under the aegis of German and French finance capitalists.

But nobody would have denied the existence of the German Reich ca. 1871. Yet, European finance capital has not yet managed to achieve a proper transnational state (with a centralized fisc and military force subservient to it) at the regional scale of Europe. (Clearly, being under the outsized control of the US, NATO is not and cannot be viewed as a military force subservient to the EU.) What are then the chances that the TCC has already arisen and currently exercises global domination without clear outward evidence?

It also seems to me that William’s characterization of capital as either national or transnational does not take its involved historically-concrete nature in due consideration. To be fair, Marxists (as far as I know) have barely examined this complex phenomenon, theoretically or historically, in the required detail. (Paul Sweezy’s short 1936 piece in S&S was not followed up on.)

While, in general, capital is defined as self-expanding value, value that grows via the production and appropriation of surplus value or unpaid labor, and therefore with a drive to transcend its concrete forms of existence in pursuit of growth, capital does not exist in the abstract. Capital exists as myriad concrete capitals in mutual opposition to one another, engaged in mutual competitive conflict with one another, embedded in particular historically-circumscribed social contexts, and embodied in particular physical objects (inclusive of human bodies) singularly located in space-time.

Because capital is value, and value is the distinctive trait of commodities or privately-owned objects, then the reproduction of capital requires the concrete recurrent enforcement of private ownership, a complex, evolving, historically determined social structure. Partly, private ownership replicates itself “by default” — i.e. by dint of ideology and economic inertia. However, when push comes to shove, it must rely on organized coercion (or the threat thereof) via a concrete state apparatus.

For example, through the integration of British capital in the global circuit of capital, British workers are in fact exploited by global capital, and not simply by their British bosses or (more indirectly) by whoever may hold legal (financial) claims over the profits those workers contribute to generate. That is, because, effectively, as Marx showed in Capital, through the process of exchange, all global surplus value operates as if placed in a global pot from which the concrete profits of British and other capitals tend to be apportioned in accordance to the competition-enforced rule of profits proportional to capital.

However, though the exploitation of British and all workers is conducted by capital considered as a global totality, the concrete exploitation of these workers necessarily involves their more direct superintendence by local British bosses in particular workplaces — as well as by the UK state, which contributes in its own manner to keep the workers in place, etc. Similarly, the enforcement of capital ownership, especially when contested by workers, other private capitalists, or other states, can only be done concretely in specific jurisdictions, in the legal contexts provided by particular nation-states.

In fact, the phenomenon we call “finance” — the realm of categories such as equity (residual liability), credit securities, insurance, fiduciary responsibility, etc. — is precisely this superstructure of (capital’s and, more generally, all wealth’s) legal ownership, its ongoing dispersion and concentration, shuffling and reshuffling, via exchange and legal adjudication in specific jurisdictions.

Possession — it’s often said — is “nine tenths of the law.” And possession is local in space-time. Yet, the capital-labor relation that essentially characterizes a modern capitalist society requires that the workers possess (use or operate directly) the means of production, while in workplaces the capitalists exercise ownership over these means of production at “arms’ length” through always imperfect and mediated chains of supervision and management.

Yet, these means of production and the products of labor that result from their use are lawfully claimed as the property of the capitalists — people not directly involved in the productive use of these means of production.

This is not entirely different from credit, where one borrows from a bank to buy a house, which can then legally possess (use or inhabit) and “own,” though pledged as a collateral security to the creditor so that, in case of default, the creditor may foreclose on it and repossess it to secure repayment of its loan, etc.

In brief, the historical development of private ownership, from the dawn of civilized societies to the present, has consisted largely in the lengthening of the chain that both connects and separates the primary or direct possession and use of wealth from its ultimate ownership (defined as the ability, in the last analysis, to determine the disposal of said wealth). As already suggested above, the transition to capitalism involved a drastic step — a qualitative leap indeed — in this direction.

This is relevant to William’s anecdote of his discussion with an Indian woman in Manila. In this context, he refers to the Tata Group, an Indian-based conglomerate that holds controlling interest of a number of important British companies to imply that, Indian capitalists being in fact among the largest exploiters of British labor, the focus on nation-states as mediators of international capitalist exploitation is wrongheaded, and that people like Ratan Tata and other Indians principals of the group are best viewed as members of the TCC.

