This essay is presented in the interests of analysis and discussion of tendencies in the international communist movement. Its focus is the issue of imperialism and anti-imperialism. It represents the writer’s opinions only.

In his 1916 book “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Lenin takes on rival ideas, especially those of the German socialist Karl Kautsky, on the nature of imperialism and its future. But the most important thing in the book for us today is how Lenin described imperialism, and how he saw the duty of revolutionaries towards it.

Lenin defined imperialism as the natural outgrowth of the development of capitalism, not a policy option chosen or not chosen by this or that bourgeois government. The most important characteristics of imperialism, according to Lenin, are:

1.    The combination of industrial capital with finance capital, with the latter dominating.
2.    The move from competition among many capitalist concerns to huge transnational monopolies.
3.    The move from mere export of products to export of capital; i.e. capital moving all over the globe in search of maximum profits.
4.    Competition and wars between rival capitalist powers.

This description show that Lenin saw imperialism as the correct name by which advanced capitalism should be called, not a “dimension” or “aspect” of advanced capitalism. If imperialism and advanced capitalism are one and the same, you can’t fight the one without fighting the other.

Put another way, you can’t be “anti-capitalist” without being “anti-imperialist.”

So Lenin held that the road to socialism runs through a struggle against imperialism, a struggle that was incumbent on all revolutionaries, especially those who live in imperialist-ruled countries. He criticized a hypothetical Japanese person who denounces the United States for dominating the Philippines, saying that such a person would have no credibility unless he also denounced and struggled against Japanese imperialist control of Korea, at the time an especially brutal reality.

Lenin’s position sharply contrasts not only with that of Kautsky, who believed that a benign “super-imperialism” might be the road to socialism, but also with that of social democrats. In wealthy and powerful developed capitalist countries, most social democrats sought not to dismantle imperialism, but at best to fight for workers in their own countries to get a bigger piece of the pie of profits gained from imperialist exploitation of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. This was the characteristic stance of many social democrats in the U.K., France and other wealthy countries.

Lenin could not have anticipated that social democratic groups might also appear in poor countries which are the victims of imperialism, and that you could have, in such circumstance, political currents that are social democratic but also anti-imperialist: Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas in Haiti, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Revolutionary Democratic Party/PRD in Mexico, and left-center social democratic ruling parties in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay etc. The difference in political conduct between Tony Blair’s “New Labour” and Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas is that for the former, the strategy is to cozy up to international monopoly capital to get a better share of the pie, and for the latter, only the empty pie plate is offered by imperialism, so perforce they have to take anti-imperialist positions.

Because Lenin’s statements were taken to heart in the world communist movement, anti-imperialism has been a near-constant in the varying positions and stances of our parties. By fighting imperialism, one is not only doing justice to the workers of the colonized world, one is performing an essential task for making socialism possible in the developed, wealthy countries.

This was not entirely new with Lenin; Marx had already come to the realization that for British workers to achieve their liberation, the liberation of Irish workers was essential, and that white American workers could not be free while Black workers were “branded.” Coming at the issue from the ruling class side, the British imperialist statesman Benjamin Disraeli averred that by expanding the British Empire, he was making it possible to preserve capitalism in the U.K. because the wealth brought in by imperialism made it possible to make life more tolerable for British workers. By dismantling imperialism, revolutionaries make it impossible for the capitalist ruling class to go on governing as before—a necessary condition, Lenin thought, for socialist revolution.

So with few lapses communists in wealthy countries such as our own have thought it important to emphasize solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles in the colonies and what Lenin called the “semi-colonies,” in other words poor countries under imperialist sway, or threat.

At the time that Lenin was writing, the United States was ruling Puerto Rico and the Philippines with an iron hand, and dominated the government of newly independent Cuba to the point that many Cubans thought their “independence” was a joke. In 1895 the US had taken over the independent Kingdom of Hawaii by force. By World War I, US imperialism had established military, economic and diplomatic control over Central America, the Caribbean (the part not ruled by Britain or France) and some of the South American states. The United States had long dominated Mexico, and the year after Lenin’s book came the farcical Pershing expedition to capture Pancho Villa. The 1904 Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine was used to justify dozens of armed interventions in the region, which made small and poor countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as Cuba, poorer and less free and independent. The general of US Marines who had been in charge of some of these operations, Smedley Butler, described the role of the US military in the following eloquent terms:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

So the United States did not engage in these military aggressions just for the fun of it, or to keep order or defend democracy or civilization, but to lend support to the economic dimension of imperialism in which the main actors were companies like United Fruit.

The US also was a participant in the scramble to carve up China and its markets among the wealthy powers, hypocritically denouncing its partners in crime, France, the UK, Germany, Russia, Japan and others, for their greed, but really annoyed because they tried to stop the United States from participating in the orgy through the “Open Door” policy. In many of these countries, the beginnings of local communist movements and parties honed their skills by organizing workers and farmers not only against the local bosses, landlords and mandarins, but also against imperialism. This was true all over the world, leading to the strong communist and workers movements in China, Vietnam, India, South Africa and many other places.

