The motive behind imperialism & colonialism is always material

In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire wrote: “What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.” Césaire’s argument parallels the one Michael Parenti has made about imperialism: that a country never absentmindedly stumbles into becoming imperialist, it’s always an active choice. A choice motivated by material self-interest. It’s this inescapably sinister nature of colonialism and imperialism, where the benefactors decide to embrace their roles as oppressors for fundamentally selfish reasons, that makes Césaire describe Hitler as the logical conclusion of this path.

These oppressors always claim they’ve chosen to serve oppression for altruistic reasons. They say they seek to “civilize” the peoples they exploit, or to “liberate” these peoples when using the modern imperialist terminology. Or they say they only want what’s best for their own people, implicitly admitting they believe the best role for their people is as oppressors. When the crimes and exploitation that imperialism and colonialism involve are exposed, they justify their stance by arguing that human nature is inherently competitive, and that a civilization must either subjugate or be subjugated. That there are plenty of examples of societies which haven’t existed on the suffering of others, like the hundreds of indigenous nations which took on neither the oppressor nor oppressed roles prior to colonization, is disregarded by this reasoning. 

Because we’re now in the historical stage of capitalism, which necessitates imperialism and pushes countries into being either exploiters or exploited, colonialism’s defenders argue that it’s unrealistic for the oppressor-oppressed relationship not to exist. This is a perception that’s rooted in capitalist realism, which depends on circular logic; capitalism is seen as the only system that can exist heretofore, purely because it’s the dominant system of today. That there are still several socialist countries, and that the Soviet bloc existed just a generation ago before falling due to mistakes future communists can learn from, disproves this notion about capitalism being immutable. But that doesn’t convince colonization’s defenders either; they fall back on portraying the socialist countries as themselves being oppressive, confirming their narrative that subjugation is an unavoidable fixture of history.

This is the pattern when it comes to arguing against colonization: those who see colonization as a good thing aren’t able to be won over by any argument, because they aren’t simply intellectually confused. They know what their interests are, and they’ll defend these interests no matter what. One encounters the same phenomenon when they confront an American colonial chauvinist with the recent working examples of returning full tribal jurisdiction: there’s no argument that can change the mind of the chauvinist, as chauvinism is an emotionally rooted idea which intellectual arguments can’t destroy. Correcting the ahistorical claims colonialism’s defenders put forth does nothing to bring them towards the decolonial side, as those claims are merely covers for their true motive: to benefit from the wealth that colonization and imperialism bring to them. 

The purpose of every colonial ideology, from American exceptionalism, to Zionism, to the reactionary strain of Chicano nationalism which calls for Mexico to annex the southwest, is to make this motive appear defensible. To make something despicable seem like it’s compatible with a humanistic attitude. Of, course, this is as long as an imperialist pretends to be a humanist; when they take the mask off, they reveal themselves to be essentially indistinguishable from a Nazi.

Because colonialism and imperialism depend on these ideological rationalizations, it is possible for someone born into an exploiting role to reject this role, and to fight on the side of the exploited. Those who are presented with an opportunity to embrace their status as oppressors have the options of succumbing to their dark side, and allying with the forces of colonization, or embracing their noble side, and allying with the peoples fighting for their liberation from colonization. There are plenty of examples of such heroic individuals, like the U.S. soldiers who’ve defected to serve the side of Korean socialism or the white anti-slavery militia leader John Brown. But in plenty of cases, those with the opportunity to serve oppression end up taking that opportunity, and never repenting.

This embrace of the evil within a colonizing society is how that society gets a Hitler. Hitler appealed to the dark side of Germans, claiming that the way for the German people out of their economic crisis was not to become a socialist republic, but to reinvigorate their colonization efforts. To annex Eurasia in a settler-colonial project modeled after the one in the United States, exterminate the communists so the threat of a post-colonial future could be eliminated, and wipe out the Jews, the Romas, and the other groups viewed as threats to the “Aryan nation.” When I say Germany’s dark side was won over by this appeal, I’m primarily talking about the German petty bourgeoisie, the social base for fascism. As America’s fascist movement continues to grow, our own petty bourgeoisie are naturally gravitating towards this role as fascism’s core base. 

It’s not poor whites who are driving today’s violent reactionary upsurge, any more than it was poor Germans who put Hitler into power. In both instances, the social class that’s been most willing to become capitalism’s fighting wing is the minority that’s enjoyed great benefits from imperialism relative to the rest of the population. The class that’s feeling frustrated due to new economic strains from capitalism’s collapse, and is threatened by a rise in class consciousness among the poor.

For this reason, poor whites in America have great potential to become won over towards allying with the decolonial struggle. It’s not the working class or lumpenproletarian settler who has their primary interests tied into the continuation of colonialism and imperialism. It’s the labor aristocrat, the petty capitalist, or the CEO, categories that combined represent a small and shrinking minority. Those of all colors who’ve been exploited and pushed aside by capitalism can unite, and work to defeat the fascist project of these elements. We can tap into the majority of the U.S. population that has its primary material interests staked not into the decaying imperialist settler state, but into the creation of a post-colonial socialist federation. Hitler does not have to win, as Hitler represents the desperate survival measures of a parasitic order which can’t sustain itself.

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Class struggle is intensifying. We must prepare for when the bourgeoisie’s fighting wing strikes.

A confrontation is coming. One that the world has already seen many times, but that we in the U.S. will experience in a distinct way from how other countries have experienced it. This is the class confrontation, which has so far produced revolutions in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and many other countries. Conversely, when the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat has won this conflict, it’s produced fascist dictatorships, ones that have murdered millions of people throughout Germany, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, and other places in order to suppress the class struggle. Whether America’s intensification of class struggle leads to revolution, or to our own version of those wildly violent counterrevolutionary scenarios, depends on how effective our communist movement will be.