But I don’t think his interpretation of the phenomena is the most plausible. No doubt William has a point, but so does the Indian woman who thinks that India as a nation-state needs to gain greater autonomy from the richer Western powers. Because, although there are in India today fabulously wealthy capitalists with business operations all across the world, the average productivity and standard of living in India now lags behind those of China, let alone those in the richer West. A large portion of the direct producers in India are still trapped in precarious and even pre-modern social structures — and the Indian nation-state presents and validates itself politically as the official representative of Indian society as a whole.

All these determinations matter in different though interrelated ways: that the principals of Tata Group and other individual capitalists in the East or South may be as wealthy as billionaires in the West; that their ethnicity is Indian and not Anglo-Saxon (even if their offspring may be quite mixed and cosmopolitan); that the Tata Group holding is incorporated in India; that a big chunk of their holdings is located in India (closer to possession and where their political heft may be most effectual), even if their other holdings are located in China, Spain, Mexico, or wherever; that if the English workers at Tesco or British Salt (companies in the group’s portfolio) go on a strike, a direct dispute to adjudicate who has a right to what (i.e. who effectively owns what) in the capital-labor relation, such dispute may go through arbitration or litigation under British law, while if in China or Mexico it would go through a different legal framework; etc., etc.

Consequently, it is likely that, in India, China, the UK or Mexico, Ratan Tata would have to resolve disputes of this kind in a more mediated form than in India, never in some imaginary transnational jurisdiction where his status as a super wealthy capitalist would be all that matters — always in one provided by a particular nation-state, each nation state somewhat subject to its particular historical, local constraints, and where his concrete position in global society is historically circumscribed.

On the characterization of China’s social formation, I also disagree with William. In particular, the behavior of state and private Chinese capital in the poorer countries cannot be equated with those of Western capitals. Should socialists in richer countries denounce the predatory practices of Chinese capitalist interests abroad, and support local resistance to them, with the same intensity as those of US capitalists? In general, yes. But the specific form of this support has to be adjusted to the particulars of each case.

Does the Chinese state have a tendency to throw its weight around the world in defense of Chinese (private and state) capitalists using methods similar to those refined by the colonial powers or those practiced to date by the US? There is evidence that China’s state backs the Chinese capitalists in significantly different ways, in contrast to the behavior of Western states. Claudio Katz has documented these differences in some detail for Latin America. After all, there seems to be some difference between an ad-hoc West-managed “rules-based international order” and one that at least pays lip service to international law under the UN system. In their rejection of predatory capitalist practices, socialists cannot ignore these differences.

As with many aspects of William’s argument, the differences appear to be in the emphasis. William does not entirely ignore the objections to his views, but he grants those objections a lesser import than I and others do. But regardless of our views on the character of China’s social formation, the ambition of the US and its client states to sabotage China’s technological and economic ascent (or bleed Russia white or choke Iran) has no evident benefit for the workers of the world or the global struggle for socialism. On the contrary.

In general, Marxists cannot look at local struggles as if waged in an international vacuum. A different international context alters the significance of a local struggle. The bigger picture matters. As Donald Knuth says, “premature optimization is the source of all evil.” If not careful, one easily jumps from the frying pan to the fire. The raison d’être of socialism is to enlighten and guide the workers’ struggle. The time, attention, and other resources of socialists are never infinite. The struggle for socialism necessarily involves strategic thinking — the determination of priorities in an uncertain and dynamic social environment, deciding on which struggles to wage serially and which in parallel, allocating resources in proportion to the (shifting) strategic weight of each type of struggle.

What is more conducive to socialism: a unipolar global capitalist order or a multipolar one? Which one would give socialists a better fighting chance? Or, at the very least, which one would give the human race a better chance of survival? William suggests that a multipolar world would be marginally better. I would be more categorical about it. Though temporarily, while it settles itself, a multipolar world may stir up instability, it seems to be the only viable configuration in which large nations with the means to destroy us all can check and counterbalance one another, while the world order under unilateral US hegemony has proved to be untenable.

I thank William again for stating his claims clearly, permitting the rest of us to compare, contrast, and sharpen our own views on these important matters. And thanks also to all other comrades intervening in the discussion.