Anti-imperialism and the “Left” today

Chris Cutrone

Presented at a panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of California Santa Cruz, with fellow speakers, Keith McHenry (Food Not Bombs) and Alex Dillard (ACP), March 12, 2026.

Platypus’s first public forum event was a panel discussion on imperialism, held in early 2007 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where my students had initiated the reading group that became Platypus in the context of the Iraq anti-war movement. We asked the questions, “What is imperialism? And why should we be against it?” It was the first of Platypus’s panels discussing the historical death of the Marxist socialist Left and its potential rebirth.

I spoke on this public forum panel, and laid out the ideologically tendentious perspectives of “anti-imperialism” that were a problematic legacy of the 1960s New Left Vietnam anti-war movement, impeding the possibility of the reemergence of a socialist movement and politics.

An obscure fact of the “Marxist Left” of the era is that the Vietnam War took place in the context of the Sino-Soviet split: the conflict between the USSR and Communist China, which President Nixon eventually exploited to withdraw from the war in Southeast Asia. Several years later, China and Vietnam fought a brief war but a violent one with tens of thousands of casualties — for the Chinese, it was to fight against supposed “Soviet imperialism” of which Vietnam was an ally.  Why? Because Vietnam had invaded Kampuchea — Communist Cambodia — and deposed the Khmer Rouge, to stop the “killing fields” there in which millions perished. Kampuchea was a Chinese ally — which at that time meant an ally of the U.S. in their joint opposition to the Soviet Union and its Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries; so the USSR and its allies could plausibly claim that Communist China was acting on behalf of “U.S. imperialism.”

The “Left” of the time claimed that after the Vietnam War and in the context of the 1970s global economic downturn, the U.S. was in decline and inter-imperialist competition was breaking out with Japan and Germany and greater Europe. — Instead, the U.S. led the global restructuring of capitalism into neoliberalism, which eventually brought down Communist Party rule in the East Bloc and the Soviet Union itself — all according to the long-term Nixon and Kissinger plan to open up China to capitalism and set the stage for renewed American hegemony in the 21st century, which it certainly did.

There are two opposed views of “imperialism” operating on the “Left” today. One is concerned with “U.S. imperialism” as the global hegemon enforcing world capitalism; the other is welcoming “multi-polarity” and the rise of “counter-hegemons” such as Russia and above all China — less so, the other BRICS countries, whose time seems to have passed.

There are some deliberate conflations and confusions of these matters, One older way of discussing such things was in terms of the “Global South”: by contrast, the “Global North” once included the Soviet Union and was concerned with “Soviet imperialism,” and had a decided “Third Worldist” orientation. Where does Russia fit into such a schema today: “imperialist” or “Global South”? Is China, as a share of the global economy nearly equal to its share of world population, still a “peripheral,” “developing” or “under-developed” country, or now a “core” country in global capitalism? Is Chinese economic and industrial development abroad, for instance in Africa, “imperialist” expansion or “neo-colonialism”? When Russian troops are stationed in other countries in support of allied regimes, does this turn those countries into Russian “colonies”?

I will cite Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, who called anti-Americanism in the Vietnam War era “ideological.” Meaning, a form of misrecognition, something that conceals more than it reveals. This is true today — perhaps even more so than back then. On the American “Left,” anti-Americanism has the quality of inverted nationalism, suggesting that only American actions matter in world events.

This confusion has long historical roots, going back to the era of original historical Marxism at the turn of the 20th century.

The Communist Party of Great Britain’s writer for the Weekly Worker, Mike Macnair has claimed that the fundamental mistake made by Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and other Marxists of the Second or Socialist International, was that they misapprehended the end of the British Empire’s global capitalist hegemony as the end of capitalism itself. For instance, Lenin called the “imperialist” era of the time the “highest (possible) stage of capitalism.” This was counter-posed to Kautsky’s revisionist prognosis of “ultra-imperialism” as a possible alternative to WWI’s inter-imperialist competition and conflict: the joint cooperative exploitation of the world by the core capitalist countries. Lenin claimed that this fudged the issue and tried to avoid, not the inevitability of international war in imperialism, but rather the political crisis of capitalism that led to fierce political conflicts both within and among nation-states.