I say our revolutionary crisis—should it bring either revolution or counterrevolution—will look distinct from anything we’ve seen prior because there’s no historical examples we can currently point to of a country with our kinds of contradictions undergoing revolution. The closest thing to that is Germany, which underwent a revolution in its eastern part after the country experienced imperial decline, capitalist crisis, and a suicidal fascist warfare campaign that necessitated society be built back up from the ashes. Perhaps America will undergo a comparable  process, but even Germany doesn’t have the amount of contradictions we’re faced with.

We’re a settler-colonial country, one that’s assumed the role as the center of imperialism. This is the parasitic foundation upon which American capitalism, itself a parasitic system, is built on. Capitalism here can’t survive without the continuation of extraction from the imperial peripheries, the continuation of the occupation of the Indigenous First Nations, or the continuation of our failure to give slavery reparations to the African nation. U.S. imperialism’s colonies, both external and internal, must be kept subjugated for the bourgeoisie to keep making profits. 

When a system is so dependent on the maintenance of a particular geopolitical order, at a certain point it will begin to wither, and will have to take drastic measures to survive. With the last generation’s unraveling of U.S. hegemony, and the last half-century’s capitalist contraction that’s demanded neoliberal austerity to keep the system going, U.S. capitalism is in a state of unprecedented crisis. Washington is becoming less able to keep a grip over the neo-colonies, the internal colonies have been rising up with movements like Black Lives Matter, and working class peoples of all colors and nationalities are increasingly mobilizing for their rights. 

Unions and strikes have been rising during the last year in particular, and millions are declining to take jobs due to how bad workplace conditions and wages are. This has prompted Bank of America to hope living conditions get even worse so that workers will have less of a choice in the job market. But even if the finance oligarchs succeed at using the capitalist state to impose further anti-worker policies (which they will), capitalism’s contradictions will be made more severe, and the people’s discontent will further grow. A vast opening is appearing for revolutionary consciousness to spread, for the workers to become receptive towards Marxism and its theory, for our cadres to find more people who are willing to commit and train.

Our ruling class sees these developments, and is doing what every threatened bourgeoisie does: become more willing to back the most reactionary, chauvinistic elements of capitalist society with the hope that these elements can successfully fight off the revolutionaries. Under our conditions, this process of fascism becoming more prominent (as in a sense fascism has already been part of America’s superstructure for generations) means a rise in settler-colonial terrorism. Our version of Germany’s Brownshirts, or Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, is fascist intimidation groups like the Proud Boys. In time, they’ll receive backup from the neo-Nazis who’ve been carrying out secretive paramilitary training during recent years. But we haven’t even needed to wait for the outward Nazis to come out and start shooting, a scenario which has happened this year with the Buffalo massacre. The white supremacists who make up U.S. law enforcement have long been patrolling our streets with growing impunity, and with ever-expanding government military aid.

In his book Dirty Truths, Michael Parenti writes that “America represents more than just an economic system. It is an entire cultural and social order, a plutocracy, a system of rule that is mostly by and for the rich. Most universities and colleges, publishing houses, mass circulation magazines, newspapers, television and radio stations, professional sports teams, foundations, churches, private museums, charity organizations, and hospitals are organized as corporations, ruled by boards of trustees (or directors or regents) composed overwhelmingly of affluent business people. These boards exercise final judgement over all institutional matters.” Settler-colonialism and global imperialist extraction are the means for keeping this cultural and social order intact, the tools the plutocracy uses to prop up this imbalanced system that wouldn’t be able to function otherwise. As long as imperialism, both external and internal, keeps capital strong, those in the core who capitalism subjugates will remain under capitalism’s dictatorship.

Capitalism is long obsolete, a zombie socioeconomic system that ceased being revolutionary in the 19th century after it mostly replaced feudalism. Since then, as capitalism has decayed and tried to beat back those who seek to replace it with the next historical stage of socialism, capitalism has created fascism as a means to wage war against the revolutionaries. The only reason why fascism hasn’t yet consumed America to the extent that it consumed Germany is that the U.S. ruling class was able to expand its imperial holdings, and to bribe U.S. workers substantially during the middle of the 20th century. Since capitalism weakened with the 1970s crash, and the bourgeoisie had to implement neoliberalism, these imperial benefits have been progressively drying up, endangering the social stability that used to let the U.S. empire be internally prosperous. 

Now the system is having to eat itself at an accelerating rate, and capitalism is having to bring out its fighting wing to ever greater degrees. The waves of fascist violence that we’re seeing, from the fascists both in and outside of law enforcement, are only going to get bigger, because the system’s terminal illness is never going to start improving. It’s all one big downward spiral.

The future under capitalism is one of further living standard deterioration as the ruling class keeps imposing more austerity, privatization, deregulation, and regressive taxation to compensate for imperialism’s waning market access. The poor, which disproportionately means the internal colonies, will be pushed into an even more desperate situation, the police and the fascist paramilitaries ready to massacre them if they try to fight back. The American fascist movement will tap into the remaining elements of the labor aristocracy, the well to do settlers who are most materially tied to colonialism’s continuation, in order to build up their counterrevolutionary army. This movement’s demagogues will promise these favored sections of the population that they can regain America’s former prosperity if they fight for a revamped colonization project. We could indeed see a repeat of Germany’s “Lebensraum” campaign to annex land so the master race can get what it believes it deserves. The factor that could prove American fascism more easily defeatable is that here, there are colonized nations which have been fighting for their autonomy for centuries. White proletarians must act in solidarity with these nations to have hope for defeating the fascists.

