[Such socialism condemns repression practiced by the U.S. and the
governments it supports, yet turns a blind eye to, or even defends
repressive, authoritarian, and dictatorial states simply because these
states face hostility from Washington.]
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THE ‘SOCIALISM OF FOOLS’ OF THE ‘ANTI-IMPERIALIST’ LEFT  
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William Robinson
August 7, 2023
The Philosophical Salon
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_ Such 'socialism' condemns repression practiced by the U.S. and the
governments it supports, yet turns a blind eye to, or even defends
repressive, authoritarian, and dictatorial states simply because these
states face hostility from Washington. _

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The German socialist August Bebel once commented that antisemitism is
the “socialism of fools” because the antisemites recognized
capitalist exploitation only if the exploiter happened to be Jewish
but who would otherwise turn a blind eye to exploitation emanating
from other quarters.  Over a century later, such socialism of fools
has been resurrected by a self-declared “anti-imperialist” left
that condemns capitalist exploitation and repression around the world
when it is practiced by the U.S. and other Western powers or the
governments they support, yet turns a blind eye to, or even defends
repressive, authoritarian, and dictatorial states simply because these
states face hostility from Washington.  I will discuss the cases of
China, Nicaragua, the BRICS, and multipolarity as they bring out the
convoluted logic and retrograde politics of this
“anti-imperialist” left.

The politics of capitalist exploitation and social control around the
world are fundamentally shaped by the contradiction between a
globally-integrated economy and a nation-state-based system of
political domination.  Economic globalization and the transnational
integration of capitals provide a centripetal impulse to global
capitalism whereas political fragmentation gives a powerful
centripetal counterimpulse that is resulting in an escalation of
geopolitical conflict.  The chasm is rapidly widening between the
economic unity of global capital and political competition among
ruling groups who must seek legitimacy and keep the internal social
order of their respective nations from fracturing in the face of the
escalating crisis of global capitalism.  This global conjuncture is
the backdrop to the contemporary “socialism of fools.”  I will
discuss here the cases of China, Nicaragua, the BRICS, and
multipolarity as they bring out the convoluted logic and retrograde
politics of the “anti-imperialist” left.

CHINA AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT

Capitalism with Chinese characteristics has involved the rise of
powerful Chinese transnational capitalists fused with a state-party
elite dependent on the reproduction of capital and high-consumption
middle strata, fueled by a devastating wave of primitive accumulation
in the countryside and the exploitation
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hundreds of millions of Chinese workers.  China is now one of
the most unequal
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world.  Strikes and independent unions are not legal in China.  The
Chinese Communist Party has long since abandoned any talk of class
struggle or workers’ power.  As labor struggles continue to
escalate in the country so too does state repression
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them.  It is true that capitalist development has lifted millions out
of extreme poverty and brought about rapid industrialization,
technological progress, and advanced infrastructure.  It is equally
true that the North American and Western European core countries
experienced these achievements during their periods of rapid
capitalist development from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth
centuries.  The left never saw this capitalist development in the
West as a victory for the working class nor did it lose sight of the
link between this development and the law of combined and uneven
accumulation in the world capitalist system.  China is now
“catching up.”

The Chinese model rests on a complex of state-private companies in
which private capital accounts for three-fifths
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output and four-fifths of urban employment.  China has not followed
the neo-liberal route to transnational capitalist integration.  The
state plays a key role in the financial system, in regulating private
capital, in massive public expenditure, especially in infrastructure,
and in planning.  This may be a distinct model of capitalist
development than the Western neoliberal variant but it still obeys the
laws of capital accumulation.  Following the opening to global
capitalism in the 1980s China became a market for transnational
corporations and a sink for surplus accumulated capital able to take
advantage of a vast supply of cheap labor controlled by a repressive
omnipresent surveillance state.  But by the turn of the century
pressures were building up to find outlets abroad for surplus Chinese
capital accumulated during years of hothouse capitalist development.

Sustaining this development now became dependent on the export of
capital abroad.  In the first two decades of the twenty-first century
China led the world in a surge of outward foreign direct investment to
countries in the Global South and North alike, deepening the
transnational integration of capitals and accelerating capitalist
transformation in the countries in which it invests.  Between 1991
and 2003, China’s foreign direct investment increased
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and then increased 13.7 times from 2004 to 2013, from $45 billion to
$613 billion.  By 2015 China had become the third largest
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investor in the world.  Its outbound FDI began to exceed inbound FDI
and the country became a net creditor.  What happens when this
Chinese outward FDI touches down in the former Third World?