But the end of the British global hegemony should have led to proletarian socialist revolution and the transition out of capitalism. It is a tragedy that it wasn’t made into that. Indeed, we are living in the aftermath of that failure. The U.S. shouldn’t have replaced the British as the global hegemon, since it created a crisis of the American republic itself, which we are still dealing with today.

For Lenin, imperialism was a crisis of the politics of the state. There was already liberal and conservative anti-imperialisms manifesting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for instance by the American Anti-Imperialist League in the Spanish-American War, which signaled the entrance of the United States as an imperialist power on the stage of world history. The election of 1900 in the war’s wake was defined by the contention between the anti-imperialist and former Populist Democratic Party Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and Republican William McKinley who had prosecuted the war resulting in the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and capitalist penetration of Cuba, running for reelection, with new Vice Presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Bryan lost and McKinley was soon assassinated by an immigrant anarchist in protest of the U.S. occupation of and counterinsurgency against independence fighters in the Philippines, bringing Roosevelt to power.

The Social Democratic Party candidate for President and former Democrat and Populist Eugene Debs distinguished the proletarian socialist approach to the problem of capitalist imperialism from the Republican progressive and Democrat conservative responses, expressing his Marxist understanding of the historical significance of the problem. Debs emphasized that the Anti-Imperialist League’s preferred candidate, William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic Party more generally expressed the conservative reaction against capitalism in the “wail and cry of the dying middle class,” whereas the Republicans, who were the dominant party since the Civil War and, until FDR’s electoral realignment of the capitalist Parties a generation later in 1932, represented capitalist “prosperity galore, give us four years more!” If the Republicans were the “imperialist party” and the Democrats the “anti-imperialists,” then the socialists were neither: they represented “industrial democracy” and overcoming capitalism itself — including of course the “imperialist” forms it took.  

Imperialism was both a political and economic phenomenon, in the Marxist view. It was both an economic and political crisis in a historically advanced stage of capitalism. Hence both “progressive” and conservative capitalist politicians inevitably oriented around it, in an antinomical conflict that expressed the historical contradiction of capitalism itself. What were the symptoms of this crisis? Monopoly and finance capital; and the Bonapartist capitalist state — in the U.S. referred to as the “imperial Presidency.” This is not a form of capitalism, but a form of the crisis of capitalism. Is it still so today?

The crisis of capitalism manifested in the inter-imperialist conflict of the Great Powers leading to WWI was a political conflict, which is what made it an opportunity, a possibility and necessity of proletarian socialist revolution, to turn the imperialist war into a class — civil — war. But it was already a civil war among the capitalists. The Great Powers were part of the British-led global capitalist system. It was not a matter of national capitalist states — capitalism, from a Marxist perspective, was never a national proposition of separate individual countries, but always a world-historical one. It’s one world-historical crisis.

The question for Marxists was how to struggle for proletarian socialism in the context of the breakup of empires, with nationalist uprisings and conflicts. This was a subsidiary problem of the defining issue for Marxism, namely the relation between democratic and socialist revolution, going back to 1848: how was the proletariat to lead the democratic revolution in the era of capitalism so that it led to socialism? How not to be swamped by petit bourgeois democracy and liberal — including national liberal — radicalism and the limits of bourgeois revolution? How to ensure the independent initiative and leadership of the working class in the revolution, rather than subordination to the liberals and other bourgeois radical democrats, progressive or otherwise?

This is only a distant memory in light of today’s realities. It is a stretch, to say the least, to try to apply the political manifestations of Lenin’s time to the politics and supposed “geopolitical” conflicts of our time. Unlike Lenin’s time of the crisis of the British Empire and global hegemony , the political system of Pax Britannica in the emergence of industrial capitalism of the 19th century, this is not the end of the American empire or of U.S. global hegemony, but an opportunity and necessity of its renewal, within a broader revolution of capitalism, as happens every 40 or 50 years, economically and politically.

