The neo-colonies, the countries that are hyper-exploited by imperialism, are where the next wave of revolutions is going to start. This is apparent both in how much further along the class conflict is in these countries compared to in the imperialist countries, and in the alarmed reactions from the imperialists to the class conflict’s current intensifications within Colombia.
As Colombia’s people have risen up in irrepressible protests throughout the last month, responding to their government’s attempts to privatize healthcare and raise taxes on the poor, the country has seen a fulfillment of the dynamic which Indian Marxist Saikat Bhattacharya described in his piece Third Wave of Revolution is Coming:
For India and Indonesia, economic crisis, ethnic tensions and geopolitical contradictions with rising China together can create an ideal situation for revolution. Right to self-determination of nations will be the most important condition for revolutions in India and Indonesia. The First Wave succeeded only in West Europe and partly in the Americas. The Second Wave succeeded in non-Western World. But Third Wave has chances to succeed both in Western countries like the USA as well as in Third World countries like India. Yes, the Third Wave will be even more successful than Second Wave just as the latter was more successful than First Wave. Progress is inevitable.
According to Bhattacharya, the First Wave of revolutions lasted from the 18th century anti-colonial independence uprisings to the Paris Commune, the Second Wave lasted from the Russian revolution to the Sandinista revolution, and the Third Wave will begin within the countries that are most exploited by neoliberal globalization. We don’t know if Colombia’s revolution will come before the revolutions in Asia or Oceania, and those places may well still be the first ones given how armed communists in those places have more power than the ones in Latin America. But Colombia, as well as its neighbors Haiti and Honduras, have been undergoing a democratic collapse that’s happened in reaction to economic crisis and that furthers the people’s will towards revolt.
Haiti and Honduras have already become full-on dictatorships due to U.S. neo-colonial maneuvers, and Colombia has been shooting protesters and political dissenters even more than those other countries have. So throughout these and other Latin American neo-colonies, the masses have been taking to the streets.
Colombia’s people have also been carrying out a strike, which is alarming to the U.S. neocons who seek to prevent further revolutions within the region. It was a series of strikes and protests that precipitated the revolution in Cuba, wherein guerrilla warfare from the Marxist-Leninist vanguard was only one factor in the revolt that took down the dictator Batista. This showed that the tipping point in a socialist revolution, especially in Latin America, doesn’t come from the actions of the revolutionary vanguard party but from a spontaneous revolt by the people. And even though Colombia’s revolutionary guerrillas have been losing ground to the government’s forces and are isolated to diminished holdouts, the mere fact that unstoppable protests have broken out is proof that Colombia is veering towards revolution.
The goal of the counterrevolutionaries, both in Colombia and in Washington, is to prevent those holdouts in the Marxist-Leninist National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) from turning the situation in their favor. The prospects of these guerrilla forces gaining many new members as a result of the expanded class consciousness the protests are bringing, and of armed forces members heeding the FARC’s recent call for them to refuse the government’s orders, are all too plausible for the agents of international capital. So the forces of reaction have gone into a frenzy of spreading paranoid conspiracy theories about the protests and fanning the flames of Colombian paramilitarism.
These conspiracy theories stem from the neo-Nazi faction within the Colombian government, led by the fascist police and military advisor Alexis Lopez Tapia, whose goal is to justify the violent suppression of the entirety of the country’s class struggle. Under Tapia’s “Dissipated Molecular Revolution” theory — which calls for the military to snuff out the class struggle on a “molecular” level — every entity that’s opposed to the hard right, from indigenous organizations to the guerrillas to human rights groups to NGOs to civil society groups, is part of the same insidious conspiracy that the military needs to devise a plan to destroy. This conspiracy is supposed to stem from a mismash of foreign governments the fascists don’t like (such as the Chavistas and the Cuban socialists), and criminal organizations which these anti-imperialist governments supposedly seek to wield for violent subversive purposes.
There’s something Orwellian about these narratives, because they subvert the truth by accusing the liberation movements of what the Colombian government is guilty of. Colombia is a narco-state, where a powerful drug trafficker has used stolen money to buy votes for the country’s current president and where this crime has gone unpunished due to the total control the cartels hold over the state, the police, and the military. Plus, the government is the one that’s been carrying out a campaign to terrorize the population, as evidenced by the paramilitary, military, and police massacres which have been perpetrated as part of the neo-Nazi faction’s fanatical goal of snuffing out those who challenge capital.
