Balls on imperialism

Submitted by PaulHampton on 21 December, 2004 - 11:19

Letter to Weekly Worker, from Paul Hampton, AWL

John Ball’s uncritical summary of The Politics of Empire (Weekly Worker December 16) rehashes some “anti-imperialist” conventional wisdom but misses the flaws of the book – its distortion of reality and its terrible political conclusions.

Alan Freeman, one of the book’s editors, is also a bag carrier for Mayor Livingstone, associated with Socialist Action and the recent ESF. The book reflects these politics. Beneath its urbane pessimism, it is nothing less than a manifesto for second-camp “socialism” that abandons the central role of the working class.

The book contains a pastiche of analysis, concluding that the world is entering an age similar to classical imperialism (1880-1914) – of protectionism, rivalry and war. But the evidence for this is noticeably thin.

Just because the Kirchner government in Argentina has rescheduled its debts with the IMF doesn’t prove that the “Third World” is ungovernable. The Kirchner government might represent its own national capital but it is not an “anti-imperialist” force. It is certainly hostile to the occupied factories, the unemployed movement and the socialists active in the assemblies.

And differences over the Iraq war don’t prove that the rivalry between the US and Europe today is on anything like the scale of the divisions that led to the First World War. There are of course enmities between the imperialist powers – but to ignore other tendencies towards interdependence is to falsify reality. And to simply cram existing reality into theories of imperialism developed nearly one hundred years ago does no service either to the Marxist tradition or the working class today.

In fact the foreboding about globalisation is a device to rationalise the book’s anti-working class political strategy. Freeman spells this out explicitly in an interview in Labour Left Briefing in November: “If the working class globally was a force for defeating imperialism, it would have done so. But non-working class movements have meanwhile inflicted important defeats on imperialism. This has to inform strategy.”

For the advanced capitalist states, the book promotes the kind of populism found in the Stop the War Coalition in Britain. For example the chapter by Kate Hudson justifies STWC’s silence on Saddam and the Kurds, and it’s the alliance with the MAB fundamentalists.

For the rest of the world, the politics of nationalism dominate. The editors argue: “In the Third World social advance and national sovereignty are indissolubly linked…. It is imperative for such movements that their state itself should be a part of the resistance…. Working class movements of the Third World have to defend the sovereignty of their state.” (pp.40-41)

Freeman spells out what this means concretely in the Briefing interview. He says: “movements such as Bolivarianism [in Venezuela], or the intense desire for Arab unity are supremely important.”

And the book peddles a peculiar soft Stalinism, lamenting the collapse of the USSR and claiming that China and Cuba represent an alternative (p.12). Another contributor, Patrick Bond, sums up the political perspective, suggesting a “global popular front against the United States” (p.211).

More importantly, the book largely ignores the working class, not only as the subject of exploitation in the “dominant” states but also in most of the “dominated” states as well. The relative social weight of the working class in almost every country of the world is greater now than it was a century ago, even if the level of organisation and political consciousness is lower in places. Yet the idea that workers of the world are the crucial force against the empire of capital is simply absent from this book.

Therefore as an analysis of reality it is one-sided and deficient, and the political conclusions it draws are downright reactionary.

Paul Hampton
AWL

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