Trump represents the crisis of neoliberal politics in both the Democratic and Republican Parties — a crisis of electoral appeal, policy agenda and ideological justification after those of neoliberalism have worn off. It is also a crisis of post-neoconservatism and its policies and ideology. But we must ask the reasons for that ideology: the task of the 21st century as a second American Century. For it is not only Americans who might want it or not, but the world that might still need or even want American leadership and a global role for the U.S., both economically and politically. The entire world depends on the U.S. — Interestingly, the U.S. already depends far less on international trade than other countries — even less than China does.

Marxists of Lenin’s time were wary of ideological anti-British-ism as an excuse for politically reactionary and no less capitalist phenomena such as German “Great Power” aspirations. Marxists were not sympathetic to the rising capitalist powers against the ruling one. Today, this is complicated by China’s ideological claim to “Communist” politics. Is China a rising capitalist power against the U.S. or a force for socialism? What if it’s neither? Certainly, Russia is neither. The military conflicts of our time are in the Middle East and Central Asia, for instance not only Iran and Israel but Pakistan, India and China: where should socialists “side,” if at all, in such wars, potential and actual? Where does the U.S. stand in relation to them? How, if at all, should American socialists be oriented to the political problem of “imperialist” capitalism today, looking ahead to the struggle for proletarian socialism? How does imperialism and its conflicts point beyond capitalism, if at all?

The current war in the Middle East is misleading as an indicator of the future: it is more an expression of the unfinished business of the past, putting an end to long-simmering  conflicts without a future, as countries such Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Turkey want to move on. So do the people of Iran. Islamist ideology is a thing of the past.

Anti-Americanism is a Cold War relic of an ideology — already old in the 1980s when the Islamic Republic originated. It is weak and lame. It expresses a lack of imagination on the “Left.” But it is not true to original historical Marxism such as Lenin’s. It is an inverted American nationalism, especially among Americans. It is an apologia for non-American capitalism, such as that of the Europeans and Asians, but also Latin American, Middle Eastern and African capitalism.

Socialists today should be faced to the future, warned but not beholden to the historical phenomena and oppositions within capitalism of the past — history serving as a critical and not dogmatic resource for thinking about our possibilities and tasks today. “Imperialism” is a term from a bygone era that reminds us not of eternal realities but of our own failure to rise to the necessities of our time. Workers in the U.S., Asia and China, the Middle East and Europe, Africa and Latin America are jointly exploited and oppressed by capitalism, and so must struggle together to overcome it. Socialists in America should accept the responsibility of the central, leading capitalist country appropriate to this task. | P

Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on the Iran war

Chris Cutrone discusses with Doug Lain the Iran war. In the second half, they discuss pedagogy vs. punditry, writing vs. podcasting and other issues of public intellectual life. 

Why Marxists loved America (Chase Center at OSU)

Chris Cutrone

Presented at the Salmon P. Chase Center of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, February 11, 2026.

Hegel made an exception to his philosophy of history for America as a “land of the future.” He acknowledged to a friend that his model political regime of constitutional monarchy on the basis of the English Revolution was improved in the American Constitutional Republic as the ideal form of state for bourgeois civil society, with its elected monarchy in the Presidency as counterbalance to democracy, to preserve the freedom of civil society. Marx and Engels regarded the United States as the most bourgeois, democratic and free country of their time. Lenin called the American Revolution a “truly revolutionary war” and wrote in the early 20th century that in America “freedom was most complete.”

For their part, Marxist-informed socialists in the United States such as the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs claimed both the American Revolution and the Civil War and their political leaders as historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, to their cause and as their rightful legacy, as against the capitalist political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, falsely wearing their mantles. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin greatly esteemed Debs, especially for his denunciation of U.S. imperialism and its involvement in World War I which had landed Debs in jail, and Debs returned the praise, calling himself, during the counterrevolutionary reactionary panic after the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids repression of the Socialist Party, “from head to foot a Bolshevik and proud of it.”

