The Weight of Imperialism, the Permanent Stage of the Global Expansion of Capitalism
Since its inception, and at every stage in its history, the global deployment of capitalism has always been polarizing. Yet this characteristic of actually existing capitalism has always been underestimated, to say the least, because of the Eurocentrism dominating modern thought, even in the avant-garde ideological formations peculiar to the great revolutions.
The historical Marxism of the successive Internationals only partly escaped this general rule.To understand the immensity of this imperialist reality, and to draw all the strategic consequences for the changing of the world, is the first indispensable task that all social and political forces on the receiving end of it have to face, in both the core and the periphery. For what imperialism has brought about is not so much a maturing of conditions for ‘socialist revolutions’ (or accelerated tendencies in that direction) in the centres of the world system, as challenges to its order through revolts in the periphery. It is no accident that Russia was the ‘weak link’ in the system in 1917 or that revolution in the name of socialism then shifted eastward to China and elsewhere, whereas the collapse in the West on which Lenin pinned his hopes failed to materialize. The countries that underwent revolution therefore faced the dual, contradictory task of ‘catching up’ (with methods similar to those of capitalism) and ‘doing something else’ (‘building socialism’). This combination turned out as it did in the various countries; it might perhaps have been better, in the sense of allowing communist aspirations to grow stronger as advances were made in catching up. In any event, this real contradiction crucially shaped the objective conditions under which the post-revolutionary societies evolved.
The forms of political action and organization developed by ‘revolutionary parties’ (in this case, the Communists of the Third International) remained trapped in the idea that the revolution was ‘imminent’, that the ‘objective conditions’ for it were present.
The Party therefore had to make up for what was lacking: it had to become an organization to ‘make the revolution’, and therefore, under the circumstances, to stress homogeneity (later ‘monolithism’) and an almost military discipline. The parties in question maintained these forms of organization, even when the perspective of an immediate revolutionary assault was abandoned in the late 1920s. They were the placed in the service of a quite different objective: protection of the Soviet state, both internally and externally.In the peripheries of globalized capitalism—by definition, the ‘storm zone’ in the imperialist system—a form of revolution did remain on the agenda. But its objective was still essentially blurred and ambiguous. Was it national liberation from imperialism (and preservation of much, or even most, of the social relations characteristic of capitalist modernity), or was it something more? Both in the radical revolutions of China, Vietnam and Cuba, and in the less radical ones in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the question was still: ‘to catch up’ or ‘to do something else’? This challenge was in turn linked to another priority task: defence of the encircled Soviet Union.
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