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Every meddling tactic the U.S. empire has used in Ukraine has a historical precedent

The perception of the events in Ukraine that U.S. imperialism seeks to propagate is one of “see no evil, hear no evil” when it comes to the role Washington has played. The demonization of Russia is so extreme that Kiev supporters often can’t even admit the conflict is a proxy war, for fear that this would in any way harm their narrative about Russia being a completely unprovoked imperialist aggressor. When those on the pro-NATO side have to seriously engage with the reality of what Washington is doing, their responses have a tellingly open-ended nature, where they concede that the views of the anti-imperialists are potentially true while insisting that the whole matter is subjective. Like when the neoconservative think tank the Atlantic Council has concluded that “Ukraine’s status as a proxy for the United States and NATO may be a matter of interpretation.”

As the think tank admits in response to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s charge that Washington is waging a proxy war, “That the United States’, much less NATO’s, military support for Kyiv raises ethical concerns is no surprise; states rarely provide military assistance to other parties unless their interests are also served.” But the possibility that such concerns are based in fact is only vaguely entertained by these neocons. Right after recognizing it’s entirely possible that they’re wrong, and that Washington is indeed using Ukraine as a tool in a geopolitical game, they make it clear that their concern is not over the situation’s ethics. It’s about how best to advance imperialism’s strategic and narrative goals, despite Lavrov clearly having a point: “whether the United States and its NATO partners are in a textbook proxy relationship with Ukraine matters less than the potential consequences if that relationship isn’t properly managed. Both parties should pay close attention to these possible perils—if not out of a commitment to the values associated with the liberal international order, then at least to deny Russia a narrative that can make its cause seem more legitimate.”

The people whose minds the imperialists seek to influence on Ukraine, those being the masses whose opinions provide a sense of “democratic” authenticity to the wars their governments wage, don’t have their support for military aid to Kiev dependent on whether it can be called a proxy war. As long as the imperialists can convince the people that Russia’s actions are without provocation, and that Operation Z’s denazification mission is lacking in factual grounds, the public won’t undergo a consciousness shift. This is why the imperialist propaganda outlets have admitted that it’s a proxy conflict, and instead focus on those other areas within the propaganda war.

As Michael Parenti has said about the attitude our ruling class has towards how we view the world:, “I tell students when they say, 'Oh they don't care what we think. They ignore us', and all that, and I say, 'Oh no, no. That's the only thing they care about. The only thing they care about is what you're thinking.” This is because democracy may be an illusion under capitalism, but even dictatorships do everything they can to control the flow of information and deceive the people into supporting the government’s policies. If the people become conscious of their government’s lies, it’s only a matter of time before the government falls.

Crucial to keeping the public from discovering our government’s big lie on Ukraine—that Russia’s intervention was unprovoked—is maintaining blanket suspicion towards every statement Russia makes to explain its actions. The people must be made to believe Russia is lying when it says neo-Nazis make up a defining element of the Ukrainian governmentalal and military structure. Conversely, when Russia says Washington is using Ukraine as a proxy, the imperialist narrative managers must insist that even if this is true, Washington certainly doesn’t seek to prolong the conflict for the sake of weakening Russia. This is what Biden has asserted in one op-ed, which contains perhaps the clearest example so far of the current president telling a lie. Perhaps we’re waging a proxy war, they say, but that’s up to interpretation. And if you can prove we are, we aren’t doing it for selfish reasons.

Their narrative of a noble proxy war, in which Washington has been taking Kiev’s side against Russia for altruistic reasons, is recognizable as absurd if one has any knowledge of how imperialism works, or the most rudimentary understanding of U.S. history. The U.S. empire would never give military aid to a country, or sacrifice its own internal social stability by imposing self-destructive sanctions, out of some unselfish desire to defend that country’s self-determination. The entire reason the United States exists is due to the genocidal annexation of an entire continent of indigenous nations, and Washington has violated the sovereignty of many dozens of countries through its own invasions and foreign meddling. The aid to Kiev is not about defending the Ukrainian people, but about using them as expendable tools to destabilize Eurasia. To believe Washington is acting altruistically—and by extension to believe Russia is acting out of imperial ambition—one would have to be unaware of every time the U.S. empire has committed crimes similar to the crimes it’s committed in Ukraine. 

In parallel to how Washington carried out a fascist coup in Ukraine in 2014, Washington has carried out numerous coups throughout Latin America especially. In parallel to how the U.S. has been backing Nazi terrorists in Ukraine, the U.S. has backed Chilean Nazi torturers, Islamist terror groups, terroristic Hong Kong protesters, numerous dictatorships, drug lords, and the genocidal states of Israel and Saudi Arabia in order to advance imperialism’s goals. In parallel to how the U.S.-backed Kiev regime has carried out ethnic cleansing, ethnic cleansing has been a common practice for the governments the U.S. supports (see Israel for just one example). In parallel to how the CIA carried out false flags throughout the Yugoslavia conflict to portray the Serbs as solely responsible for the war, such fraudulent atrocity stories are now being attributed to Russia. 

Another similarity to Yugoslavia is in how the U.S. installed a series of far-right leaders after dismembering Yugoslavia, like how the U.S. has done within Ukraine during the last decade. In parallel to how the U.S. south Korean puppet dictatorship planned to invade the DPRK, then the U.S. portrayed the DPRK as the aggressor when the DPRK preemptively intervened to defend itself, the U.S. has portrayed Russia as the aggressor for preemptively defending the Donbass republics from a planned Ukrainian invasion.

In parallel to how Washington is using Ukraine as a proxy war instrument for weakening Russia, Washington used the Mujahideen as proxy war agents for weakening the Soviet Union. Which later had terroristic blowback towards the United States, like how Washington’s support for neo-Nazi Ukrainian militants may one day start exacerbating America’s own white supremacist violence problem. We’re already seeing U.S. neo-Nazis regularly use Ukraine as a training ground for gaining combat experience, and seeing racial U.S. mass shooters use the same symbols Azov often uses. Imperialism’s infamous past catastrophes are repeating themselves, now with the additional factor of an inflation crisis that’s being exacerbated by this wildly destructive imperialist maneuver. In essentially all parts of the globe, the various human costs of this proxy war are being felt.

