Newsletter #97: Third Worldism w/ Aslı Bâli & Aziz Rana

By Ben Mabie

During The Dig’s thoughtful reconsideration of the past and future of ‘Third Worldism,” Aziz Rana remarks on a somewhat distinct feature of the revival of internationalist sentiment in the North Atlantic left, particularly in the United States, in the period of the Iraq War. Despite the forceful rejection of American foreign policy and its resistance to parochialism, this revived anti-imperialism nevertheless fails to do what earlier instances of radicalism had done — to braid, connect, and tie together these local concerns with a global structure that linked a whole series of national social formations together. “[We] were starting to have arguments about empire, but those things are not being linked to domestic practices; so [when discussing empire] you are not having a conversation about race in the United States, about immigration, or the treatment of native peoples as being directly tied to what the US is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.” 

This runs against the grain of historical uses of the concept of imperialism. It was first an act of political translation that universalizes local grievances, an effort to take them all seriously and therefore make broader alliances possible. But more than that, it was an effort to produce a stronger grasp of the world, to think through the linkages between different scales of domination and exploitation and the possible relationship between the struggles that traversed seemingly discrete social formations. 

“Imperialism” is an old term. For a stretch throughout the nineteenth century, it was virtually synonymous with Napoleon III and the state he built out of the collapse of the Second Republic. As the century wore on, it “assumed a range of new meanings,” Salar Mohandesi writes in a history of the concept, “referring to phenomena as diverse as military aggression, colonial conquest, formal annexation, protective tariffs, economic dominance, or rivalry between great powers.” 

It was evident to any observer that these developments were tightly linked, obviously related. But it remained ambiguous, even as it was taken up with increasing frequency by “proponents and opponents alike,” an attraction that grew up around escalation of violent conquest of much of Africa and Asia. In thirty short years, the largest colonial powers doubled the territory under their command: some 90 percent of Africa was brought under direct colonial domination. By the turn of the twentieth century, the capitals of Europe — and Japan — had brought almost the entire planet under their rule. “But since there was only so much of the globe to carve up,” Mohandesi explains, the headlong drive for colonies began to heighten antagonism between the expanding empires. “Although they tried to regulate their competition, coordinate the division of the globe, and stave off war, tensions continued to rise.”

It was within the ambit of the socialist movement that these theorizations became most robust. Here it grew into a central framing device for debates about the conjuncture in general — not a synonym for farflung events, nor simply consigned to one “level” of a complexly organized conjuncture. Imperialism was not just a name for the Southern or colonial problem, but was rather the sign under which the present was theorized. Capitalism had undergone dramatic transformations. Whereas older analyses of capitalism as a social formation had centered on the artisans of Paris or the industrial workers of Manchester, now new social subjects and political challenges were coming to the fore.

In the hands of Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Eduard Bernstein, Liang Qichao, Nikolai Bukharin, V. I. Lenin, M. N. Roy, and others, imperialism brought together questions concerning the nature of the state, capitalism, and its crisis tendencies, and the specificity of political power under capitalism; it incorporated assessments of struggles for national self-determination that were mushrooming around the world, and debates on the relationship between the threat of military conflict and foreign direct investment. The classical reference points for the arguments between ‘‘reform and revolution” as carried out by Bernstein and Luxemburg were simply unthinkable without reference to imperialism. 

So the concept was not just an effort to put what appeared as separate issues on a common plane of analysis, but an effort to place various struggles on shared terrain of political antagonism too. Through it, the aspirations of poor peasants resisting displacement, workers resisting speedups on the job, mothers at the marketplace eyeing the rising price of food, and students listening to the drumbeats of war could begin to conceive of their practical political unity. 

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Our movements are rediscovering how to disrupt the capacities of the logistical “nerve centers of capital in motion,” as Patrick King has written, and we are experimenting with how to articulate the class struggle’s local grievances to issues of genocidal warfare in far-away locales, at least within our limited organizational bases. But we don’t have a comparable theory today that articulates domestic strategies for political power with thoroughgoing analysis of domestic political economy, let alone its insertion in the global organization of capitalist power. Reconstructing such a theory will require more than analogies between struggles, or even concrete linkages between different movement organizations and political parties. We need a new research program that can capably organize otherwise siloed analyses into the global conjuncture. 

We will also need a more thorough accounting of our conceptual inheritances. It’s not enough to reappropriate the classical problematic, or even theories of imperialism of a more recent vintage, as their force derived from their inclusion in a larger theoretical schema underwritten by specific ideas of the state and nation, of crisis and capitalist development and political strategy, that are themselves untenable today. 

These older theories had more than traces of eschatology of the terminal crisis and a crude theory of the capitalist state. They could not anticipate the incorporation of postcolonial states into the capitalist bloc, a transition accomplished and marked by the counterrevolution of the late twentieth century, but one that nevertheless scrambles earlier strategic wagers. And as John Milios and Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos have argued in Rethinking Imperialism: A Study of Capitalist Rule, the dominant theories both new and old tend to theorize capitalism as only existing at the level of the global system, effacing the role of the level of the nation-state in the reproduction of capitalist social relations and the internationally overdetermined class struggle that unfolds within its boundaries. For Milios and Sotiropoulos, this absence means that many theories of imperialism are “unable to grasp the multifaceted character of international reality.” In the place of an account of the social, economic, ideological, and military linkages between different states and social formation, they substitute instead more Manichean divisions. 

The alternative to considering anti-imperialism a question of “foreign policy,” or making “the international” level the skeleton key that explains all political problems, would be a theory of imperialism that specifically wants to grasp this articulation between state, capital, and the hierarchical chain of connections between different nation-states. Again, what is needed is not merely analogies, but a theory of how the crystallization of class power and struggle within a social formation and in the form of the state produces a fragmented capitalist world. That uneven world is nevertheless stitched together in an imperialist chain. And it discloses the nascent alliances and possible points of leverage our movements might develop or exploit.