Later, Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, who fled the Nazis to the United States, along with his colleagues Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, wrote endearingly about his experience of American society, and upheld the American Republic’s Constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances as the model for “critique,” the free interplay of theory and practice and subject and object, in maintaining and promoting the freedom of society.

So powerful was the influence of the American Revolution that the Communist Party in the United States named its party night school for workers after Thomas Jefferson. Its leader in the 1930s, Earl Browder, famously stated that “communism is as American as apple pie.”

What was the substance of this evaluation by such prominent Marxists of the United States and the American Revolution and its legacy? Marxism understood capitalism as a phenomenon based on bourgeois society, and regarded the American Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution. What did this mean?

First, we must step back and examine the Marxist understanding of history and how it had led to capitalism. The basic idea is that the rise of modern “bourgeois” society or “civil society” was a societal transformation on the same order of magnitude as the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, which in Marxist terms had ushered in “class society” from the original “primitive communism” of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities. This was understood as the beginnings of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution was regarded as the crisis of bourgeois society and capitalism, indicated by the class division into capitalists and workers, specifically by the proletarianization of labor, in which workers no longer owned the means of production — the machines and other capital goods owned by the capitalist class. The Industrial Revolution, according to Marxism, led to the possibility and necessity of socialism — modern communism. The Industrial Revolution historically brought about the modern class struggle of the workers against the capitalists that led to socialism.

Capitalism was defined by its contradiction and crisis: the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production; and the crisis of “socialism or barbarism” — capitalism was understood as the barbarization and decadence of bourgeois society, in which bourgeois principles were observed only in form and not in substance.

It is important to note that for Marxism bourgeois social relations were the social relations of labor, and bourgeois society itself was understood as the emancipation of labor from the traditional social relations of prior civilization, with its caste system, subsistence agriculture and guild-craft control of artisan production.

The bourgeois revolution was the emancipation of the rights of labor against its traditional restrictions in the previous state — the ancien régime and its official religious sanctification. In this respect, it was the rights of private production and appropriation in civil society, which was the right of individuals to pursue their own chosen labor, offering its products on the free market. But this was a social form of labor: the social relations of free exchange, trade and commerce as the form of social cooperation and community; the freely associated laborers. Trade in traditional civilization was restricted politically by the caste order, and was primarily in luxury or specialized goods for the ruling castes, and not the subsistence needs for the vast majority of people. The rise of bourgeois society was the transformation of immediate local subsistence production into production for trade and commerce. One produces not for one’s own subsistence or those of one’s immediate local community, but for trade to acquire subsistence goods for one’s own consumption from more distant others: the dependence of the majority on the commerce in subsistence goods. The exchange of traditional civilization governed by custom was replaced by trade according to worth freely negotiated according to the value of labor in the market.

This is why the modern society of production for trade and commerce is called “bourgeois,” meaning “urban” in French, by contrast with traditional civilization of the countryside where production was for subsistence in local agriculture — 95% of the population were peasants; today, by contrast the vast majority of society’s members are workers: wage-laborers. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt put it, today even a king is someone employed in a job, not by Divine status but performance evaluation of function: the 17th century English Revolution reduced the Sovereign to the highest paid employee serving ceremonially to perform the dignity of the state.

Capitalism, arising as such in the 19th century, was the contradiction and crisis of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution, in which a dynamic of replacing labor by automation introduced the business cycle of boom and bust, which was not merely a commercial crisis of supply and demand in market adjustments, but a crisis of value of wage-labor in the social system of production, indicating its potential obsolescence.

The First Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from ~1750 to ~1850 and was centered first in Britain and then, after the French Revolution, in France and the Benelux countries — Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg — and those parts of Europe, such as the western part of Germany in the Rhineland, most affected by the French Revolution. (Marx and Engels hailed from this region, Engels from a factory-owning family.) This was where machine automation first took hold and the proletarianization of labor first took place.