How do the empire’s narrative managers engage with these realities? They don’t, because they can’t. If the people get reminded of all the atrocities and vile schemes their government has carried out in pursuit of total worldwide hegemony, this conflict will become easily recognizable as another one of these U.S. crimes. It will become only logical to accept that Russia’s intervention was provoked, and that the U.S. installed a belligerent fascist regime in Kiev with the intention of provoking it. Our ruling class doesn’t want us to engage in these logical steps. “Hear no evil, see no evil” must be maintained by any means necessary, and all the historical context behind today’s events must be concealed.

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Anti-Leninism is the ideological core of the new cold war against China & Russia

Within the sphere of pro-imperialist thought, there are two types of views on the countries which challenge imperialism’s interests. The more brazen and crude one, taken up by the most reactionary types of pro-imperialists, is that China and the other socialist countries are indeed communist, and that “American greatness” is at war with these countries and those who ally with them. The more intellectually sophisticated view, represented by liberal academia and the pro-imperialist “left,” is that the socialist countries are actually “state capitalist” or just plain capitalist, and that Washington is engaged in an inter-imperialist power struggle with China and its allies Russia and Iran. 

Both of these narrative frameworks serve to rationalize U.S. imperialism’s aggression, meddling, and exploitation, but in different ways. The “left” side of imperialism is underhanded in which ideas it seeks to convey, claiming to be opposed to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. The way it at the same time helps these things is by portraying Washington’s foremost challenger China as itself being capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist, implicitly justifying Washington’s covert efforts to balkanize China in the name of “freeing” Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan; Washington’s military buildup against China to contain supposed Chinese “expansionism;” and Washington’s meddling across growing sections of the formerly colonized world to try to sabotage the “neo-colonial” Belt and Road Initiative. The “left” also uses NATO narratives to justify Washington’s perpetuation of the proxy war in Ukraine, which on a macro scale is about undermining China as well.

Whereas the reactionaries narratively justify the new cold war on China by inventing racist slogans and reviving Red Scare rhetoric, the “left” imperialists construct complex intellectual frameworks for why China is a negative force. They project the U.S. empire’s evils onto China, compiling supposedly rigorous academic analyses on why the country is not communist, why it’s oppressing its people, why it’s a rising imperialist power, and so forth.

The equivalent applies to the way these left imperialists, and the neoconservatives they tend to ideologically ally with, portray Russia; the recent neocon call to “decolonize” the Russian Federation is compatible with the views of the leftists who don’t recognize how this is an attempted repeat of imperialism’s operation to break up Yugoslavia. The fact that these leftists uncritically accept every atrocity story that the CIA pinned on the Serbs, as well as every atrocity story the CIA’s neo-Nazi Azov proxies are pinning on Russia, lets them embrace these kinds of ideas with total confidence. Their core perception is that Russia and China are themselves imperialist powers, and that all evidence for Washington’s involvement in creating the current conflict can be rejected as enemy propaganda. They apply the same reasoning to Iran when prompted, though Iran isn’t currently the biggest imperialist narrative target so they virtually leave it alone. But should the geopolitical struggle ever shift more towards southwest Asia, these leftists will no doubt go along with whatever narratives imperialism manufacturers about Iran.

This covert type of pro-imperialist thinking, where the powers defying Washington are seen as not worth defending because they merely intend to become the new imperialist bloc, is at its core defined by anti-Leninism. By a disregard for the Leninist definition of imperialism, which recognizes that imperialism is not whenever a government makes a trade deal or carries out a military operation; in the current historical stage, imperialism means when financial oligarchy and monopoly carry out parasitic extraction from the peripheral countries, to summarize this definition in the briefest possible terms. Liberals, both of the “leftist” and reactionary kinds, are not interested in learning about Lenin’s analysis. And when it comes to the liberals in the imperialist countries especially, a serious investigation into what imperialism does and doesn’t mean is out of the question, because what ideologically informs their positions is chauvinism for the “west.” 

Whether they’re MAGA, Blue MAGA, or part of the “libertarian left,” these liberals (I’m in this case referring to liberals as supporters of capitalism) fundamentally believe in the moral superiority of western liberalism’s values. They see any country that defies imperialism’s interests as among humanity’s foremost enemies, in need of being countered. This is why they obsessively demonize north Korea’s supposedly undemocratic government, while applying no such scrutiny to south Korea’s government, which was formed out of an actual dictatorship and continues to enforce one of the world’s most anti-free speech laws. This is why they eagerly accept every human rights abuse story about China no matter how groundless, and reject every human rights story about Ukraine’s U.S.-installed regime even when their own NGOs confirm these accounts.

They wouldn’t hold these beliefs if they weren’t surrounded by imperialist propaganda, but they also wouldn’t be so willing to accept this propaganda if they didn’t hold that central idea of western chauvinism. Their choice to stake their interests in the continuation of imperialist extraction, which requires the advancement of Washington’s geopolitical maneuvers, is the foundation upon which they process information about world affairs.

Prior to when Leninism was formulated, liberals of course already embraced imperial chauvinism. But after the Russian Revolution, when Leninism got put into practice with the formation of history’s first workers state, this chauvinism was forced to take on a new character. Its adherents now had to try to discredit this new model for liberating countries from imperialism, in which a country could deprive global capitalism of market access by having the proletariat decide how the economy was run. Since the emergence of bourgeois nationalist governments in several Arab countries, the Iranian Revolution, and the fall of the Soviet Union, upon which we’ve seen the emergence of capitalist states which refuse to become neo-colonies, imperialism’s propaganda has by necessity expanded beyond anti-communism. But anti-Leninism is still crucial to this propaganda, because Leninism is what can refute the narratives about Iran, Russia, and China being imperialist.

