The Last Marxist

Chris Cutrone

Letter published in the CPGB Weekly Worker 1522 (January 23, 2025).

Paul Demarty’s article, “Rise of lifeboat imperialism” (Weekly Worker 1521, January 16, 2025) cites my essay published in Compact Magazine (January 9, 2025) on the prospects of U.S. expansion into Greenland, disputing my assertion that the U.S. has treated its opponents as “Slave States”: repetitions of the fight against the Confederacy in the Civil War. 

Demarty raises Cambodia as a disproving counterexample. But the U.S. did not simply “carpet-bomb Cambodia” but targeted Vietnamese Communist forces operating there during a larger war. The Cambodian government was not the opponent of the U.S., nor of course were the people of Cambodia — or of Vietnam: certainly, they were not the enemies of the people of America. The U.S. did not demand “unconditional surrender” of them but a negotiated settlement. That says something. 

Even so, the U.S. war in Southeast Asia was a crime, and one that was opposed by many people and for many good reasons — including vociferously and notably by the original “containment” Cold War strategist himself, George F. Kennan. Still, the Communists committed many crimes of their own against the people of Vietnam, Laos and, needless to say, Cambodia. 

It’s long past time for us to remember this history differently, and no longer somehow as still a live issue when it is not. The Cold War is over, for over a generation now. After suffering millions of deaths and the permanent poisoning of its territory to last through the generations as effect of its war, Vietnam now depends for security on a military and economic alliance with the U.S. against threats from its ancient neighbor and enemy, China. 

There was a broad Anti-Imperialist League that was formed to oppose the U.S. governing let alone fighting a horrific counterinsurgency in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, on entirely liberal and democratic grounds, and in the name of American freedom. As Mark Twain indelibly wrote, “Shall we give those poor things a rest?” But Aguinaldo, the great Filipino nationalist, admitted that their historic choice was not actually independence but dependence on either Japan or the U.S. 

Socialists in the U.S. have a responsibility, but not for a historical moral balance sheet of U.S. government actions, but for the future course of society and politics, a long-term task for which we only have the barest rudiments of resources with which to begin building today. 

As Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living — not the dead, who have no claim on us. As Fanon said, we bear no guilt and owe no reparations for crimes committed before we were born. 

We must, as Thaddeus Stevens said, transform the heritage of slavery (and worse) to free the world — and thus honor the sacrifices that have brought us to the place and opportunity we inhabit now, and only now. We must wake from what Marx called the “traditions of dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living” and heed the “poetry of the future.” It’s long past time. 

There will be a future for capitalism. Will there be for socialism?