Imperialism after History
Imperialism remains the only explanatory matrix big enough to make sense of what’s going on in the world today. How else do you explain events, countries, and peoples as disparate as Afghanistan, Sudan, Venezuela, Syria, Belarus? How else does the economic unity produced through capitalist globalization become registered in thought?
And yet, this fact should strike us. Our world is precisely characterized by the lack of faith in any theoretical unity. Ours is a fragmented, culturally bound world in which it matters more who you are than what you stand for. Postmodernity reveals its truest content as post-history, a premature attempt to shove the history of the modern world into the dustbin. In this context, the fact that the left is able to make a coherent whole out of a world shattered into cultural bits is surprising. This, by the way, is exactly what Baudrillard was getting at with his essays on the nonexistence of the Gulf War. Whereas before, the Marxist left was able to very easily construct a narrative of the world united in the self-contradiction of human freedom that it called ‘capitalism,’ presupposing a method of doing and understanding history that is utterly repulsive to us nowadays, now it truly takes some logical gymnastics to achieve the same. The result is the left’s paltry excuse for praxis: anti-imperialism.
Furthermore, it should come as no surprise that anti-imperialism’s importance has grown during and after the Trump phenomenon. You could not critique Trump without recourse to the word ‘imperialism.’ It had to be included in every sentence of every leftist discourse. However, the true importance of this relationship is not as it may appear, least of all how it appears to the anti-imperialists themselves. For both Trump and the anti-imperialist left have been fighting against the decline of the U.S. empire.
Precisely because imperialism makes today’s world fit in relation to the world of its revolutionary ancestors, the left needs it to remain viable. Anti-imperialism expresses its reliance on the status quo in order to have any claim to relevance. Trump, for his part, recognized that the days of U.S. imperialism are fast slipping away - if they’re not already gone for good - and he was relieved of the baggage of previous, neoliberal administrations to chart a more entertaining, if still ineffective, Bonapartist course. Yet in neither case can we say that the irrevocable fact of the collapse of neoliberalism and, with it, that also of U.S. hegemony, has been fully registered in consciousness. Consciousness still remains as it did for the abbé Sieyès or Hegel: it is a post-festum achievement, lagging behind events until its moment of clarity already appears outdated, events having changed once again.
In short, we confront a world today that is no longer imperialist. Yet the left clings stubbornly to its anti-imperialism. What otherwise may appear as a strange paradox nonetheless reveals a profound possibility. For if the left could make the world imperialist again, it just may find the answers to its most vexing questions. If the left still looks for inspiration to the Bolsheviks, that is because it recognizes the ‘Leninism’ of the Second International to be the highest achievement of Marxism. Its own bungled, warped, and downright reactionary ‘Leninism’ smuggles an awareness of the need to return to that most foundational of world crises, namely the imperialist world war, in order to make sense of its tasks in the present. Even if the world cannot become imperialist again, the left still ought to interrogate its high-water mark in history if it is to ever overcome it(self). This is the promise, but also the silliness, of contemporary anti-imperialism.
To tell the story of imperialism, one must begin with Bonapartism. And central to that story is the revolutionary upheavals of 1848-49 (in Europe, anyway; their wider repercussions fanned out across the globe over the next 20 years). The bourgeoisie developed their world slowly over many centuries. Eventually, the recognition of what society is (namely, bourgeois) and how society should be (namely, what it already is) burst forth belatedly into human consciousness. This consciousness manifested itself politically in the so-called bourgeois revolutions of the late 1700s and early 1800s. The bourgeoisie boldly put itself forward as the group capable of moving the entire species forward out of the misery of the agrarian past and into the dazzling new future promised by a democracy of labor.
This world, for Marx, choked on the weight of its own self-contradictoriness. It turns out that empowering people to be free only to the extent that they work, and then systematically putting people out of work in the insatiable demand to industrialize production, creates an unstable mess that jeopardizes the whole project right down to its foundation. Now, there is no reason why humanity won’t take another 500 years to extricate itself very slowly and painfully out of this dilemma. But, because of how the revolutions of 1848-49 played out, we no longer have to wait that long.
The industrialized working class emerged as a historical actor in the course of these revolutions. It demonstrated that it was capable of taking a shortcut in history, if you will. All of its members find themselves constituted as bourgeois subjects without property. That is, they are entitled by bourgeois social relations to make the world anew as a result of their productive labor, yet they are constrained (by those very same social relations) from enjoying the fullest fruits of that labor. Instead, their labor creates the profits of another class of human beings. In the aggregate, standing above both classes, the producers and the parasites, is the productive process itself, whose human roots (in everyone’s labor) are obscured by the very alienation of that labor in the severing of profit from the laborer. In other words, the supreme achievement of the bourgeoisie, namely capital, the collective productivity of human beings, eludes any one person or group’s control and subsequently becomes incapable of doing what it is supposed to do, namely provide the material basis for the undiluted enjoyment of human freedom.