There was a semi-hiatus in the most aggressive manifestations of US imperialism during the later 1930s and the 1940s. The administration of Franklin Roosevelt instituted the “Good Neighbor Policy” which temporarily put an end to direct US interventions in Latin American countries. Thus it was possible, in 1938, for Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas to seize foreign oil holdings without triggering the invasion by US Marines which would have followed had he done it 10 years earlier (or the CIA machinations that would have been unleashed had he done it 12 years later). The “Good Neighbor Policy” partly overlapped with the “Popular Front” period of the Comintern, in which communist parties in the Latin American area were urged to enter into the broadest possible united fronts with bourgeois parties in and out of power, so as to prioritize the fight against fascism, in which the USSR was allied with the United States and the UK. In 1943, the Comintern was dissolved, as a measure to reassure the allies that the USSR was not actively working for the overthrow of their bourgeois regimes. This was the period in which the Cuban Communist Party, for example, changed its name to the Popular Socialist Party and entered into an electoral alliance and then a coalition government with future dictator Fulgencio Batista.
 
The Comintern parties’ policies of this period, though arguably correct in the fight against fascism, also led to some illusions among some of the Latin American communist parties, to the effect that promoting US corporate investment in Latin America was entirely beneficial to a socialist project. This jibed with similar ideas coming out of our own party at the time, especially those of Earl Browder, who thought that the wartime alliance among the United States, the UK and the USSR was a permanent thing which would allow for the gradual development of socialism in the United States. Militant opposition to US imperialism was shelved for the time being. When the Cold War started after the end of World War II, there were big controversies in the parties of the region, including our own, with splits, ousting of leaders and expulsions.

The coming of the Cold War led to a new, more violent stage of imperialism. The hysteria in the United States on the subject of “who lost China” and the attempts by the European imperialist powers to restore their control over Asian colonies that had slipped out of their grasp during the struggles of World War II (the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Vietnam etc), the Korean War and the growth of left- and often communist-led insurgencies and mass resistance movements led to a new level of imperialist intervention to crush anti-imperialist insurgents. We are familiar with the story of the Korean War and also the Vietnam War in which the United States took over from a defeated France. In 1953, the CIA (a relatively new entity at that time) teamed up with British imperialism to overthrow the democratically elected, secular government of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had threatened British oil interests in that country. Mossadegh was hardly communist (he stiff-armed the Iranian communists, the Tudeh, when they offered to help defend him) but anti-communism was now used as the pretext for an intervention that restored the reactionary government of the Shah, who became imperialism’s strongest ally in the Middle East.

In Guatemala, the Third International communist party, the PGT (Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo) had grown up quickly from its founding in 1944, especially in its work to organize and mobilize indigenous peasant farmers and agricultural workers. The communists, though officially proscribed until 1952, were allied with two successive left wing nationalist governments, those of Juan Jose Arevalo (1945-1951) and Jacobo Arbenz (1961-1954), and had become an influential force in the country. The most right wing elements in Guatemala, the planter elites who exploited the indigenous communities, and the conservative elements of the Roman Catholic Church, made common cause with US imperialism and particularly with Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, who had investments in the United Fruit Company that Arbenz had begun to nationalize. The CIA financed and led a bloody coup d’état in 1954, leading to the overthrow of Arbenz and to decades of warfare and repression which lasted until 1994, with a death toll of over 100,000 and perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians (for the early stages of this story, see Greg Grandin’s book “The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War,” University of Chicago Press, 2004).

From the Guatemala coup until the 1990s, Latin America from Central America to the Southern Cone (Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) was a bloody battleground in which the US government played both and open and an undercover role in bankrolling coups d’état, fingering left-wing and especially communist activists to be murdered, and using economic pressure to destabilize left wing regimes. “Operation Condor,” in which the US was heavily involved, resulted in the deaths of thousands of Latin American activists and leaders, and the crushing of labor unions, student groups and any other force that would oppose the local elites and/or US economic domination of the hemisphere. The United States associated itself, in these activities, with some of the most gruesome dictators the world has ever seen: Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, Jorge Videla in Argentina, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Hugo Banzer in Bolivia, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Efrain Rios-Montt in Guatemala and many more. Direct interventions occurred also, in Cuba at the beginning of the 1960s, and in the Dominican Republic in 1964 (the Cuba intervention was a farcical failure, but the Dominican, Grenadan and Panamanian interventions were successful). Many Latin Americans believe that the CIA was behind a number of assassinations also, including that of President Omar Torrijos of Panama and President Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, both of whom were killed at nearly the same time (July 31 and May 24, 1981, respectively) in very suspicious aircraft “accidents,” after antagonizing the US government. The question of whether the death of President Salvador Allende of Chile on September 11 (!) 1973 was murder or suicide is now being re-investigated. There were murders of left-wing political leaders who had been ousted from power, including former Bolivian President Juan Jose Torres, in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976. Torres had been overthrown at the behest of the Nixon administration and his administration was succeeded by the brutal drug-dealing regime of General Hugo Banzer.