DISPLACEMENT AND EXTRACTION BECOME “SOUTH-SOUTH COOPERATION”

The indigenous communities of the Peruvian highland province of
Apurímac have waged bloody struggles
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recent years against the Chinese owned and operated Las Bambas
open-pit copper mine, one of the largest in the world, that have left
scores dead and injured.  In fact, the Peruvian state legally sells
policing services to mining companies, enabling China’s MMG to
purchase physical force from the police to advance copper extraction
by violent means.  While this Sino-Peruvian extractive space and
others like it are touted by the “anti-imperialists” as a model of
South-South cooperation and post-Western modernization, keen observers
will recognize at once the classical structure of imperialist
extraction, whereby transnational capital displaces communities and
appropriates resources under the political and military protection of
local states tasked with the violent repression of resistance to
expulsion and exploitation.

The pattern is the same throughout Latin America.  Chinese banks have
given out more than $137 billion in loans to finance infrastructure,
energy, and mining projects.  One by a coalition of environmental and
human rights groups looked at 26 projects in Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.  It
found widespread violations of human rights, the displacement of local
communities, environmental devastation, and violent conflict wherever
Chinese investment in mines and megaprojects took place.  Defenders
of loan practices by China claim that these loans are different from
those coming from the West because they do not impose conditionality
in the way that Western lenders do.  This is not entirely true
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 But even if it were, what difference does that make for workers,
peasants, and indigenous communities resisting the exploitation,
repression, and environmental destruction associated with Chinese
capital in collaboration with transnational investors from elsewhere
and local capitalist states?

The point is not that Chinese capital is worse or better than capital
originating from other countries.  Capital is capital irrespective of
the national identity or ethnicity of its bearers.  However, when a
Western capitalist state and a capitalist state in the Global South
cooperate to impose megaprojects on local communities or to facilitate
transnational corporate plunder in extraction or industry this is
condemned as exploitation by imperialism and local ruling classes. 
When two capitalist states from the Global South cooperate for the
same megaprojects and corporate exploitation this is praised as
progressive, anti-imperialist “South-South cooperation” and
“bringing development.”

Such outfits as the Tricontinental, headed by Vijay Prashad, gush
praise
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this Chinese role in the former Third World as “mutually
beneficial,” “helping development,” and a “win-win
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for China and the countries its corporations invest in.  Are we
really to believe that Chinese investors are expanding
export-processing zones and relocating labor-intensive industrial
production from China to lower-wage zones in Ethiopia, Vietnam and
elsewhere, not to make profit but to “help these countries
develop”?  Is that not the same legitimating discourse as the World
Bank? Parroting the legitimating discourse of the Chinese state-party
elite, the Tricontinental has also insisted
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“the peaceful rise of socialism with Chinese characteristics”
provides an alternative to Western imperialism. Well, it does.  But
not an alternative to capitalist dispossession and exploitation. 
Capitalist development is not a class-neutral process.  It is by
definition a class project of the bourgeoisie.  Capitalist
development, whether from the West or the East, is about expanding the
frontiers of accumulation.

THE MISUSE OF SOVEREIGNTY AND SOLIDARITY

The “anti-imperialist” left rightfully decries Western propaganda
but seems incapable of calling out or even recognizing non-Western
propaganda around the world, or worse yet, they parrot that same
propaganda.  Nicaragua provides a textbook case
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The Ortega regime has proved adroit at using radical-sounding language
and anti-imperialist rhetoric to strike a reflexive chord of support
among the international left.  Ortega returned to power in 2007
through a pact with the country’s traditional right-wing oligarchy,
the former members of the armed counterrevolution, and the
conservative Catholic Church hierarchy and Evangelical sects. 
Promising absolute respect for private property and unrestricted
freedom for capital, he proceeded to co-govern until 2018 with the
capitalist class, granting transnational capital 10-year across the
board tax holidays, deregulation, unrestricted freedom to repatriate
profits, and repression of striking workers.  Ninety-six percent of
the country’s property remains in the hands of the private sector. 
The dictatorship has repressed all dissent and shut down over 3,500
civil society organizations since 2018 – this in a country of barely
six million people – because it considers _any_ civic life outside
of its own to be a threat.

Many progressives may be genuinely confused because of the
well-deserved support that the 1979-1990 Sandinista revolution
marshalled around the world and the history of brutal U.S.
intervention against the country.  That revolution died in 1990 and
what came to power in 2007 under Ortega was anything but revolution. 
Yet the “anti-imperialist” left has chosen to warmly embrace the
dictatorship, justified because of alleged U.S. attempts to
destabilize the regime and in the name of “sovereignty.” But the
evidence does not support the claim made by these detractors that the
United States is pushing “counterrevolutionary regime change”
against Ortega, notwithstanding Washington’s saber-rattling
rhetoric.  Nicaragua does not face trade or investment sanctions.
 The United States is the country’s principal trading partner
– bilateral trade
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$8.3 billion in 2022 – and transnational corporate investment
continues to pour in, as does multilateral lending to the Central
Bank.  There is no U.S. military or paramilitary intervention.  Yet
none of these facts have stopped the U.S.-based organization Code
Pink, among others, from claiming
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“socialist government” under pressure from “devastating
sanctions” and facing “violent attempted coups.”