The French Revolution was closely associated with the American Revolution, which itself was a further development of the English Revolution of the preceding century. The French Enlightenment and the revolutionaries it inspired were noted Anglophiles, and it was not mere coincidence that the storming of the Bastille took place in the centenary year of the seating of the constitutional monarch in the English Glorious Revolution, 1689, as politically theorized by John Locke. Marx said that of the two traditions of materialism, those of Descartes and Locke, it was Locke’s that led to socialism. Thomas Jefferson participated in both the American and French Revolutions, co-writing the American Declaration of Independence as well as the French Declaration of the Rights of Human Being and Citizen, co-written by Lafayette who himself had led the French forces in the American Revolutionary War. The later leading French Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War under Lafayette, and wrote of the indelible experience of freedom he had in America. The American Revolution is best understood as the continuation and radicalization of the English Revolution, as expressed by Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson’s revising of Locke’s inalienable rights of “life, liberty and property” to the “pursuit of happiness,” of which property was the mere means and not a right as an end in itself. This prepared the United States for the social freedom that made it Hegel’s “land of the future,” to be realized in the 19th century, contemporaneous with the rise of Marxism.

British Utopian Socialist Robert Owen presented his model community ideas to the U.S. Congress, meeting with Founding Fathers and former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and also James Madison, as a keenly interested audience. One of the final expressions of Jefferson’s political sentiments was to endorse, in an 1825 letter to Frances Wright, the Utopian Socialist experiments underway as a means for facilitating Emancipation and Abolition as part of the greater cause of labor.

The Second Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from 1871 to 1914 — from the Franco-Prussian War to WWI. German victory over France led to unification under the Prussian Empire, which allowed for its rapid industrialization. Contemporaneously, the Meiji Restoration in Japan and political centralization under the Emperor, triumphant over the Samurai, and the victory of the Union in the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, as well as the emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire, meant that these countries saw rapid industrialization in this period. The rise of these new industrial powers produced new international conflicts in global capitalism and eventually the World Wars of the 20th century.

Whereas Marx and Engels were individuals in a “party of two” whose ideas about capitalism and socialism were relatively limited in their influence, in the era of the Second Industrial Revolution there was the emergence of Marxism as a predominant ideology in the modern proletarian socialist movement of the working class. The new socialist parties most influenced by Marxism in the era prior to WWI were those in Germany, the United States, Russia, Italy and Japan: the countries of the Second as opposed to the First Industrial Revolution. Unlike the others, the United States was a liberal democratic constitutional republic. It was also quickly emerging as by far the largest and most dynamic and technically innovative capitalist economy in the world. The Marxists of the Second International such as Lenin and Eugene Debs understood that the future of socialism at a world scale would be ultimately decided in America.

Furthermore, in this period, the working class was greatly internationalized, with many workers migrating for work around the world, often not permanently settling but returning to their home countries after earning their fortunes. It was a smaller world at that time of original historical Marxism than we tend to appreciate. Many workers from around the world had experience living and working in the United States in this period, and they were influenced profoundly by its social freedom — much as Marx and Engels had been influenced by the freedom they experienced as exiles in France and England. Interestingly, Marx seriously considered permanently relocating to America, to which many radical political refugees from Europe had emigrated in the 19th century, such as the “Red ’48-ers” who had fled from the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany and Central Europe — “Bohemians.” These German émigrés, with whom Marx was associated, participated in the Abolitionist Movement and the new Republican Party in the United States, whose leading newspaper, the New York Tribune, Marx regularly wrote for in the 1850s, and the Red ’48-ers served as officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and figured as Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. Later, in the period before the Russian Revolution, many leading and rank-and-file Bolsheviks lived and worked and organized as socialists in the United States. They took that American experience back with them in leading the Revolution in Russia. Many American socialists inspired by the Russian Revolution had first met the Bolsheviks in America.

As elsewhere, the contradiction between bourgeois society and its values of the rights and freedom of labor with new industrial capitalism was clearly manifest. This introduced a complex dynamic in which the struggle for socialism of the industrial proletariat was connected with upholding the older revolutionary tradition of the American and French Revolutions and the bourgeois rights enshrined therein. Just as French socialism emerged from the revolutionary tradition there, so did socialism in the United States, through both the American Revolution and the Civil War.