In all cases, things became truly nasty when the interests of US and other corporations were threatened. US embassies worldwide became the bases of operations for CIA and military intelligence agents who worked overtime to develop corrupt ties to local oligarchs, military officers, politicians and social and cultural figures. The vast extent of these ties was revealed by a repentant C.I.A agent, Philip Agee, in his 1975 book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary.”

The joke became current in Latin America:

Question: “Why has there never been a military coup d’état in the United States?”

Answer: “Because there is no US embassy in Washington D.C.”

The CIA and other US and Western European intelligence agencies also did their best to infiltrate and utilize all kinds of academic, cultural, charitable and especially labor groups and organizations for the purpose of maintaining imperialist hegemony worldwide. So when recently a left-wing website in Latin America posted an article claiming that the Campfire Girls are a CIA front, the initial urge to laugh is tempered by the realization that infiltrating cultural organizations exactly what the CIA used to do, on a huge scale. When I was a graduate student at Northwestern University during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the big scandal in our field of cultural/social anthropology was the degree to which the CIA saw US and other anthropologists and scholars working abroad as a natural means of extending not only intelligence, but also intervention activities. There were serious blowups about the CIA and other US intelligence agencies recruiting anthropologists to do information collecting and even counterinsurgency work in Chile, India and Vietnam. As I and other students who were opposed to this tendency looked into the question, we were shocked by its potential scope, and by the blasé attitude of senior figures in the field to what we saw as major violations of professional ethics. Unfortunately, there is no way we can be sure that this sort of thing has stopped.

The victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979 led to the Contra Wars, coordinated by the CIA, which killed thousands. Many major US figures involved in the Contra Wars are still politically active today and work closely with right-wing political currents all over Latin America and beyond: Lt.Col. Ollie North, John Negroponte, Roger Noriega, Otto Reich and others. They are particularly close to the right wing of the Republican Party and to the Cuban exile community in Florida, and will play a major role in the future. Many of them have their fingerprints all over the Honduras coup of June 28 2009.

And this bloody phase was not confined to Latin America. One of the most vicious episodes of repression following a military coup happened in Indonesia in 1965-1966, with the overthrow of President Sukarno. In that incident, up to a million innocent people, including most of the members of the Communist Party of Indonesia, were massacred, lists of people to be killed being provided by the CIA There are strong indications that the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo involved cooperation between “the Agency,” Belgian security forces and Congolese politicians.

In Africa, also, there was collusion between the United States and the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the Middle East, in addition to its close alliance with Israel, the United States cooperated with a young thug named Saddam Hussein by giving him lists of Iraqi communists to be liquidated. Billions of dollars in mostly military aid were channeled into the governments of Egypt and Israel.  The list of intrigues and interventions is too long to give here. Imperialism also had a major hand in developing reactionary Islamist jihadism, under the Zia Al-Haq dictatorship in Pakistan and the warfare against the left wing government and its Soviet allies in Afghanistan.

Even in Europe the activities of imperialism included destabilization plots in several countries, designed to isolate political sectors which seemed to be taking off in an independent direction. NATO was and continues to be a major force in this; the full story of “Operation Gladio” and its destabilization efforts in Greece, Italy and perhaps other countries has not yet been told.

I have concentrated on the role of the US government in imperialism, because the US is where most readers live and because the it was, and continues to be, the strongest imperialist state. We know, of course, that other developed capitalist states did not, and do not, keep their hands clean in these matters. France and the other European Union powers are heavily involved in imperialist exploitation of Africa. Even a relatively small country such as Canada (33 million inhabitants) is heavily involved in exploitative and environmentally disastrous mining activities in poor countries, especially in Central America, and under the current Conservative Party government of Mr. Harper, plays the role of “Mini-Me” to US imperialism’s “Dr. Evil.”

While there was a Soviet Union and a Socialist Bloc, there was a counterweight to the power of imperialism. Though the USSR and the European socialist countries were usually loathe to project military force, they were a vital source of economic support for countries seeking to move away from imperialist domination. The socialist bloc provided direct foreign aid (including military and infrastructural aid) and also trade deals which, if they did not always come to Che Guevara’s high standards, at least gave poor countries and alternative to imperialist terms. When the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism collapsed, a process finished by 1991, this counterweight no longer existed. So, for example, 2,000 Angolans who had been studying medicine in socialist Czechoslovakia were kicked out by the “humanistic genius” Vaclav Havel. In the debates in the Soviet press in the lead up to the collapse, the issue of poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America supposedly sponging off the Soviet people came up in a brutally racist way. Cuba was a particular target of these writers. The idea that the USSR had fair trade relations with poor countries caused a negative reaction; the writers wanted the USSR to establish the same kind of UNFAIR trade relations with the poor countries that the wealthy countries had; i.e. exploitative and unequal. For all the faults and errors of the USSR and the former socialist states of Eastern Europe, they played a vital role in supporting the liberation struggles of South Africa and other countries, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European Socialism was, for this reason, a huge victory for imperialism, which did not wait a moment to press its advantage.