Washington does wage full-blown destabilization campaigns, not against
Ortega, but against Iran, Venezuela, and other countries.  Such
crimes must be vehemently condemned by any leftist worthy of the name.
 But this does not absolve the left of commitment to internationalism
and solidarity with those oppressed just because we resist U.S.
imperial pretensions around the world.  The “anti-imperialist”
left, however, will tell you otherwise.  Heed the warning
by journalist Caitlin Johnstone
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if you live in a Western country “it is simply is not possible for
you to lend your voice to the cause of protesters in empire-targeted
nations without facilitating the empire’s propaganda campaigns about
those protests.  You either have a responsible relationship with this
reality or an irresponsible one.”  Simple as that.  Proletarians
of just some countries unite!

The “anti-imperialists” have reverted to a conception of
sovereignty, _not _of the people or the working classes, but of the
rulers in countries that they defend.  Anti-colonial and
anti-imperialist struggles in the twentieth century
defended _national_ – _not state_ – sovereignty in the face of
interference by the imperial powers.  Capitalist states use this
claim to sovereignty as a “right” to exploit and oppress inside
national borders free from outside interference.  We on the left have
no qualms about “violating national sovereignty” to condemn human
rights abuses by pro-Western regimes, and nor should we in defense of
human rights in those regimes not favored by Washington.

Proletarian internationalism calls on the working and oppressed
classes of one country to extend solidarity not to states but to the
struggles of the working and oppressed classes of other countries. 
States deserve the left’s support to the extent – and only to the
extent – that they advance the emancipatory struggles of the popular
and working classes, that they advance, or are forced to advance,
policies that favor these classes.  The “anti-imperialists”
conflate state with nation, country, and people, generally lacking any
theoretical conception of these categories and advancing populist over
class political orientation.  We on the left condemned the U.S.
invasion and occupation of Iraq earlier this century.  We did so not
because we supported the Saddam Hussein regime – only a fool could
have – but because we stood in solidarity with the Iraqi people and
because the whole imperial project for the Middle East was tantamount
to an attack on the poor and the oppressed everywhere.

BRICS: REPLACING THE CAPITAL-LABOR CONTRADICTION WITH A NORTH-SOUTH
CONTRADICTION

The “anti-imperialists” cheer on the BRICS
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a Southern challenge to global capitalism, a progressive, even
anti-imperialist option for humanity.  They can only make such a
claim by reducing capitalism and imperialism to Western supremacy in
the international system.  In the heyday of colonialism and its
immediate aftermath local ruling classes were, at best,
anti-imperialist but not anti-capitalist.  Their nationalism
obliterated class by proclaiming an identity of interests among the
citizens of a particular country.  This nationalism had a progressive
and sometimes even radical edge to it so far as all members of the
country in question were oppressed by colonial domination, the caste
systems it imposed, and the suppression of indigenous capital. 
Today’s “anti-imperialists” wax enthusiasm for the BRICS as a
revived “Third World project,” in the words of Prashad, an
antiquated nostalgia for that anti-colonial moment of the
mid-twentieth century that obscures internal class contradictions
along with the web of transnational class relations into which they
are enmeshed.  Two references will suffice to illustrate just how out
of touch such thinking is with the twenty-first century reality.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to give a talk in Manila to a
group of Philippine revolutionary activists.  One woman in
attendance, originally from India, objected to my analysis of the rise
of a transnational capitalist class that incorporated powerful
contingents from the former Third World.  She told me that in India
“we are fighting against imperialism and for national
liberation.”  I asked her what she meant by this.  Core
capitalists were exploiting Indian workers and transferring the
surplus back to the imperialist countries along the lines that Lenin
analyzed, she replied.  It was by sheer coincidence that in the very
week of my talk, the Indian-based global corporate conglomerate, Tata
Group, which operates in over 100 countries in six continents, had
acquired a string of corporate icons of its former British colonial
master, among them, Land Rover, Jaguar, Tetley Tea, British Steel, and
Tesco supermarkets, making Tata the single largest
employer _inside_ the United Kingdom.  So, India-based capitalists
had become the largest single exploiter of British workers. 
According to this woman’s own outdated logic, the United Kingdom was
now the victim of Indian imperialism!

Shortly after his first inauguration, in 2003, and then again in 2010
during his second presidential term, Brazilian President Lula loaded
up a government aircraft with Brazilian corporate executives and
headed for Africa.  The presidential-corporate entourage lobbied
Mozambique and other African countries to open up to investment in the
continent’s abundant mineral resources by the Brazilian-based
transnational mining corporation, Vale, which also operates on all six
continents, under the rhetoric of “South-South solidarity.”  It
is unclear what was anti-imperialist, much less anti-capitalist, about
Lula’s African corporate safaris, and by extension the
“South-South cooperation” agenda it epitomizes, or why the left
should be applauding the expansion of Brazilian-based capital into
Africa, Chinese-based capital into Latin America, Russian-based
capital into Central Asia, or Indian-based capital into the United
Kingdom.

We may support the (mildly) redistributive policies at home and
dynamic foreign policy abroad of governments such as Lula’s.  All
capitalist states are not the same and it matters a great deal who is
in the government.  But a “progressive” government is not a
socialist and not necessarily an anti-imperialist government.  For
the myopic, the outward expansion of Chinese, Indian, or
Brazilian-based capital is seen as some sort of liberation from
imperialism.  What is one to make of the bizarre claim
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the Canadian-based Geopolitical Economy Research Group and the
International Manifesto Group that it sponsors, for whom ideological
commitment trumps facts, that the BRICS are “among the better-known
successes” in efforts to promote “autonomous and egalitarian
national development and industrialization to break imperialist
shackles”?

If the BRICS do not represent an alternative to global capitalism and
the domination of transnational capital, they _do_ signal the shift
towards a more multipolar and
balanced _inter-state_ system _within_ the global capitalist
order.  But such a multipolar inter-state system remains part of a
brutal, exploitative, global capitalist world in which the BRICS
capitalists and states are as much committed to control and
exploitation of the global working and popular classes as are their
Northern counterparts.  As the BRICS membership expands, new
candidates in 2023 to join the bloc include such magnificently
“autonomous and egalitarian” states fighting “imperialist
shackles” as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and
Kazakhstan.

MULTIPOLARITY: THE NEW ALBATROSS

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the West’s radical
political, military and economic response to it may signal the _coup
de grace_ of a decadent post-WWII inter-state order.  An ever-more
integrated global capitalism is inconsistent with a U.S.- and Western
controlled international political order and financial architecture
and with an exclusively dollar-denominated global economy.  We are at
the onset of a radical reconfiguration of global geopolitical
alignments to the drumbeat of escalating economic turbulence and
political chaos.  Yet the crisis of hegemony in the international
order takes place within this single, integrated global economy.  The
emerging global capitalist pluralism may offer greater maneuvering
room for popular struggles around the world but a politically
multipolar world does not mean that emerging poles of global
capitalism are any less exploitative or oppressive than the
established centers.

To the contrary, the established West and the emerging centers in this
polycentric world are converging around remarkably similar “Great
Power” tropes, especially jingoistic – often ethnic –
nationalism and nostalgia for a mythologized “glorious
civilization” that must now be recovered.  The Spenglerian
narratives differs from one country to another according to particular
histories and cultures.  In China hyper-nationalism combines with
Confucian obedience to authority, Han ethnic supremacy and a new Long
March to recover great power status.  For Putin it is the glory days
of a “Great Russian” empire anchored in Eurasia, politically
propped up by extreme patriarchal conservatism that Putin calls
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spiritual and moral values” embodying the “spiritual essence of
the Russian nation over the decaying West.”  In the U.S. it is the
hyper-imperial bravado of a waning Pax Americana legitimated by the
doctrine of “U.S. exceptionalism” and the bombast of “democracy
and freedom,” at whose fringe has always been white supremacy, now
incarnated in a rising fascist movement as “replacement theory.” 
To these we could add pan-Turkism, Hindu nationalism, and other such
quasi-fascist ideologies in this rising polycentric world.  Make
America Great Again!  Make China Great Again!  Make Russia Great
Again!

The U.S. may be the top dog and the most dangerous criminal among
competing cartels of criminal states.  We must condemn Washington for
instigating a New Cold War and for prodding Russia through aggressive
NATO expansion into invading Ukraine.  Yet the “anti-imperialist”
left insists that there is one single enemy, the U.S. and its
allies.  This is a Manichean tale of “the West and the rest.”
Such a metaphysical Star Wars narrative about the virtuous fight
against the singular Evil Empire ends up legitimating the Russian
invasion of the Ukraine.  And just as Star Wars, it becomes hard to
distinguish the fantastical babble of a fantasy world from the babble
of the “anti-imperialist” left.

_William I. Robinson
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Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin
American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He
has written widely on global capitalism, world politics, social
theory, and Latin America. Among his recent books are: Into the
Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (2018); The Global Police
State (2020), and Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (2022).
He lives in Los Angeles._

_True to the tradition of public intellectual engagement, The
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where contemporary thinkers can discuss today’s crucial
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