It was Leninism that tore the initial hole within the new version of imperialism that’s dominated the globe since the 19th century. Leninism updated the anti-imperialist struggle, transforming it from the purely anti-colonial form that it had during the Haitian anti-slavery revolution, into a modern type of revolution which is both anti-colonial and socialist. It made the construction of a workers' state a normal part of revolutions, enabling countries to become economically independent and therefore become free from neo-colonial exploitation. 

Whereas the Haitian revolutionary model was fit for its own time, in which capitalism wasn’t yet at its highest stage and imperialism could be beat back more easily, Leninism was fit for the current age, in which capitalism has reached its monopoly stage and imperialism exists in the form of exporting capital. (Rather than in the form of exporting goods, as was previously the case). Leninism was the first great enemy of modern imperialism, and it continues to be so as Marxist-Leninist China dismantles U.S. economic hegemony. The Russian Revolution’s economic gains may have been dismantled with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but we continue to see its legacy play out in the form of a rising geopolitical challenge towards imperialism. It set the precedent for entire states to defy the whims of the imperialists.

For this reason, whereas liberals will give credit to the Haitian revolution, they’ll never recognize the Russian revolution or the other Leninist revolutions since then as worthy of respect. They’ll denounce these revolutions as having produced “communist dictatorships,” or as having betrayed the true form of communism. Like liberals even care about achieving communism, beyond abstract idealist notions of what “communism” means.

This is why whenever a country has freed itself from neo-colonialism by adopting Marxism-Leninism, which is to say workers democracy, liberals have come to view it as a tyranny. And why whenever a poor country starts to pull itself out of neo-colonialism by implementing the BRI’s developmental projects, they claim this country has simply fallen under a new colonial master. The latter narrative is informed by the former, as the perception that China is a pseudo-socialist autocracy makes it possible to believe that China seeks to subjugate the peripheral countries. Liberals, at least the types of liberals who claim to be anti-capitalist, also claim to not like imperialism, and to support anti-imperialism in theory. But this “anti-imperialism” is totally meaningless, because every time a part of the world actually does something to weaken imperialism, these liberals have an answer ready for why they don’t support it. 

I’ve even seen this with academics who extensively study the grievous harm that neo-colonial exploitation does to the workers and communities in the peripheral countries. If a neo-colonial country like Colombia or Sri Lanka were to free itself by adopting workers democracy, like Cuba or the DPRK have, these types of academics would come to see these countries as oppressive, in the way that they see those socialist countries. This is especially likely given that Colombia and Sri Lanka are two pivotal countries for Washington’s strategic interests. 

We don’t even need to imagine a scenario like this. As the BRI expands, and neo-colonialism comes under greater threat, we’re seeing such a growth in the number of governments that imperialist propaganda vilifies, and that liberals rush to attack as well. Ethiopia is a prime example; as the country uses China’s help to overcome the underdevelopment that imperialism has engineered, propaganda actors are working to manufacture consent for a Libya-style intervention within the country. 

As Alan Macleod writes, this war narrative depends on demonizing the government, to the effect of whitewashing the racist atrocities of the previous Tigrayan regime and diverting attention from the ongoing war crimes of the U.S. proxy the TPLF: “Tigrayans were near ubiquitous in the upper ranks of the country’s military and intelligence services, and were greatly overrepresented among its economic elite. This, for Dr. Taye, amounted to no less than a system of informal ‘Apartheid’ that was ignored by most of the West. MintPress also contacted a spokesperson for the TPLF, but did not receive a response. Since coming to power in 2018, the new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has moved against the TPLF in a set of changes that supporters see as much needed reforms to reduce corruption and the TPLF’s grip over public life, but opponents see as overstepping his mandate and as the persecution of an ethnic minority.” Which governments liberals apply human rights scrutiny to depends on what best advances U.S. geopolitical interests.

The only difference between the unhinged “fire and fury” imperialists, and the “pragmatic” liberals who are currently in the White House, is in aesthetics. Both of these types are willing to risk a third world war with Russia by continuing the Ukraine proxy war, and both are coordinating the similarly reckless provocations against China in Taiwan. The intellectual class that supports the foreign policy of the neoliberal centrists also serves to shield the more brazen types from any ideological challenges. This is because though they may take issue with some of the undiplomatic language the reactionaries use, they reinforce the narratives that imperialism depends on.

Even if we don’t see another world war, or see the U.S. nuke another city, imperialism’s cold war efforts are already having gargantuan human costs. The Ethiopian civil war the imperialists are using their TPLF terrorists to perpetuate is producing one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, as is the conflict in Yemen that the imperialists perpetuate to counter Iran. Washington is imposing sanctions on Afghanistan, to similarly catastrophic effect, so that it can keep the BRI from expanding into the country. The Ukraine proxy war has displaced millions and cut the country’s economy in half, while enabling further neoliberal shock policies within the country. Those who attack Leninism—whether by vilifying the Marxist-Leninist governments, or by calling semi-peripheral countries “imperialist” in opposition to Lenin’s analysis on imperialism—are helping perpetuate these horrors. Embracing a Leninist analysis is how to put an end to imperialism’s crimes.

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In Amerikkka, addressing the national question requires dismantling settler land relations

In The Foundations of Leninism, Stalin wrote that “Leninism brought the national question down from the lofty heights of high-sounding declarations to solid ground, and declared that pronouncements about the ‘equality of nations’ not backed by the direct support of the proletarian parties for the liberation struggle of the oppressed nations are meaningless and false. In this way the question of the oppressed nations become one of supporting the oppressed nations, of rendering real and continuous assistance to them in their struggle against imperialism for real equality of nations, for their independent existence as states.”