Neo-liberal imperialism, which succeeded the fall of the socialist governments, has taken a huge toll on the poor countries and on the former socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Though there have also been military interventions (the Balkan wars, Gulf War I, the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War being the largest) and the role of NATO has been hugely expanded, the main imperial instruments of rule have been the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which control poorer countries’ access to loans and development aid, and the World Trade Organization, which sets the rules of most of international commerce, as well as regional bodies. These entities are overwhelmingly dominated by international monopoly capital and by the big imperialist powers (the United States, the European Union countries, etc.).

Countries which could no longer rely on help from, or even on alternate trade agreements with, the socialist block have been hammered into adopting the “Washington Consensus,” one of the most important instrumentalities of imperialism in the last 15 years. The Washington Consensus requires all international trade between rich countries and poor to be structured in such a way as to give the rich countries maximum access to markets and natural resources of the poor countries.  It dictates the adoption of the neo-liberal package as a requirement for getting any kind of loans or credits from international agencies or wealthy capitalist countries. This package consists of the following items:

•    Bogus “free” trade, which entails opening up the poor country to penetration by transnational corporations. This entails removing or drastically lowering tariffs, and eliminating subsidies on the poor country’s own exports or internal sales. However, rich countries are allowed to subsidize their exports to the poor countries, which amounts to the “dumping” that Lenin was already talking about in 1916. This has been one of the main characteristics of US “free trade” agreements with Latin American countries, including NAFTA and CAFTA-DR. A classic example is Haiti; in exchange for helping restore President Aristide to power in 1994, the Clinton administration forced Haiti to drastically reduce import tariffs on rice. This opened up the Haitian market to heavily subsidized US rice exports, coincidentally or not mostly from rice producers in Arkansas, President Clinton’s home state. But it drove thousands of Haitian rice producers off the land and into the Port au Prince slums. This is why the Haitian capital was so overcrowded when the earthquake hit a year ago. As a result of the crowding, many more people were killed than would otherwise have been. Recently ex President Clinton admitted that his policies had done more for Arkansas rice producers than for the Haitian people, but the policy remains.

•    Radical privatization of public resources, which allows transnational corporations to take over and/or replace whole areas of the economic life of poor countries, to the benefit of the bottom line and the detriment of the vast majority of the poor countries’ inhabitants. Privatization of water, telecommunications, educational, health care and other services in poor countries has been a characteristic of this period, and has become the focus of sharp class struggle, e.g. the successful “water wars” in South America.

•    Austerity measures, including mass layoffs of government employees, cutbacks of the most basic public services, and fees charged even to allow children to go to elementary school are forced on the poor governments. The 2008 mortgage, financial and housing crisis has become a pretext for pushing austerity measures all over the world, including in the United States.

•    Repression of the inevitable social rebellions is enhanced by aid from the rich countries to the military and police establishments of the poor ones. To facilitate the crushing of opposition and to realize greater profits, governments are urged (and often don’t need much urging) to go after labor unions especially, with direct repression and also with labor law “reforms” designed to make labor relations more “flexible.” Sometimes fighting crime and drug trafficking is the pretext by means of which the rich countries pressure the poor countries to increase their repressive measures (as in the case of “Plan Colombia”).

•    Wealthier countries do what they can to make sure that the governments of the poor countries accept these conditions, and that nobody comes to power who is going to buck the trend, to which end they are willing to manipulate elections, surreptitiously fund right wing opposition groups and engage in other kinds of interference. US and French action to remove Jean Bertrand Aristide as president of Haiti in 2004 is a noted example.

•    There is a mutually supportive interplay among international monopoly capital, the Breton Woods organizations (IMF and World Bank), the WTO and local economic and political elites. Thus it was that as Mexico was taking the plunge into poverty and despair after the initiation of NAFTA in 1994, 25 new billionaires suddenly appeared on the scene in that country. They all derived their sudden extra wealth from the politically wired privatization schemes that Mexico adopted as part of the Washington Consensus. This has happened in many countries, including the former socialist states of the USSR and Eastern Europe. Privatization of telecommunications systems, banks, mining industries, transportation and utilities play a major role in the less industrialized countries especially.

•    There is also a reactionary ideological offensive to accompany and support the economic and political (and sometimes military) offensive of imperialism. The promotion of ideas like “the end of history” (now discredited, since history has obviously not ended), “human nature” as being “naturally” bourgeois, “trickle down” economics, the depiction of workers as the “problem” and entrepreneurs as “the solution” and, of course, anti-communism are all part of this offensive. New racist offensives are launched in the media, with the purpose of dehumanizing the people of poorer countries (who are mostly non-white) so that the barbaric treatment meted out to them will be more palatable to people in the wealthier countries.