This contradiction, the fact that bourgeois society promises to be something that it can never become, is embodied in each and every proletarian. And it is the fact of living out this contradiction that impels proletarians to become a class. And since the class’ salvation lies only in the abolition of the possibility of ever existing as a class, i.e. the full abolition of wage work and private property, its destiny is therefore to inaugurate the next stage in general human freedom. This is the ‘shortcut’ revealed by 1848.
But what was also revealed in 1848 is that the bourgeoisie is now incapable of playing the role of revolutionary. The bourgeoisie betrayed its own revolutionary values by systematically wiping out the emerging proletariat. It would rather enjoy the world as it is than lose its petty privileges in the course of transforming the world according to the blueprint it originally drafted. For that’s all the proletariat threatens: the complete fulfillment of the bourgeois project. Yet for the bourgeoisie, the world is ‘bourgeois’ enough. 1848 pitted both classes against each other in mortal combat, and the outcome will have irrevocable consequences for world history and human freedom. The conflict is still undecided.
In the meantime, though, we have Bonapartism. There has been a world-historic vacuum created by 1848 into which the bourgeoisie is now incapable of stepping. However, the proletariat is also temporarily incapable of doing so. The proletariat is not yet organized as a class for itself to the degree necessary to assume responsibility for changing the world. History is at a standstill. So, for the time being, the Bonapartist state holds society together. This term simply denotes the quintessential ‘modern’ state with its large standing armies, welfare apparatus, management of the national economy, etc.
Bonapartism is the logical outgrowth and final resting place of the modern bourgeois political project. It is a stagnation and regression in history in that it holds society back from where its economy already wishes to take it. But it is also progressive in that it is the final obstacle standing in the way of such a revolutionary transformation. The Bonapartist state keeps the bourgeoisie and proletariat in check, but insofar as it plays them off each other, it reveals the latent class content of every confrontation, making the entrance into class consciousness that much more visible. It concentrates all of the social coercion necessary to keep society intact into one executive bureaucracy, office, or even individual. And insofar as it does this, it demonstrates to all classes the flimsiness of the system keeping them from each other’s throats. Bonapartism’s very fragility is its strength, and its strength is its fragility. Its revolutionary co-optation of the bygone demands of the early bourgeoisie and socialists is precisely what makes history stand still. But it is also the precondition for history to move forward again.
Every system of governance since 1848 (really, 1852, which is when Louis Bonaparte assumed office) has been Bonapartist. Where then does ‘imperialism’ enter into the discussion?
Imperialism should not be reduced to its root and cousin, ‘empire.’ True, the Bonapartist state finds empire, whether domestic or foreign, an unavoidable necessity. Nowadays, the state merely courts transnational corporations, the latter of whom being those actively engaged in empire-building. But imperialism is about more than empire. Indeed, it is a higher expression of Bonapartism, perhaps its last, as Lenin once hoped.
The very fact that the bourgeoisie of the world united as a class over and above its petty, nationalistic differences united the world too into one great market. And this has had important consequences for the world’s proletariat. Not only have its numbers geometrically increased. But, more importantly, it has also outgrown the confines of any one nationality, just like the bourgeoisie. In order to succeed, and I mean really succeed, the proletariat of the world must register in consciousness what the capitalist economy has already made it in fact: one, indivisible, global workforce. This means it has one and only one interest as a class: the establishment of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat.
The spreading of commercial tentacles all over the globe, the concentration of entire industries under fewer and fewer brand names, the escalation of militarization and increasing threats of world war - these are all characteristic of what is variously called the Age of Imperialism, the Gilded Age, the late Victorian Era, etc. We all know the consequences these developments had for the ‘colonizers’ as well as for the ‘colonized.’ But we ignore at our own peril the inescapable fact that the Age of Empires was simultaneously the Age of Socialism.
Imperialism is precisely that phase of Bonapartist governance that accelerated the growth of socialism the most. In fact, socialism and imperialism cannot be understood without each other. Each conditioned the growth of the other, and ultimately they would duke it out during what would retrospectively be called World War I.
How did imperialism foster the growth of socialism? By bringing tens of thousands of workers into the same factory, or same intra-company lines of communication, though they be thousands of miles apart! By building railroads and telephone lines at government expense! By raising the standard of living, however slightly, such that workers could rightly expect to own more than their meager wages allowed!