What does this mean in the context of Amerikkka, where a rogue British colony has snatched up almost all the land from the Indigenous First Nations? A clue as to what it means can be found within a news story about a recent confrontation within my area between the settlers and the tribes. It was about a developer who began a construction project on a historic Wiyot village site, then was forced by the representatives of the three local tribes to make every concession short of a formal apology. Frustrated and impatient, he sought to reach a compromise in which he would still be able to impose his development model onto the Native territory, then found out that the tribal leaderships weren’t ready to approve the plan. As the North Coast Journal has reported about the man’s feeling of betrayal at this:

That apparent disconnect exploded at the Aug. 18 meeting, with a representative of [developer] Schneider's saying the tribes had "lied" and [commission chair] Bongio decrying the two tribes and the California Coastal Commission for going "after one individual," accusing the tribes of playing games, saying his trust in the tribes had been lost while intoning they were extorting Schneider. Bongio also warned the situation would set a precedent "like you wouldn't believe." "Nothing will happen in Humboldt County," Bongio said during the meeting, calling the situation "the most egregious thing" he's seen in 11 years on the commission. "You already do have to go before the Indians but it's just going to have to be a whole new thing that everyone has to go through every time there's a project — you name it, whatever it is. You'll have to go before them and the Coastal Commission. This has went way too far." Wiyot Tribal Chair and Cultural Director Ted Hernandez said his tribe has had a strong, respectful working relationship with the county Planning Department but he found Bongio's comments deeply offensive and openly wondered how the two governments could chart a path forward.

We don’t yet know precisely what the full dismantling of settler-colonial land relations will look like, because the theory which defines a given revolution arises not before but after the revolutionary process unfolds. But one thing we already know about it is that after the United States is abolished, and the tribes regain full jurisdiction over the lands that were stolen from them, settlers like this developer will no longer be confused about whether or not they can harm the interests of the nations whose land they live on. The answer will more clearly be no. The tribes will have full stewardship, meaning they won’t have to compete for leverage within land management committees as the Wiyot have successfully done. It will unambiguously be up to the tribes, whose governments will be the only governments in existence upon the dismantling of the settler state. (Potentially aside from the Republic of New Afrika, which the tribes may agree to set aside land for in the vein of how the USSR created a Jewish Autonomous Oblast).

People like this developer will still be allowed to live here, as according to the Indigenous decolonial theorists I’ve talked to, everyone will be made citizens of the First Nations by practical necessity. But they’ll no longer operate within a paradigm where those with means believe they can get away with committing sovereignty violations. And since socialism will be implemented upon the land’s full liberation from colonial occupation, petty bourgeois individuals like the developer won’t have the tools to trample over the rights of the tribes. The fracking executives who are currently destroying Native water supplies obviously won’t be able to do so either. With the liquidation of the bourgeoisie as a class, numerous Native issues will be solved. The crucial step is to first return total land stewardship to the tribes.

When I say that the vast majority of the whites and other non-Natives on this continent won’t be negatively impacted in any way by the full restoration of tribal self-determination, this is what I mean. Most people don’t own any land, and not everyone who owns land is bourgeois. The bourgeoisie, ranging from the petty types to the oligarchs, are the ones who the tribes will have a clear reason to target, especially after the bourgeoisie lose all state control. The Wiyot nation doesn’t include “kicking out all the whites” in its statements on what it wants to do to advance its interests. Nor does it say it would want to impose a reverse racist hierarchy if it regained all of its territory. As far as the vast majority of people are concerned, its demands seem quite benign. But for the bourgeoisie and their settler state enforcers, any assertion of indigenous sovereignty is a radical transgression, because it fundamentally conflicts with the Amerikkkan project to profit from an illegal colonial occupation. When the tribes get back what was taken from them, most of the settlers will only “lose” something in the sense that they’ll no longer be at the top of a racial hierarchy which capitalism uses to divide the working class. They’ll become members of an equal society, one which has undergone both national and class liberation. 

The process of defeating U.S. settler-colonialism won’t simply be a replication of how the USSR or the PRC have handled the national question. Rather than pluri-nationalism, so I’ve also heard from Native Marxists, we’ll need to adopt confederalism. This would be where the tribal governments are autonomous, and only working in collaboration when this is necessary to carry out a mutually beneficial goal (like military defense against potential reactionary aggressors). Balkanization wouldn’t be practical at history’s current stage, where the reactionaries haven’t yet become extinct, but having a central authority decide the internal affairs of these nations wouldn’t be correct either.

The full picture of what a post-colonial North America will look like won’t be visible until we’ve done what Stalin described, and transform the national question into a practical thing. People like the Wiyot land defenders are already working on this. As the revolutionary struggle intensifies, defenders of settler land relations will point to how the entirety of the decolonial theory for our conditions hasn’t yet come into existence, and claim this discredits the decolonial position. But to make this argument is to repudiate Lenin and Stalin, who showed that when you take the colonial question seriously rather than dismiss it as idealism, you’ll find the answers to all the logistical questions which come along with it.

The settler state, which in my area has enabled the racist arguments of the developer, is further discrediting itself in the eyes of First Nations leaders. As Herndandez has said, “I think I've lost faith in the Humboldt County Planning Commission. I'm still very upset and extremely ticked off at how the chairman handled his business. They forget they're guests on Wiyot Land, it's still Wiyot territory and we've never given up our rights on Wiyot land. ... How do we heal this wound now? It's a deep wound. To call the people of these lands 'Indians?' I'm sorry, we are the true citizens of this land and we have a name.” As the contradictions of colonialism and capitalism heighten, the day draws closer when justice comes for Amerikkka’s victims.

