Despite the increases in class conflict that Covid-19 has brought, the socialist movement in the imperial core is still stuck in the state of fundamental weakness that’s defined it for so long. The much-anticipated strikes of May 1st were scattered and largely disorganized, and the social democrats continue to hold a vastly larger presence within countries like the U.S. than the communists do. The First World left still sorely lacks the kind of mass organization than is the case for the left in places like Latin America.
As Che Guevara said, “Workers in the imperialist countries gradually lose the spirit of working-class internationalism due to a certain degree of complicity in the exploitation of the dependent countries, and this weakens the combativity of the masses in the imperialist countries.” This continues to be true, even as tens of millions of these workers have lost their jobs in recent months; imperialism and colonialism have a way of tethering their benefactors to the status quo.
So while we should keep working to build the institutions for proletarian revolution and raise class consciousness, we must accept that until the material conditions of the First World change, we won’t have the opportunity to take power. But we can help create that kind of change by supporting the Third World socialist and anti-colonial movements, which have the potential to wreck capitalism within the imperial core.
Without the ability to exploit the Third World, the capitalist class in the core imperialist countries would have to enormously contract its operations, and this would make these countries very vulnerable to revolution. By its nature, modern capitalism needs to be globalized in order to remain stable-as the scholar Michael Parenti has observed, “There can be no such thing as ‘capitalism in one country.’” The machine needs the resources and labor of the colonized to function, which is why the machine is so desperately trying to retain its hold over the Third World.
The whole system won’t collapse as soon as it loses one country to an anti-imperialist revolution. It’s carried on after losing north Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and many other countries. But with each revolution comes a loss in strategic advantage for the imperialists, and with each victory for the anti-imperialists comes a higher probability that revolution will happen in additional nations. The freeing of Iran and Venezuela from imperialism has brought a loss for Washington’s ability to exploit the petrodollar within two oil-rich countries. And socialist China’s rise to superpower status has allowed it to begin economically freeing smaller nations from Western financial entrapment. The imperialists are being increasingly weakened by the consequences of the anti-imperialist revolutions from the last century.
Just this last week, the imperialists again showed their frantic desire to recover these losses. U.S. mercenaries, backed by a shady private security company, attempted to violently overthrow Maduro-before being easily apprehended by Venezuela’s security forces. It was one of around a half-dozen haphazard Venezuela coup attempts that Washington has tried in the last couple of years alone, and it failed like all the rest. In an increasingly multi-polar world where Russia and China have the power to protect Venezuela from a regime change invasion, it’s reasonable to expect that the Chavistas will remain in power throughout all future imperialist sabotage.
The ongoing survival of the socialist revolutions in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua hasn’t destroyed imperialism’s presence in the region, but it’s made Washington much more at risk of losing Latin America as a whole. This has remained true even after Washington carried out a coup against Bolivia’s socialist movement last year; Bolivia’s indigenous and socialist struggle is far from over, and Bolivia is a minor global economic player. The most important country in the region (or perhaps the world) that the imperialists are at near-term risk of losing is Brazil, which has the world’s ninth largest economy and is the tenth strongest military power.
“Brazil currently faces a confluence of at least three grave crises — one of public health, another economic, and other political and corruption-related — that has left the largest country in Latin America and the world’s sixth-most populous nation in greater turmoil and danger than at any time since its 1985 redemocratization,” the journalist Glenn Greenwald observed last week. Looking upon the effects of Bolsonaro’s radical austerity policies and privatization measures throughout the last year-and-a-half, Greenwald describes that “the Brazilian economy is in virtual freefall, with the Brazilian real plummeting to all-time lows, the stock market tumblings, and economic growth nonexistent.”
Capitalism has collapsed in Brazil, and this is leading to increases in Brazilian class struggle amid threats by an alarmed Bolsonaro to impose presidential dictatorship. Similar events are afflicting the other U.S.-backed neoliberal regimes in Latin America as the global economy slips into a depression. If the anti-imperialist movement topples any number of these regimes in the next decade, it could lead to a region-wide or even global series of revolutions; South Africa’s economic crisis is creating opportunities for increased class struggle in the country, indicating that South Africa and other African countries could join in on the coming wave of revolutions.
If this wave sweeps both Latin America and Africa, it will help free up more Asian countries for socialist revolutions. As Kim Il Sung said, “The peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America have a common interest and are in a position to support each other in their anti-imperialist and anti-U.S. struggle. As long as Africa and Latin America are not free, Asia is not free.” If neocolonialism is crippled in Latin America and Africa, and Western multinational corporations lose their ability to extract superprofits from the biggest economies in these places, the imperial core will become as vulnerable to revolution as Brazil now is.
If the Western capitalist class can no longer exploit these countries’ oil, lithium, agricultural sites, technology, and other resources, the economies of the U.S. and other imperialist benefactors will shrink. This would add onto the imperialist economic losses that are already coming from the crumbling the petrodollar system, the international abandonment of the dollar, the growing U.S. economic isolation from China, and the rise of China as an economic power. It would also further the internal contradictions of American capitalism, which are now being exposed through the Covid-19 recession and the meltdown of the U.S. financial system.
As inhabitants of the imperial core, we can make this collapse of capitalism in our region turn into revolution by building up the communist and anti-colonial movements. And we don’t have control over whether or not the revolutionaries in the Third World will succeed, but it’s nonetheless important for us to strengthen our solidarity with them.
Because if we let the First World left continue to predominantly believe that China is “authoritarian,” that the DPRK is a “dictatorship,” and that Chavismo is “not really socialist,” or promote other colonial chauvinist myths, the international exploited class will remain divided. Through acting in unity with these nations and movements, we’ll align ourselves with the forces that have the best chance of destroying imperialism.
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