This form of imperialism has been imposed on all the less developed and poorer capitalist-run countries, including the former socialist states of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Even governments that have come to power by revolutionary struggle, such as that of South Africa, have found themselves forced to accept at least part of this formula. After all, no country, and especially no poor country, can simply drop out of international commerce. While imperialism is making all the rules for international trade virtually without challenge, other countries are forced to adapt themselves.

The neo-liberal phase of imperialism has been called “the last stage of imperialism” by former Cuban President Fidel Castro, whose unquenchable revolutionary optimism always cheers us up, but it is still going strong and wreaking havoc. In a recent analytical article in the New York Times, Neil McFarquhar reveals that all over Africa, outside corporate entities are buying up vast quantities of farmland out from under the feet of traditional communities engaged in subsistence agriculture. This land is to be turned over to the production of cash crops for export. The experience of other countries shows that this will lead to the vast displacement of village agricultural populations, with no new employment opportunities offered to them except to immigrate to wealthier countries. And this will happen without visas, because no visas are going to be offered to these displaced and often minimally educated farmers and their families. Because of imperialist domination of international trade, credit and aid, poor countries are unable to generate enough industrial and service jobs to absorb all these displaced people. Also, transferring so much land that has been growing crops to feed the local population into cultivation of cash crops for export (often, for biofuels) worsens the food situation in the poor countries. McFarquhar’s article reveals that a South Korean agribusiness conglomerate was about to get control of nearly ½ of the arable land in Madagascar, which led to the 2009 uprising in which President Marc Ravalomanana was ousted by Andry Rajoelma.

This is an old pattern in Africa and beyond, namely the conversion of traditional peasant farmers and tribal cultivators into proletarians exploitable for the surplus value they create through various mechanisms to make their subsistence farming unsustainable. It was pioneered in Southern Africa by Cecil Rhodes and his colleagues, who were adept at inventing various schemes for taxing the “natives” so that they would be forced to work in the cash economy, i.e. in the mines and on commercial farms and like enterprises. There were taxes on huts, on firearms and even on dogs. These were means used to generate a Black proletariat to work for a pittance in extremely dangerous and unhealthy conditions in the diamond mines at Kimberly and the gold mines of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Farm and other labor was, of course, also generated by these practices. The information contained in McFarquar’s article shows that far from being a thing of the past, these tactics are now expanded to a worldwide scale, as well as vastly intensified.

Neo-liberal imperialism with its aggressive displacement of poor farmers in the interests of transnational agribusiness considerations has other effects. All over the world farmers are forced to accept genetically engineered seeds to replace the ones they have been using for millennia. This sharply reduces both their options and their incomes. It is thought to be one factor behind a huge wave of suicides by farmers in India over the past decade.

The massive disruption of both rural and urban populations which neo-liberal imperialism has effectuated has produced another result also: That of massive movements of displaced farmers and workers within individual countries, and across national borders. Naturally, the cross border migration goes from poor countries to rich ones. It comes in undocumented, because the rich countries are almost never willing to give permanent immigrant visas to these displaced people. It also comes in in the form of exploitative “guest worker” programs. It is noteworthy that not one single rich industrialized country has signed the main U.N. protocol on the rights of migrant workers, the International Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families. The large scale undocumented immigration from Mexico, Central America, Haiti and other countries to the United States, and similar waves of migration from Africa and Asia to Western Europe, exist not in spite of, but because of, “Western investment” in the poorer countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Mexico and Canada is a case in point. Mexico now sends 80.2 percent of its exports to the United States, so it is trapped in the framework. At the same time, the huge invasion of Mexican internal markets by monopolistic agribusiness has displaced millions of Mexican farmers and their families. Industrial development in Mexico has not made up for more than a fraction of this displacement, leading to a sharp increase in undocumented Mexican immigration to the United States – undocumented, because the US does not make legal immigration visas available.

Many have commented that “neo-liberalism” has also been imposed within the rich countries, including our own, where we have also seen drives toward privatization, austerity and the rest of it. The citizens of especially, but not only, the poorer countries of Western Europe (Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece) are up against the wall with a new wave of aggressive neo-liberal assaults being carried out under the pretext of the world financial and economic crisis. In our own country, the current attacks on public service workers’ unions and the social safety net are part of the same dynamic. The effort to destroy public employees unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere are part of this dynamic.

Into the 21st century, most of this neo-liberal phase of imperialism still continues. However, there have been some counter trends.

The growth of China, India and Brazil is reducing the degree to which the US, the wealthy countries of the Euro zone, Japan and the smaller rich countries can dictate trade terms to the rest of the world. Several of the documents that came out of the 12th World Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties point out the degree to which the share of world economic activity of the United States and European Union countries has dropped, while that of the “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) has increased. That is a topic for another article, or several.