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Cultural hegemony & the insidious nature of imperialist propaganda

Gramsci wrote that “The methodological criterion on which our own study must be based is the following: that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination,’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership.’” The capitalist ruling class, and the imperialist order that it depends on to survive, don’t only maintain their rule through coercive force. The other essential part of how they maintain their power is through creating the sense that the imperialist worldview is merely the default, objective truth. That when you hear that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was unprovoked, or that Taiwan is a separate country from China, or any of the other pieces of propaganda the imperialists present, you’re not hearing propaganda (that supposedly comes from only the other side) but unbiased reporting.

It’s a fundamental reality of social science that there’s no such thing as an unbiased analysis. Every portrayal of world affairs is filtered through a subjective lens, incentivized by whatever material interest the person presenting it has staked themselves in. In the core of imperialism the United States, the material interest that the foreign policy authorities are invested in is that of parasitic extractivism. Capitalism in its current stage can’t survive without the continuation of neo-colonialism, where the core countries export capital to the peripheral countries so that the profit demands of monopoly can be met. And the imperialists have concluded that to maintain their access to these global markets, they must subdue China, which is increasingly enabling the peripheral countries to economically stand on their own feet. 

This is what motivates Voice of America, an outlet that’s directly dependent on the U.S. government, when it consistently skews its coverage of Ukraine in a way that reinforces the narrative about Russia being the side that’s in the wrong. The imperialists have to put forth this narrative because if it’s found out that Russia is responding to a humanitarian threat posed to the Donbass republics by the Kiev regime, a regime which exists due to U.S. cold war meddling, the American people will no longer consent to military aid to Kiev. And if Kiev’s war against Russia can’t continue, Washington won’t be able to carry on its mission of weakening Russia. A mission whose success would make possible Washington’s vision for a subdued China, as Russia is China’s most important ally.

Keeping these facts in mind is how to recognize which motives go behind VOA’s choices of words when it talks about Ukraine. Take this example, which is the most neutral type of statement that VOA and other imperialist sources ever make about the topic:

2021: Zelenskyy appeals in January to U.S. President Joe Biden to let Ukraine join NATO. Russia masses troops near Ukraine’s borders during the spring in what it says are training exercises. In December Russia presents detailed security demands including a legally binding guarantee that NATO will give up any military activity in eastern Europe and Ukraine. In response, NATO repeats a commitment to its “open-door” policy while offering “pragmatic” discussions of Moscow’s security concerns.

2022: In a televised address on February 21, Putin says that Ukraine is an integral part of Russian history, has never had a history of genuine statehood, is managed by foreign powers, and has a puppet regime. Putin signs agreements to recognize the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent and orders Russian troops there.

No proclamations are made in these paragraphs. There are VOA articles that repeat the slogan about Russia’s actions being “unprovoked,” but on the surface, this reads as nothing more than a Wikipedia-type summary of the events. But Wikipedia itself hides a consistent and coordinated pattern of pro-imperialist bias behind its veneer of being a neutral resource, and the same is the case here.

Even “neutral” accounts by imperialist sources aren’t trustworthy because as a rule, they lie by omission. The main way VOA does this is by not mentioning the events which had caused Russia to interpret Kiev’s requests to join NATO as a sign that Russia’s security would soon be compromised. In its chronology of the events between Ukraine’s capitalist restoration and today, VOA doesn’t include the instances of Washington using its NATO allies as tools for placing nuclear missiles on the borders of its adversaries. It doesn’t mention how after joining NATO, Turkey let the U.S. put nuclear missiles next to the USSR. Which would have required VOA to cover a more extensive timeline, but that’s what’s necessary for laying out the sufficient context behind why Russia intervened in Ukraine.

One could counter that the other eastern European countries that have joined NATO since the cold war’s end haven’t acquired nuclear weapons, and this indeed makes the scenario of a nuclear Ukraine less likely. But Russia can still point to the historical precedent of the Turkish missile placement as evidence that it’s possible for Washington to decide to do the same in Ukraine. The fact that Ukraine is today a focal point in the great power tensions makes Russia’s concerns all the more rational. And that’s just one part of why Russia intervened. What VOA also omits is that Kiev has been ethnically cleansing its own people in order to de-Russifi the country, and that the separatist war has been about rescuing the people from this inhumane treatment. As well as that the independent republics were not recognized by Kiev as independent, making a Ukrainian invasion of these republics probable and justifying Russia’s effort to take away the regime’s military capabilities. As International Human Rights teacher at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law Daniel Kovalik has observed:

One must begin this discussion by accepting the fact that there was already a war happening in Ukraine for the eight years preceding the Russian military incursion in February 2022. And, this war by the government in Kiev against the Russian-speaking peoples of the Donbass – a war which claimed the lives of around 14,000 people, many of them children, and displaced around 1.5 million more even before Russia’s military operation – has been arguably genocidal. That is, the government in Kiev, and especially its neo-Nazi battalions, carried out attacks against these peoples with the intention of destroying, at least in part, the ethnic Russians precisely because of their ethnicity. While the U.S. government and media are trying hard to obscure these facts, they are undeniable, and were indeed reported by the mainstream Western press before it became inconvenient to do so.

What happens if these and the other hidden realities of imperialism are exposed? As Gramsci wrote, “If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i. e. is no longer ‘leading,’ but only ‘dominant,’ exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc.” This is why I write: to help bring our society to that state where the existing social order no longer has cultural hegemony to support it, and can only maintain itself through coercive force. The more that imperialism’s disinformation and lies by omission are made recognizable to the people, the more the ruling class will have to rely on coercion. At which point the contradictions of capitalism will have reached a stage of revolutionary crisis, in which the working class has an opportunity to wrest power from a vulnerable bourgeois state. This is how we can liberate both the global population that lives under imperialism, and the population in the core that’s also subjugated by capitalism.