In Germany, the preeminent country of the Marxist-led socialist movement at the turn of the 20th century, the working class claimed the legacy of German Idealist philosophy of Kant and Hegel, which was itself inspired by the English, American and French Revolutions, as against the capitalists: the working class claimed the intellectual and cultural heritage of the bourgeois revolution that had decayed — become “decadent” — under capitalism. This was also true in England, France and America. In this way, the struggle for proletarian socialism took up the mantle of the earlier bourgeois revolution and emancipation that had been betrayed in capitalism.

So, it is not a simple matter of proletarian socialism succeeding the bourgeois revolution in terms of leaving it behind, but of actively recovering it, struggling within the revolutionary tradition from its contradiction in capitalism. Propagandistically, this was posed as the succession of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the historically revolutionary — and “universal” — class. What did this express?

The universality of the bourgeois revolution suffered some severe setbacks outside the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as at home with the reinvigoration of slavery as a function of the Industrial Revolution, preventing it from dying out naturally as the Founding Fathers expected. Whereas there has been one continuous American Republic from the Revolution to today — however modified substantially by the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments — France, for example, is today in its Fifth Republic, interrupted by two monarchies, two empires and a fascist regime; and the U.K. remains a monarchy, albeit constitutional (even though it was a republic during its revolutionary Civil War in the 17th century); and Germany and Japan have been liberal democracies only since WWII. And the U.S. remains the preeminent capitalist country in the world that it became during the Second Industrial Revolution.

The modern bourgeois republic differs from the ancient republic in its respect for civil liberties and rights — the rights of civil society against the state, not observed by Ancient democracy.

The Marxist understanding of the dialectical relation between capitalism and the possibility and task of socialism means that the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production poses itself most purely in the United States of America, and has done so from early on. It has not been clouded by the question raised by Arno Mayer and others about just how “bourgeois” society and politics were in Europe before recent times, the supposed issue of “feudal holdovers” in Europe, even in France as well as in the U.K. up through the Second World War — before the victorious U.S. imposed the essential criteria of the American republican system of liberal democracy onto Europe and Japan. This was not merely a function of capitalism, since capitalism has been compatible with illiberal and undemocratic political systems. The tension between capitalism and the freedom of American bourgeois society was made global in character in the “American Century” and leadership of the “Free World.” This was the intention of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and realized in the United Nations system of the victorious Allies under American leadership — the Cold War erupting soon between them notwithstanding.

Just as in Marx’s and Lenin’s times, the specter of socialism or communism apparently still haunts the world, as seen in the last Millennial generation’s attempted resuscitation of its tradition. Today, it appears as the ghost of Marxism. The greatest phenomenon of a new socialist movement in recent times has taken place in the United States with the Millennial Left. In it, questions of original historical Marxism — the recovery of Marx and figures such as Lenin — have figured prominently. This was also true in the last major historical upsurge of interest in Marxism, in the 1960s New Left, which back then — as now — was influential and inspirational throughout the world. It was long understood that if Marxism is not relevant in the United States, then it is irrelevant everywhere else.

Late doubts about this speculative proposition of identical fates of the bourgeois revolution — and America as its last standing avatar — with the struggle for socialism to overcome capitalism reflect not enlightenment but its forgetting. Socialist counter-identification with America as the predominant capitalist country expresses doubts about socialism. Marx’s and historical Marxism’s clear perspectives on the foundational character of the American Revolution and central character of the United States historically in the struggle for socialism have become obscured in the present. A reactionary anti-capitalism, both on the ostensible “Left” and avowed Right, has made a casualty of America and its revolutionary history. In its 250th year this is particularly poignant. In the recent era of neoliberalism — the Reagan and Thatcher revolution of neoliberal capitalism — the American “Left” has reached to post-WWII European social democracy as a contrasting counter-model, and capitalism has been hastily identified with Anglo-Americanism. In this, both the counterrevolutionary character of social democracy and the revolutionary character of capitalism itself have been obscured. What was forgotten is that original historical Marxism opposed the welfare state of capitalism, which was seen rightly as — intentionally — undercutting the workers’ own social capacities and struggles by making them dependent wards of capitalist politics. Instead, this counterfeiting of socialism has been accepted falsely as good coin. The Millennial “Left,” for instance the Democratic Socialists of America, has been content to accept what the Right denounces demagogically as “socialism” in the welfare state, and inverting its value positively as their own program. The original meaning of not only Marxism but socialism itself as the promised self-overcoming and transcendence of capitalism has been deranged beyond recognition. — Worse still, “freedom” has become a strangely tabooed concept, both on the “Left” and beyond. Pessimism about America expresses pessimism about socialism. It is pessimism about freedom. Choosing the pessimistic version of capitalism in “progressive” welfarism has meant doubting the possibility of socialism that Marxism originally recognized in capitalism as a self-contradictory form of freedom.

