Here is the link to an outstanding essay by John Bellamy Foster in the latest Monthly Review entitled "The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left” which will not be received favourably on this list. Foster surveys contemporary Western Marxist theories of multi-imperialisms and finds them sadly wanting against Lenin’s classic writings on subject. The entire essay is worth reading, but these few excerpts below illustrate its overall perspective.
https://monthlyreview.org/2024/11/01/the-new-denial-of-imperialism-on-the-left/ >From the essay: Gilbert Achcar, professor of development at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, published an article in The Nation in 2021 titled “How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools.” Here he accused the whole anti-imperialist left of “campism,” that is, allegiance to a particular camp or bloc, insofar as they unequivocally opposed the hybrid imperialism (economic, military, financial, and political) directed by the United States and its allies within the triad against the countries in the Global South. Those socialists who stood firmly united with the peoples of the periphery on principle and against all military interventions and economic sanctions were accused of thereby providing “red-painted apologetics for dictators.” At the same time, Achcar indicated here and elsewhere that it is quite appropriate, in his view, for “progressive anti-imperialists” to support military intervention by the Western imperialist powers in favor of regime change, as he had in the case of the 2011 intervention in Libya, if it is designed to help putatively progressive movements, on the ground.96 Western leftists, usually social democrats, have directed harsh criticisms against postrevolutionary Cuba and Venezuela for their supposed moral, political, and economic failings. Such charges are made outside of any meaningful political context, based primarily on uncritical acceptance of propagandistic reports from the U.S. and European media, while largely ignoring the enormous successes of these states. The criticisms invariably downplay the fact that both nations are currently being subjected to the most severe forms of international siege warfare ever developed. Economic blockades and financial sanctions are designed to deny these societies even the most essential food and medicine, coupled with periodic coup attempts—all engineered by the CIA and the White House. Yet, the full extent of the U.S. role is skirted by a left that seems to operate according to the rules of what the Hoover Institution called “democratic imperialism.”97 Another theoretical development characteristic of the Western Eurocentric left has been the adoption in stripped-down fashion of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, seen as a mere model of horizontal interimperialist conflict between great powers. Here, China and Russia are portrayed as constituting a single bloc (though representing very different political-economic systems), engaged in an imperialist rivalry with the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan.100 Middle-level or semiperipheral countries in the Global South enter the picture as “subimperialist” powers—a concept first introduced by Marini in the context of dependency theory but now being used in a very different way.101 Imperialism, in this new view, is no longer associated primarily with the global exploitative role of the great imperial powers, such as the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, which, making up the center of the capitalist world-system, have dominated the centuries-long history of imperialism. Rather, the characterization of imperialist states is extended to semiperipheral and emerging economies, now classified as imperialist or subimperialist, in the spirit of seeing imperialism primarily in horizontal rather than vertical terms. According to Ashley Smith, managing editor of the journal Spectre, writing for Tempest, the United States “is locked into competition,” not only with China and Russia and their allies, but also with “subimperial states such as Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil.”102 (The idea that the United States is in competition with Israel will no doubt surprise some!) Yet, as Marxist economist Michael Roberts has cogently stated, I am dubious that sub-imperialism helps us to understand contemporary capitalism. It weakens the delineation between the core imperialist bloc and the periphery of dominated countries. If every country is a “little bit imperialist”…it starts to lose its validity as a useful concept. So-called sub-imperialist countries do not have sustained and huge transfers of value and resources to them from weaker economies. In our own work [Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi] on imperialism and in empirical work by others, this hierarchical structure of value transfer is not revealed. India, China, and Russia actually transfer much larger amounts of value to the imperialist bloc than South America. Take the BRICS, the best candidates for being “sub-imperialist.” There is no evidence of significantly large and long-lasting value transfers to them from weaker/and or neighboring economies.103 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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