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As the global class struggle runs through anti-colonialism, so does the class struggle in the U.S.

The proletariat’s path to liberation in what’s currently called the “United States” runs through anti-colonialism. Anti-colonialism both in global terms, and in terms of our own conditions. This is because whereas U.S. imperialism exists upon a new version of colonialism, in which the old colonialism’s legacy gets extended by the exporting of capital into formerly colonized countries, within U.S. borders the connection is even more direct. Here, the original type of colonialism continues to exist. Hundreds of Indigenous First Nations, as well as the African nation, still live under occupation. However few of the settlers today substantially benefit from this occupation, the fact remains that they’re settlers.

To get a sense of how much bearing post-colonial theory has on the building of socialism on this continent, it’s helpful to look at U.S. settler-colonialism’s counterpart of neo-colonialism. Neo-colonialism is what props up American capitalism. It’s kept capital here strong enough that the country’s workers haven’t so far managed to carry out revolution. As Stalin wrote, “the chain of the imperialist front must, as a rule, break where the links are weaker,” because “the proletarian revolution is the result of the breaking of the chain of the world imperialist front at its weakest link.” The weakest link is the countries in which the people have the most clearly antagonistic relationship towards imperialism, and the clearest material stake in breaking from imperial control. When these countries free themselves from imperialism, it weakens capital in the core, making revolution in the core more possible.

It would seem that the core therefore has the least revolutionary potential, because it’s where capital is strongest. But just because capital here is the strongest, just because it’s the center of imperialism, doesn’t mean its people have the most meager material stake in revolution. Communists in the U.S. shouldn’t simply wait for neo-colonialism to be sufficiently diminished before we start working towards revolution. Both because apathy is never good for any revolutionary to embrace, and because the people here don’t blanketly have their interests primarily tied into the continuation of imperialism.

The bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, labor aristocrats, and even upper strata of the working class in the U.S. indeed hold the strongest allegiance towards imperialism out of any other populations, because they’re the ones who benefit the most from imperialism. But they’re the minority of the population. And just because the remaining majority of the population also benefits from imperialism, doesn’t mean it isn’t being ravaged by capitalism. Most people here are living in poverty by an honest definition, or are part of a “precariat” that’s perpetually struggling to keep from falling into the impoverished masses just below its level. Out of this majority, the communities which have been disadvantaged by settler-colonialism are statistically the poorest.

Here is where the connection between anti-colonialism and class struggle in this country becomes most apparent. The U.S. empire’s internal colonies still haven’t been assimilated into the privileged general “American” clique, like previously marginalized groups such as Irish and Italians have become since being allowed to become “white.” They’re still oppressed nations, and therefore represent relatively weak links in the chain of imperialism. The U.S. population isn’t a monolith, the imperial center’s people don’t all have their primary interests staked in the continuation of imperialism. There’s a section of it that’s thoroughly bribed by the spoils of imperialism, but there’s also a section of it that’s living in enforced deprivation and subjected to intense state violence. These contradictions are growing more severe as imperialism contracts, imposing ever more neoliberal austerity policies while further militarizing its murderous police.

At some point, these contradictions will produce a revolt from these communities even greater than the one in 2020. The question is whether communists will have sufficiently managed to guide the people towards revolution, rather than bowing to spontaneity as Lenin warned against doing. As Peruvian author Héctor Béjar assessed earlier this year, such a task will require combating imperialist propaganda, and building solidarity between the people here and the people of the peripheries:

Commodity prices, whose revenues had provided fuel for the Pink Tide of twenty years ago, remain low. But there is now a changed context across the region, namely a more engaged China. China’s interest in expanding the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) across Latin America has provided new sources of investment and financing for development in the region. It is widely accepted in Latin America that the BRI project is an antidote to Washington’s largely discredited IMF project and agenda of neoliberal austerity. With little original capital to invest in Latin America, the United States has mainly its military and diplomatic power to use against the arrival of Chinese investment. Latin America, therefore, has become a major front in the US-imposed cold war on China. In each of the region’s new left projects, China will play a significant role. That is why Xiomara Castro has said that an early visit for her will be to Beijing and why Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega decided to recognise the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate representative of China in the United Nations system. There is no doubt that, from Mexico to Chile, the question of Chinese investment has altered the balance of forces and will likely bring together political groups that would otherwise not tolerate each other. The US is trying to portray China as a ‘dictatorship’ to appeal to those sections of the progressive majorities that have already been trained to be suspicious of the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutionary projects.

Is China the first thing we should bring up when talking to the people we’re trying to bring towards communism? It’s not, the first things we should talk about are the needs of our communities and how to address them. But educating the people against imperialist propaganda on China and the other anti-imperialist countries is crucial for building an effective revolutionary party. We can’t let the imperialists break solidarity between those with a stake in imperialism’s defeat here, and the global forces which are fighting against imperialism. We can’t enable the narrative that China’s undoing of neo-colonial inequities is “neo-colonial” itself. We must combat imperialism on all fronts, from narrative to militancy.

China is providing the means for weakening capital. The current neo-colonies, along with the former neo-colonies which have already broken free, are using those means. The disenfranchised communities in the imperial center are providing a lot more hope than otherwise for a militant struggle against the capitalist state. It’s the job of communists here to support all of these forces. With their combined strength, the U.S. empire can be defeated. This is because they together represent the over 90 percent of the global population that Mao said will ultimately rise up against imperialism. The remaining less than 10 percent who will try to defend imperialism won’t prevail if the rest of the world unites against them.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.