While the US has been occupied in Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been successes in the efforts of Latin American countries to slip out of imperialist control. In a number of countries, left wing nationalist, social democratic or populist governments have been able to take power and, as importantly, build relationships of trade, credit, aid and mutual diplomatic and military support among themselves to resists the hegemony of US imperialism. The formation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), consisting of Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and some smaller states, is of signal importance because it unites countries whose leaders have explicitly, though, except for Cuba, somewhat vaguely, socialist goals. Beyond these countries, the two big trade alliances in Latin America, MERCOSUR and UNASUR, lend support without having stepped forward with an explicitly socialist goal. This system of alliances has to some extent made the old Organization of American States (OAS), which used to be an instrument of US imperial control in the region, far less relevant. The ALBA countries are trying to create a new OAS type structure which would be explicitly anti-imperialist, thus excluding the United States and Canada. But some of these progressive governments are rather fragile. In Chile last year the right was able to win the presidential elections. In 2009 a right wing coup toppled the progressive president of Honduras. There has been heavy pressure on the government of Paraguay to move to the right.

It is important for us to ask:  What is the situation of imperialism today? And, what is the role of the United States under Obama in imperialism?

First of all, nobody can say that imperialism is a thing of the past. All of the items Lenin listed as characterizing imperialism are still extant and in full force, except for active inter imperialist wars, which are unlikely in the short run. If anything, most of the dynamics of imperialism listed by Lenin in 1916 have intensified in the intervening years: Monopolies, concentration of capital, domination of finance capital, export of capital to areas where greatest profit can be realized, etc. Many of the communist and workers parties which contributed discussion papers to the 12th Annual Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Tshwane, South Africa, take the view that imperialism is still aggressive and expanding.

I strongly agree with this. There is no contradiction between the ideas that imperialism is on the march, and that anti-imperialism is also on the march. That’s how materialist dialectics work.

Secondly, since imperialism is an advanced phase of capitalism itself, and not a policy option that can be switched on and off by this or that king, president or prime minister, it would have been impossible for Obama to rule a non-imperialist United States, unless capitalism itself had somehow collapsed at the point he was elected. And like Franklin Roosevelt, Obama’s task has been to save capitalism, not destroy it. So Obama or no Obama, the United States is still the most powerful imperialist country in the world.

Let us be clear that the Republican victory in the US elections of November 2010 was a victory also for imperialism and for the ultra right. Another Republican victory in 2012 would be a huge setback for people’s struggles not only in the United States, but worldwide. That is not in doubt.

However, to ask about how the Obama administration has gone about ruling over this imperialist system is legitimate. Recall that in the case of US imperialism in Latin America, Franklin Roosevelt’s government opted to use softer methods than his cousin Teddy Roosevelt’s belligerent “big stick” method. Can we describe Obama’s foreign policy as a “Good Neighbor” policy for the 21st century, in which US economic interests are still pushed but by other methods, with more of a willingness to cede ground to popular demands for justice in the poor countries, when necessary?

During the 2008 election campaign, and for a while after his election and inauguration, it seemed to me at least that Obama was moving away from “the big stick” as wielded by the crackpot Bush administration and to a sort of “Good Neighbor” stance similar to that of Franklin Roosevelt. Obama said during the elections that he would be willing to meet one on one with US adversaries such as Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez and others, without conditions. He was attacked for this by the Republicans and, importantly, by Hillary Clinton during the primaries. So I entertained some hope that Obama, while not doing away with imperialism, would at least begin to talk to Latin American and other countries the way the US talks to China, i.e. recognizing the other countries as equal partners and not as a lot of contemptible “banana republics” to be managed by threats. In particular I thought that given the economic power of countries like Brazil and Venezuela, the United States would use a more respectful tone in dealing with the Latin American countries as a group.

At the Trinidad Summit of the Americas in April 2009, this appeared to be a possibility given statements made by Barack Obama, newly installed as president. But so far, this has not panned out.

•    The US continues to ally itself with the most right wing governments in the area: Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and has done little to improve its relations with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.  The Egypt phenomenon should serve as a warning as to the eventual results of such policies.

•    The Obama administration continues to push NAFTA-like free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and Peru, and also South Korea that are opposed not only by the left in those countries, but by US labor and the left wing of the Democratic Party here.

•    It continues to pour military aid into Colombia, which reduces instead of increasing the possibility of a peaceful settlement to that country’s long running civil wars. Wikileaks recently revealed that the United States is providing funds for Colombian military and police to train officers in Mexico in how to fight the drug cartels. This has caused a strong negative reaction among the Mexican left; 2006 PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party) presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has written an open letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticizing this and calling for her government to go back to the Franklin Roosevelt “Good Neighbor Policy.”

•    It has made some changes in US policy toward Cuba, though the Cubans complain that in some ways has tightened the US blockade (by doing more to prosecute companies that “violate” it.). Recent changes in travel and remittance policy have to be seen in the context of the overall outrageousness of US Cuba policy. They are positive, but small scale. Of considerable significance has been the willingness of the Obama administration to call witnesses from Cuban state security agencies to testify in the trial of former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles in El Paso, Texas. We shall see if there is further progress.