The crossroads of “socialism or barbarism” has cut through the heart of America as the preeminent capitalist country for the last two centuries. It still does. Hence, so does Marxism, indelibly. As we remember the American Revolution and its historical legacy, we are haunted by the remaining task of socialism — to realize the historic promise of freedom as the dialectical truth of capitalism. The truly emancipatory character of the American Revolution lives, however contradictorily, in capitalism, and its fate will be determined in the struggle for socialism. | §

Trump’s bid for a new Pax Americana

Weakest links in the “Axis of Evil”

Chris Cutrone

Donald Trump began his second term with a push for negotiated settlement with Iran, picking up from efforts at the end of his first term, which had been interrupted by Covid and his unseating in 2020. In the meantime, the October 7 attack had happened, prompting Israel to dismantle Iranian allies throughout the Middle East. This effort culminated in direct war between Iran and Israel in 2025, in the midst of US-Iran talks. Benjamin Netanyahu might have hoped to spike these negotiations, but Trump joined Israel’s bombing of Iran in order to end Israel’s war, turning it into a further lever against Iran for making a deal, and resisting Israeli calls for a “regime-change” crusade. Trump went so far as to offer the prospect of Iran joining the Abraham Accords, which had appeared originally designed to isolate and present a united Arab-Israeli front against Tehran. Trump proudly lists the Israel-Iran conflict as one of the “wars” he’s settled during his first year in office. 

Now, protests have broken out in Iran. There have been several waves of such protests going back to 2009 and the Green Movement around controversial election results, disputed between reformers and conservative hardliners. Since then, the specter of regime collapse of some kind or another has loomed. Would the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council be swept aside by the IRGC and Basiji militias in a military coup? Would the veneer of “democracy” be stripped away? Or would there be a democratic revolution and a more radical political change, ending the Islamic Republic? Will a civil war erupt? Will Iran become another “failed state”? 

Trump seems to be preparing for any eventuality. In a recent Truth Social post, he promised to “rescue” Iranians from violent repression by the regime. At the same time, as recently as Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago ahead of the New Year — the day after Volodymyr Zelensky came to discuss war and peace with Russia — Trump called for Iranian leaders to “take the deal” he’s been offering them. One of his first actions in his transition after election in November 2024 was to make contact with Iranian representatives about restarting talks. Was he sincere, or was it a ruse to trick them into lowering their guard? It is best to take Trump straightforwardly. He has said that Iranian leaders have two choices: deal or conflict. He threw out the JCPOA negotiated by Obama because he thought it was a bad deal, not because he wanted war. He wanted to avoid it. He seems justified in saying that Obama and Biden efforts had led to October 7, because it provided billions to Iran with which they could and did instigate trouble. Meanwhile, Trump’s tete-a-tete and desired détente with Russia’s Putin continues — as China’s Xi has accepted an invitation to visit Washington and Trump agreed to travel to Beijing later this year. 