The “Dissipated Molecular Revolution” theory, and the scorched-earth campaign of violence it justifies, is based upon an utterly absurd series of lies and projections. But its deceptive claims are nonetheless being amplified by the narrative managers of U.S. imperialism. Last month, the neocon publication The National Interest put out a piece titled Why is Joe Biden ignoring Colombia?, which has been republished by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation has also published a headline which claims that Colombia is being “threatened” by “leftist violence,” whose blame-shifting logic comes from the same conspiratorial worldview that the former article presents.
The National Interest paints the protests as being “infiltrated by anti-democratic groups” and being lead by “those seeking to undermine Colombia’s democratically elected government.” The internationally condemned police violence we’ve been seeing footage of, claims The National Interest, should only be seen as “allegations” of “excessive force” that merely come from “The Left.” The piece decries Biden for having “taken the allegations as fact,” and for considering cutting off military assistance to Colombia in response to the human rights abuses.
According to these neocons, Biden should abandon all concern over looking like a hypocrite on human rights in regards to the atrocities in Colombia, because preventing revolution is the most important thing for the U.S. empire to do within the country. Using that alarmingly Orwellian language again, the piece invokes “advancing human rights” as an argument for supporting everything the Colombian government does:
If the administration is truly interested in advancing human rights in Colombia, this can best be accomplished by cooperating with regional security services, not by disengaging and shunning them. U.S. disengagement only plays into the hands of those seeking to undermine Colombia’s democratically elected government. Abandoning the legitimate government of Colombia would immeasurably undermine human rights and public safety in the country. It would also open more doors for Chinese influence to spread in Colombia and throughout the hemisphere. Before a complete economic and political collapse of Colombia emerges, the Biden team needs to reverse course. It should oppose those who are actually eroding Colombia’s gains and stand with those who are trying to save their country.
These people they refer to who are “trying to save their country” aren’t the indigenous peoples, workers, and impoverished individuals who are fighting for freedom from neoliberal tyranny and violent repression. They’re the Nazi government advisors, capitalists, war criminal armed forces members, and paramilitary members who’ve been coordinating massacres of unarmed civilians to preserve neo-colonial rule. What they seek to “save” their country from is not narco rule or violence, since the existing government is the source of these things. What they’re fighting against is the liberation of the masses.
In its anxious statements about the prospects of the revolutionaries succeeding, The National Interest says it was a mistake for the Colombian government to have let the FARC and the ELN “off the hook” throughout this last decade. According to the scorched-earth neo-colonial enforcement model these neocons advocate for, the government should never have even negotiated with these guerrillas, and Washington shouldn’t be hesitating at all in its support for the state’s counterinsurgency efforts.
As is the case for Haiti, Honduras, and the other Latin American countries which have been reverting to their 20th century state of dictatorship, the most strategically thinking imperialists see human rights and political freedoms as things that should be disregarded in the war against the rising anti-colonial and proletarian movements. Their conclusion is that Washington can only retain control over its remaining imperial territories through full-on, unapologetic terror.
It seems like the imperialists fear a repeat of the error they made in Cuba, which they had believed they would be able to maintain control over even if they cut off military aid to the failing Batista regime. Now, as a new wave of revolutions approaches, the most fanatical imperialist think tank figures see unlimited military support for Latin America’s terrorist states as their safest option for retaining their neo-colonies. They’re so fanatical about it not just because of the fear of losing another source of neo-colonial extraction, but because of the geopolitical losses a revolution in Colombia would bring for Washington; The National Interest’s warning about “Chinese influence” spreading within Colombia if the revolt doesn’t get suppressed speaks to this fear.
The imperialists are preemptively fighting off the Chinese rise to power within the Global South that Bhattacharya mentioned, because they know that if another neo-colony becomes adjacent to China then Washington could lose its economic grip over the Global South and more revolutions could therefore be able to occur. This is the “domino theory” brought back for our current situation of rising anti-imperialist movements and great-power competition. The solution, say the neocons, is to support counterrevolutionary terror without restraint.
It’s a “solution” that’s based in fear and reaction rather than political pragmatism, and that Biden likely won’t fully embrace due to the bad optics on human rights which it would bring upon him. So the imperialists continue to be wrought with increasing paralysis and indecision, faced with the choice between giving up a consistent show of force against the revolutionaries and further isolating the U.S. empire by having Washington blatantly go against its stated human rights goals.
For now, Israel is the Colombian government’s most reliable ally, providing training and military technologies to the country’s security forces and paramilitaries. But Israel also backed Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa during their attempts to fight off rebellions, and we know how well those counterrevolutionary campaigns went. So when it comes to Colombia, we can apply Bhattacharya’s affirmation: “progress is inevitable.”
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