Libertarian Socialists (anarcho-syndicalists) oppose all forms of exploitation and oppression. This article discusses imperialism and how to fight it.
By imperialism we mean a situation of external domination where the ruling class of one country dominates the people and territory of another country. The key imperialist powers are the Western States (USA, West Europe, Japan) and their ruling classes, and the dominant States of the former “Soviet bloc” (Russia and China).
Roots of Imperialism
Imperialism has been a central part of capitalism and the modern State since these structures of oppression emerged 500 years ago.
Two factor s account for this. Firstly, the imperialist ruling classes wanted to obtain cheap labour and raw materials and new markets for manufactured goods in the Third World (Africa, South Asia, Latin America, Middle East, ). Secondly, Western States and their ruling classes competed with one another for territory and strategic advantage (such as keeping rival ruling classes away from cheap minerals).
Imperialism before World War Two
The first phase of modern imperialism was “merchant capitalism”. This was the period opened up by the conquest of the Americas. The capitalist ruling class of the West got its wealth through plunder, trade, slave plantations and the exploiting of European peasants and artisans.
Merchant capitalism overlapped with a second imperialist phase, “colonialism”, in which Western states established direct rule over Third World areas like Africa.
The consequences of imperialism in all these phases were overwhelmingly negative, involving genocide against indigenous peoples, slavery, racism, war, increased food insecurity, poverty and oppression.
Collapse of the Empires
The old colonial empires collapsed after 1945 period due to the weaknesses of the key imperial powers, pressure from the USA for access to these territories, and massive colonial revolts.
But while the destruction of the empires was an advance, the anticolonial movements failed in an important way: power did not pass to the working and poor people who made up the majority of the Third World population, but to local capitalist ruling classes.
This failure has very concrete roots in the nationalist politics that dominated the anti-colonial revolts (see below). At the same time, external domination continued in the Third World despite the attainment of formally independent States.
Imperialism did not end with the collapse of the empires. The USA become the main imperialist power after 1945. It sought to expand its economic and military influence through alliances like NATO to halt the expansion of the rival imperialist blocs of the so-called socialist (in reality, State-capitalist) countries of the Soviet Union and China. All these imperialist powers repeatedly used military force to secure their interests in the Third World: examples are Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
Relations between the key imperialist powers are partly regulated by the United Nations, which is an imperialist-dominated congress of self-seeking Western and Third World ruling classes.
Huge multi-national corporations (MNCs) like Shell came to dominate world trade, investment, research, and wealth after 1945. MNC’s power allows them to maintain exploitative colonial trade patterns in which Third World countries sell under priced raw materials to Western companies who in turn charge monopoly prices for manufactured goods. MNCs do invest in Third World countries, but they send most of their profits back to their head offices (instead of reinvesting it locally); undermine efficient local job-creating industries with machinery and imports with few linkages to the local economy; and use cheap, repressed, local labour.
IMF/World Bank – Get out of Africa!
Also pro-imperialist are the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. They support right-wing. Third World governments (for example, South Africa in 1976). Their policies reinforce the colonial unequal exchange trade patterns by promoting reliance on the primary sector, and also aid MNC activities by promoting free trade and capital movements. Their weapons are the promotion of free market ideas and the insistence that Third World countries wanting loans adopt a set of neo-liberal/free market policies called Economic Structural Adjustment (ESAP). ESAP calls for: promotion of raw material production; trade liberalisation; and a reduced State role in the economy (meaning privatisation, massive cuts in welfare and public sector jobs).
Why Nationalism Fails
Imperialism casts a shadow over Third World working and poor people, so what strategy can fight it?
One strategy is progressive “nationalism”, supported by organisations like the PLO and IRA, who argue that all classes in a given “nation” must unite to achieve self-determination through an independent State.
Although progressive, nationalism cannot defeat imperialism. Nationalism delivers power to local ruling classes as it relies on taking State power. The State is a hierarchical, bureaucratic structure of coercion that always defends capitalism and concentrates power in the hands of a small ruling class. As a result, the State cannot deliver freedom to the workers and peasants. Nationalism hides class differences within the “nation” by arguing that all people must unite around their supposedly common interests, when in fact they have nothing in common. Its function is to build a mass support base for local elites angry with imperialism for blocking their ambitions to rule and exploit.
The Enemy is at Home
Although Third World elites may use antiimperialist language, they cannot challenge imperialism once they hijack the anti-imperialist struggle to take power. Nationalists fail to realise that imperialism’s international power, in the form of Western militaries, the UN, the IMF and World Bank, and MNCs, means that it is impossible for any one country to pursue an independent path. Those who try are stamped on hard, like Iraq in 1991.
Third World ruling classes are objectively allies of imperialism as their interests are mostly identical They rely on imperialist economic relationships for their wealth, and on Western ruling classes’ military aid to crush worker-peasant resistance to the exploitation and repression this entails. For their part, imperialist ruling classes support these local elites as they help manage imperialism and capitalism.
Conflicts do sometimes arise between Third World and Western ruling classes. For example, local elites may resent the restrictions of imperialism and try take an independent capitalist development path by nationalising MNC property.
But although imperialists intervene against these renegades, the real source of the conflict is over how to manage capitalism and the State, not about whether or not to keep them. Both sides support these structures and agree on the need to repress the working masses. Nationalisation is not socialism but only a transfer of property from company bureaucrats to State bureaucrats. Where a genuine worker-peasant revolt breaks out, the two elites drop their differences and unite against their common enemy, the workers and peasants.
Path of Class Struggle
There is another way, libertarian socialism (anarcho-syndicalism). Since imperialism is rooted in capitalism and the State, we argue that the anti-imperialist struggle can only be successful if it is also a struggle against these structures. And these structures can only be destroyed by class struggle as only the workers and peasants are capable of building a free society as only they do not need to exploit, and have no vested interest in the current system.
Since an isolated anti-imperialist struggle or revolution cannot win, a successful struggle requires maximum international support and solidarity. The worker-peasant revolution must spread into other territories dominated by imperialism and also into the imperialist countries.
The true allies of the Third World toiling masses are the Western working classes, not the exploiting local elites who hijack power. These working classes do not benefit from imperialism as it strengthens the repressive power of their own rulers, wastes resources and lives on the military, promotes reactionary ideas that divides the workers, and allows MNCs to cut jobs and wages by the shifting operations to repressive Third World countries.
The revolution aims to establish an international stateless socialist system based on equality and worker-peasant self-management through federations of workplace and community councils. Such a system will allow all people full self-determination and the right to express their cultures and ways of life.
In order to work towards this final victory, we must join anti-imperialist struggles as we support their immediate aims, as campaigning gives people confidence in struggle, and out of working class solidarity. It is in struggle that people are won to revolutionary ideas, and so we must link these daily struggles to our vision of a free society. Overall, we oppose all imperialist interventions, defend real independence movements and progressive forces (including nationalists), and oppose attacks on popular living standards. We are for international workers unity through the trade union rank-and-file and other structures. and an international minimum wage.
Libertarian socialists: Fighters against Imperialism and Colonialism
Our movement does not just talk, it has been at the forefront of many anti-imperialist struggles. Here we give examples.
Mikhail Bakunin, the founder of libertarian socialism (anarcho-syndicalism), entered politics partly as an activist in East European anti-colonial struggles. As a result he was imprisonment and internally exiled within Russia. After escaping in 1861, he abandoned nationalism for libertarian socialism (anarcho-syndicalism) but maintained his anti-imperialism. For Bakunin Third World revolt was inevitable and desirable, but a successful struggle required an internationalist anti-authoritarian social revolution against the State and the class system.
The libertarian socialist (anarcho-syndicalist) movement took up the challenge.
In Cuba, the libertarian socialist (anarcho-syndicalists), who had a massive working class base, took part in the struggle for independence from Spain. They were active in the Ten Year War (1868-78) and later aided famous anti-colonial fighter, Jose Marti, after assurances that independence would bring social reforms. But their politics remained those of social revolution, not nationalism. When the war of independence advocated by Marti exploded in 1895 Libertarian socialists (anarcho-syndicalists) in Cuba and in exile were in the forefront of this struggle.
Although the war ended with Spain’s defeat in 1898, Marti’s promised reforms died with him in battle in 1895. Mass struggle thus continued under the independent government which, of course, did not meet the workers’ demands. Instead, the local elite which hijacked the anti-colonial struggle regularly repressed the workers and socialists who had sacrificed themselves for independence.
Libertarian socialists (anarcho-syndicalists) were active in Central American struggles against USA imperialism. In Mexico, the anarchist-led PLM, and the mass libertarian socialist trade unions, consistently challenged American imperialism and anti-Mexican discrimination in Mexico and the US, both before, during and after the Mexican Revolution (1910-22).
In 1909 the USA occupied Nicaragua. This led to a number of failed bourgeois-led revolts. The last of these revolts ended in 1926 when negotiations led to the installation of the liberal leader, Moncada, as president of this US semi-colony. This settlement was opposed by Augustino Sandino, another revolt leader, and an anarcho-syndicalist. He launched a seven-year peasant guerrilla war against the US occupation in 1927.
Despite political weaknesses, Sandino’s movement, the EDSNN, moved steadily leftwards as Sandino realised that “only the workers and the peasants will go all the way to the end” in the struggle. There was thus increasing emphasis on organising peasant cooperatives in the liberated territories. The US forces were withdrawn in 1933 and the EDSNN largely demobilised.
But in 1934 Sandino was murdered and the collectives smashed on the orders of General Somoza, the new, pro-imperialist ruler of the State. Sandino is remembered today as a Nicaraguan national hero.
In East Europe, libertarian socialist (anarcho-syndicalists) were active in 1873 uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina against Austro-Hungarian imperialism. They also took part in the “National Revolutionary Movement” in Macedonia (against the Ottoman empire). At least 60 gave their lives in this struggle, particularly in the great 1903 revolt.
In the Ukraine, the Makhnovist movement organised a titanic peasant revolt (1918-21) that only smashed the German occupation but redistributed the land, established worker- peasant self-management in many areas, and created a Revolutionary Insurgent Army under worker-peasant control.
In Ireland, James Connolly is remembered as a martyr of the 1916 Easter Rebellion against British imperialism. Connolly was basically a Syndicalist who believed in class struggle and in building revolutionary trade unions to smash capitalism. This is true despite his illusions in nationalism’s revolutionary potential and the use of elections.
Libertarian socialists (anarcho-syndicalists) played a key part in the Korean struggle against Japanese imperialism. They were active in the 1919 uprising, and in 1924 formed the Korean Anarchist Federation (KAF) on a militant anti- imperialist platform that argued for international social revolution. In 1928 the KAF organised an Eastern Anarchist Federation in 1928 with affiliates in China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and other countries. Inside Korea, the Anarchists organised a country- wide underground network that engaged in guerrilla activity, propaganda work and trade union organising. in 1929, the comrades established a two million-strong armed zone of voluntary farming co-operatives in Manchuria. Although this zone was defeated some years later, resistance continued throughout the 1930s and joint Chinese – Korean operations were organised after Japan’s 1937 invasion of China. Libertarian socialists (anarcho-syndicalists) were active after independence in the 1940s despite repressive governments and internal divisions.
Finally, we should point out that libertarian socialists (anarcho- syndicalists) in the imperialist countries also supported the anti-imperialist struggle. For example, the prominent Japanese Anarchist Kotoku Shusui was framed and executed in 1910 after campaigning against Japanese expansionism. In Italy, the movement opposed Italian expansionism into Eritrea and Ethiopia in the 1880s and 1890s, and organised a massive anti-war movement against the 1911 invasion of Libya. In 1909, the Spanish comrades organised a mass workers strike against intervention in Morocco.
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