Venezuela and Iran are sideshows in this greater global drama. Geopolitically, the Russia-China alliance — in the wake of Putin’s disastrously miscalculated invasion of Ukraine — is bolstered by Iran and Venezuela, both of which are important sources of oil for China. Is it mere coincidence that Trump began to apply military pressure to Nicolás Maduro, and specifically the Venezuelan oil trade, at the same time as the protests in Iran? One might imagine that from a US policy perspective, protests broke out in the wrong country. But, really, it’s all the same. Trump can play Venezuela and Iran off each other. At the podium with Netanyahu, Trump disavowed seeking regime change in Iran. This is because the threat of destabilization of Iran is another reason for them to reach a deal, to save themselves. 

By contrast, Maduro has now been removed from office by a US military operation, although his allies remain in control of the country. Maduro was indicted on drug trafficking charges at the end of the first Trump term in 2020, so, as far as the Administration is concerned, this is unfinished business. His capture recalls the US invasion to arrest Manuel Noriega of Panama in 1989, also on drug charges. This is importantly law-enforcement action and not war. The truth is that the US is, as is said derisively, the “global cop,” and is in fact the only serious agency for law internationally. Maduro’s rights as a defendant at trial will be respected. The principles of the American Revolution whose 250th birthday we celebrate this year, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are not restricted by nationality, but are meant for everyone. Their practical reach is not a formality.

Trump’s presidency represents the coincidence of several historical crises and potential transitions out of them — a “polycrisis” that Trump is attempting to ride to a brighter American and global future. The Iranian Islamist regime coincides with the neoliberal era. Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 amid the US embassy hostage crisis during the Islamic Revolution; the hostages were released the same day as Reagan’s Inauguration in January 1981. Later, Reagan courted a serious impeachment threat in the Iran-Contra Affair; and his worst military calamity was suffered when Iran-supported Hezbollah militants in Lebanon attacked US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing hundreds and prompting their withdrawal. 

Historically, the Shah was brought down by the 1970s economic crisis that disproportionately impacted the developing world, bringing the Sandinistas to power against a US-backed dictatorship in Nicaragua in the same year. That same year, Washington successfully lured the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan to suppress an American-supported Islamist insurgency there. The ultimate collapse of the USSR and its Eastern European allied regimes could be traced to their debacle in Afghanistan, from which had risen new leadership with Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, both dissidents from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

Now, the crisis of neoliberalism that ended the Cold War and was shadowed by fundamentalist revolts against developmental states seems to be bringing history full-circle. There is even some prospect for a return of the Shah — his son — to Iran: The dual Persian and Shia Muslim identity can resolve either way, or a new combination of both. Persian nationalism after exhaustion of Islamism might be a welcomed change. 

Iran, like many other countries, has struggled to recover from the 2008 Financial Crisis, subsequent Great Recession, and Covid pandemic, the latter of which hit Iran particularly hard. The world economy is still hanging on American growth. After many years, it’s clear that no alternative is going to emerge, especially as Europe and China have precipitously slowed. This is the opportunity Trump is leveraging in political negotiations. 

The Latin American Pink Tide has long run its course and ebbed. Chavismo has faded. Both Iran and Venezuela have bled their middle classes to massive emigration, from which they might not return but still maintain economic and political ties back home. The “Shahs of Sunset Boulevard” are waiting in Los Angeles for expanded business opportunities in Tehran. The mullahs are ready to change robes for suits. Trump is offering them the chance. He’s in no rush, but time might be running out for them. 

The choice is not peace or war, but what new status quo will emerge after the conflict. What will be the outcome of the crisis? This is the end of an era. The game is over. Time to take the winnings and go home — to retire. During the Biden presidency, other actors moved to change facts on the ground in their long-term interests and as legacies. Their efforts have run aground and come to grief. Trump is providing an exit strategy to not only Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, but to Ukraine and Israel. 

The world aflame is the condition for a renewed Pax Americana. That everyone is suspicious is no deterrent to Trump, but more leverage. Hamas was the first to recognize that their only hope was Trump. No mafia boss, whether Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Israeli, or Iranian, can deal with Washington as an inherently duplicitous neoliberal technocratic policy blob. But they can deal with Trump. Can he talk them down from the ledge, or will they jump? | §

Originally published in Compact (January 5, 2026)

January 5, 2026 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed