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, 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 violent war 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 with 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