But how did socialism condition the growth of imperialism? Every reform the socialists demanded ended up being implemented. Not by any workers’ government, mind you, but rather by the imperialist governments. The reduction of the work-day, the first minimum-wage laws, the elimination of child labor, the enfranchisement of women, hell, even the abolition of slavery in the U.S. - all these socialist demands were realized. But the aggregate effect was simply to consolidate the state’s basis of power. This wasn’t so apparent in the heady days of socialism’s peak, but in the aftermath of both world wars, the growth of the state and the way in which it comes to fill all radical horizons demonstrate that the Bonapartist state has been the only beneficiary from the fast-and-loose history of socialism.
This was not immediately on Lenin’s mind, though. For him and the best of the Second International, imperialism was the highest expression of the potential revealed by Bonapartism. It achieved such a high concentration of capital that the proletariat would merely have to take over the transnational corporations, not destroy them. The victorious proletariat would encounter a world ready-made for efficiency, quick communication, and full employment. All it had to do was topple the imperialist states that stood between it and a better use of the world as it already existed. For the Bolsheviks, this made the task crystal-clear. It made the question of socialism burn with an immediacy it hasn’t since, even in the socialist countries. The prospect of the world dictatorship of the proletariat was in reach.
All of this Lenin meant when he used the term ‘imperialism.’ If history for the Marxists was the history of class struggle, then all of human history reached its climax in imperialism. The world quaked with the anticipation of the future that capitalism seemed finally ready to carry to term. In this context, how could anyone be ‘against’ imperialism? Imperialism exuded such potential that it remained to be encountered and qualitatively transformed, not turned away from as problematic, Eurocentric, etc.
But obviously, the Second International allowed the imperialist world war to occur. It aborted the future capitalism tried to birth. It was swallowed up in the crisis it helped to instigate. At the height of its power, it was still powerless against the brute cold of history itself.
Today’s anti-imperialists know all of this, even if they would disown it. Their ‘praxis’ reveals a longing to re-engage with exactly this history. No leftist worth their salt wants to keep losing! They know they should take a look back when victory was in the air. They embody the correct impetus, namely to return to this crisis of Marxism in order to overcome it. What they don’t understand is that for their own anti-imperialism to make sense, the world would have to become imperialist again. We have been left with the Bonapartism minus the heightened potential of imperialism as Lenin saw it. The Bonapartism of the managerial state, of neoliberalism, and now of the emerging post-neoliberal order admits of different possibilities than those of the age of imperialism. The left’s anti-imperialism thus betrays an anachronism far more problematic than the ‘history’ taught in imperialist grade-school curricula around the world. The left must move on from imperialism, but it finds it cannot.
In a by-now thoroughly forgotten article buried in the fifth volume of the Peruvian Marxist journal, Amauta, Leon Trotsky wrote a brief eulogy for Vladimir Lenin. In it, he characterized Lenin as the personified spirit of the youthful world proletariat. Lenin’s life came from, belonged to, and ultimately returned to the proletariat in the age of imperialism. He was a world-historic personage for Trotsky simply because he more than anyone understood what history asked of him. Small wonder then that generations of leftists since look up to this man.
Yet there is something deeply problematic about how accurate Trotsky’s description is. The proletariat in Lenin’s day was immature. It actively fought to achieve maturity. It actively struggled, perhaps as never before or since, to be worthy of the destiny capitalism created for it. And yet it still revealed itself to be immature, incapable of diverting the Bonapartist state into the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, then, becomes the embodiment of the youthful but ultimately naive zeal of the proletariat. If we keep coming back to him as one of if not the greatest expression of political Marxism, then that reveals our own immaturity all the more. Capitalism has moved on! But the proletariat remains stuck.
There are many indigenous Peruvian warnings against becoming asustado: suffering a life-threatening situation such that the soul remains trapped at the location of the incident. If the body moves on without recapturing its soul, then inexplicable illness will plague it until it eventually dies, leaving medical doctors bewildered. With what foresight, then, did Amauta translate this obscure piece by Trotsky!
Thus we see the farce of the left’s anti-imperialism. If history repeats twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, then today’s ‘Leninism’ is certainly that: farcical. In trying to achieve a desired outcome, it only pushes it farther away. We do not need more Lenins. We need revolutionaries the likes of which Lenin could only imagine. But in order to become such, we must return to Lenin and reattain his historical clarity. To overcome we must first equal; this even the intermediate value theorem teaches. To meet the demands of history today, we must be equal to what they used to be. If imperialism once represented the highest stage of capitalism, today it represents the highest stage of socialism. We must return there if only to move on. We must recover our souls to return to health, to continue the Peruvian image. And this is what it would mean to truly learn from history.