•    State Department policy appears to be set on busting up the coalitions in the Latin American area (especially ALBA) rather than finding a way to work with them. Efforts to destabilize the government of Bolivia, for example, appear to have continued, under the pretext of the anti-drug struggle. The US is taking a hard line on Bolivia’s refusal to eliminate cultivation of coca leaf for traditional medicinal purposes, a position with which hardly any other country agrees.

•    The handling of the Honduras coup of June 2009 particularly antagonized the majority of Latin American states and the Latin American left. The OAS, hardly a bastion of left-wing radicalism, took a collective stand that pressure had to be exerted to force the coup regime headed by Roberto Micheletti to stand down and restore the legally elected president, Manuel Zelaya. Even some of the right wing governments agreed with this, because they have no interest in legitimizing a return to the military coup d’état as a means of regime change – the same thing could happen to them tomorrow. The United States broke with this unity and created a parallel negotiating mechanism outside the structure of the OAS to carry out utterly fruitless “negotiations” with Micheletti. When these failed, and Micheletti announced he was going ahead with elections for November 29, which the hemispheric consensus saw as illegitimate because they would be carried out with troops in the street repressing the left, the United States supported this and, since then, has been pressuring other countries to give recognition to the regime elected by that process, even though the murders of trade unionists and others still continue. Hillary Clinton openly stated in the fall of 2009 that she was changing US Honduras policy in a deal with Senator Richard Lugar whereby the Republicans would stop their Senate hold on two middle-range State Department appointments, in exchange for recognition of the legitimacy of the November 2009 Honduran elections.

This is not the approach Obama seemed to be articulating during the elections. Nor is it the Bush or McCain policy, which would have been more directly interventionist. It resembles, rather, the policies of President Clinton (1993-2001) for the region and the world, namely a policy aligned with the neo-liberal phase of imperialism, but shrewder and more nuanced than the caveman Republican strategies. (We can not say less violent, because of the Yugoslavia episode which was very violent indeed). This is perfectly logical: For political reasons deriving from the dynamics of the 2008 election, Obama had to give Ms. Clinton a major appointment in his government, and it is not believable that a person of Ms. Clinton’s character, political experience and stature in the Democratic Party would have accepted the foreign policy portfolio without extracting a promise of a substantially free hand in determining and implementing that policy. So we get a Hillary Clinton foreign policy, only occasionally mollified by the president, which greatly resembles the Bill Clinton foreign policy. Whether this will continue into a second Obama term we will have to wait to see.

Steps going forward

Lenin’s analysis of imperialism is as true today as it was in 1916. He argued that imperialism is inseparable from advanced capitalism, and that you can’t fight the one without fighting the other. We will not achieve socialism in this country while imperialism exists, and imperialism will be defeated mostly by the resistance of the people in the poor countries it exploits. There is no longer any Soviet bloc to help with this.

But democratic forces in this country have a duty to help. And to do so is also in the short, medium and long term interest of US workers. The better workers are doing in other countries, especially poorer countries, the better workers will do in this country. Outsourcing and the runaway shop, as well as the threats of these things, are used by US based corporations to control the wage demands and bust the unions of US workers. This is possible only in a world in which workers in Mexico, Haiti or Bangladesh are paid for a whole day what US workers earn in an hour or less. Victories for workers anywhere are victories for workers everywhere.

Secondly, because of its history and national and international orientation, the CPUSA put us in a better position than many others on the US left to give direction to the fight against imperialism, which means solidarity with people abroad who are fighting against imperialism. Other progressive and left groups do not always share our analysis of imperialism, so will not consistently fight it, except for purely domestic reasons (e.g. costs too much money, sacrifices the lives of our soldiers to “help foreigners”, we should help our people at home before “helping” people on the other side of the world, etc.). Other groups considering themselves Marxists for the most part are not well enough rooted in the class struggle here to be able to influence US workers and masses on anti-imperialist issues. The Communist Party can do that, because we have that presence in the unions and the working class communities, albeit small-scale, and we have a non-sectarian, flexible stance toward forming united fronts. We are for building center left unity at a mass level and at a leadership level, while some on the left still insist that there’s not a “dime’s worth of difference” between Republicans and Democrats, and that the only united fronts that are worthwhile are among small leftist sects. The “left talking to the left” does nothing to solve the main problem we have, which is that it is difficult for the US leftists to get the attention of major sectors of this country of more than 300 million people.

Republican administrations such as those of Reagan and Bush have used more aggressive methods to push imperialist interests than have most recent Democratic administrations. McCain, if he had been elected in 2008, would certainly have been much worse. The people who aspire to take over the country from the right in 2012 are decidedly worse. Some of the worst of them, with the leadership of their fairy godmother Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., are meeting regularly in Miami with the most gruesome right-wing figures from Latin American politics, with the stated aim of going after Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia etc, via the new Republican control of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. These get-togethers are by no means only with the Tea Party crackpots; they include “respected” Republican figures such as Senators Lugar and McCain. Still, scrutiny of the Obama administration, and especially of the Clinton State Department, is in order. A broad ranges of forces have taken issue with certain policies. The Congressional Black Caucus just issued a statement in disagreement with Hillary Clinton’s policy on Haiti. Organized labor continues to criticize the administration’s push for more free trade agreements, especially the one with Colombia. During the Honduras crisis in 2009 many left and center Democrats in Congress criticized the administration’s policies, with notable leadership from Senator Kerry, the 2004 Democratic Party presidential candidate.

It can not be denied that Democratic administrations, including the present one, also promote imperialist interests in their international functioning. This is true not only vis a vis Latin America, which I have emphasized because it is the region with which I am most familiar and because it has been, traditionally, the geographic area in which specifically US imperialism has operated most intensively, but worldwide. Note, for example, the way the US administration has pushed NATO as a worldwide intervention force (at the NATO conclave in Lisbon, Portugal), and Mrs. Clinton’s saber rattling in the Asian context.

Pro-imperialist policies do not stem from popular demand, from US workers and masses. On the contrary, in spite of all the propaganda, the workers and masses in the United States are generally against interventions and in favor of peaceful relations with other countries. There is not, for example, majority support for US anti-Cuba policy at a mass level, except among a shrinking number of Cuban exiles, and right wing ideologues. Nor is there support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are policies directed by the interests of monopoly capital, not by mass public opinion.

There is opposition to aggressive imperialistic policies within the Democratic Party; however, I am not of the opinion that when Republicans do bad things at home or abroad, it is because of the class position of their leaders and their financial backers, while if Democrats do the same things, it is, in every case, because the Republicans forced them to do them. The Democrats as well as the Republicans have their connections with international monopoly capital. To some extent there are exceptions among Democrats who represent minority districts or who have forged strong connections with organized labor. But ruling class ties are not confined to the most right wing Democrats, the Blue Dogs and the New Democratic Majority.

A particularly positive turn in the anti-imperialist struggle has been the movement of major US labor away from the aggressively pro-imperialist positions and actions of the George Meany-Lane Kirkland days. On the AFL-CIO blog now is a joint statement by the AFL-CIO and progressive, left led Mexican unions which not only shows the degree of solidarity on that front, but also a new understanding on the part of US labor of the way imperialist free trade pacts impact workers and farmers in countries like Mexico. We should work hard to build on that. It is certainly a breath of fresh air for those of us who remember things like the “American Institute of Free Labor Development” which was the CIA’s means of channeling resources to right wing, anti-communist “labor activists” abroad, using our unions as fronts.

Left-wing groups in and out of power in other countries have raised criticisms of Obama administration’s policies. These criticisms are in line with their own long-term experiences with imperialism as a whole. These criticisms often make sense in terms of the priorities of struggle in those countries, which necessarily emphasize the long term need to organize, unite and mobilize their grassroots sectors against local elites allied with international monopoly capitol, and to build structures of international cooperation that can sharply reduce dependence on the United States. We should endeavor to understand the policies of countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia as being within the framework of that long term struggle.

We, in the United States, have to deal with the limitations of objective and subjective conditions here, and have to develop our strategy and tactics accordingly. We don’t even have a viable Second International social democratic party that could actually win elections in this country, and have to work our tactics within that context. This entails building broad center-left alliances and encouraging more independent forces in the Democratic Party, while working to isolate the ultra-right. Others elsewhere have to deal with their own tactical exigencies, and objective and subjective conditions very different from ours. We must remember that in many parts of the world there are very different political systems, and communist and workers parties, or explicitly socialist united fronts, that are on a bigger scale and are able, thus, to function in a different way.

It is impossible that we transform the United States from being the most powerful imperialist state into an anti-imperialist state simply by voting one capitalist party out and the party in. However, we can set a goal of moving US foreign policy more in the direction of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy, as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has suggested. This will absolutely not happen under a Republican administration, but will not happen automatically under a Democratic administration, without mass pressure.

How can we do that? First, we have to understand that imperialism is still the dominant system in the world, that the United States plays the strongest role in imperialism, and that everywhere there is resistance. We have to educate ourselves about these things. This is an uphill struggle because most people in this country were taught in school and church, and of course also by Hollywood, that the United States is a benevolent superpower which tries to help people all over the world with our investment and foreign aid, only to be met with churlish ingratitude. But things like the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the revelations as to how the Bush administration maneuvered the country into to those disasters are topics of great interest to our people, and can serve as openers to wider discussions of how imperialism really works. The uprisings going on now in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries in the Middle East have shown millions of people in the United States how US imperialism has allied itself with crooked and repressive dictators, and except on the ultra-right, this has been a chastening experience. The people of our country, as a whole, do not like that our government props up dictators who oppress their own people, and want to know why it does such things. This, as Obama likes to say, is a “teachable moment” for us.

Then we need to understand how our own system works, and constantly be looking for the pressure points that can be used, via mobilizations of labor, churches, minority and women’s organizations, and every kind of democratic force in this country that can be mobilized in unity to force changes.

Photo by cjb22/cc by 2.0/Flickr