In his 1924 book Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, LukĂĄcs argues that Lenin not only offers the means to seize the opportunity that imperialism opens for socialist revolution, he provides the essential method for Marxists to discern theoretical clarity in the face of imperialism. Leninâs method instructs the workerâs movement in how to take decisive action in the class struggle in the face of imperialist dynamics that fragment the workers from their collective interest. So important is Leninâs intervention into imperialism that LukĂĄcs argues that it incorporates a new element into the tradition of historical materialism. This new element is discovered in the way that Lenin pinpoints how the different currents within the working-class movement relate to opportunism, chauvinism and revisionism.
Chauvinism emerges as rampant in imperialist times but chauvinism is not to be understood as a moral critique and nor is it reducible to an individualist posture of racism or bigotry; it is rather an effect of opportunism, and opportunism occurs when the proletariat has become bound up with bourgeois interests. The problem of both opportunism and chauvinism is thus strategic: when a worker adopts either position they adopt a faulty perspective on the nature of the class struggle itself, one that leads other workers to see exploitation as normal. Chauvinism is defined as the tendency to distort and manipulate the workerâs movement in such a way that exploitation is construed as normal or natural. This is why chauvinism breeds a depolitcizing tendency that is spawned from and made intensified by imperialist conditions.
Chauvinism is often centered around the theory of the labor aristocracy which maintains that imperialist war leads a privileged stratum of the working class to abandon the working class movement because they are financially incentivized to do so. Labor aristocracy is based on the idea that the spoils of war lead to a bourgeoisification of the workerâs movement. One of the major limitations to labor aristocracy theory emerges from the fact that contemporary imperialist war is no longer directly parasitical on the labor movement as it was in the lead up and immediate aftermath of World War I. Although the labor aristocracy does not function in the way it did historicallyâwhich was tied directly to total war and the imminent status of the draftâthis does not mean that chauvinism does not become a problem for working class politics in the context of imperialism today.
I would argue that chauvinism and opportunism remain relevant terms because they refer to the process in which sections of the proletariat become bourgeois and this generalized process offers a theoretical framework to explain a series of recurring tendencies. For LukĂĄcsâ, chauvinism is an effect of revisionism on a theoretical level because the revisionist deviates from historical materialism in that they do not take the concerns or the interests of the proletariat as their priority. The revisionist adopts the abstract and vague position of the âgood of societyâânot the position of laborâin their construal of the class struggle. This is why, as LukĂĄcs writes, âthe revisionist condemns the dialecticâ because they work to improve the proletariat within bourgeois society.1
Leninâs importance as a theorist of imperialism is found in the way that he critically identifies the wicked trinity of chauvinism, opportunism and revisionism, and readers of the Imperialism pamphlet will recall that all three are concentrated in the figure of Karl Kautsky and his theory of âultra imperialism.â2 The error of Kautskyâs theory of Ultra-Imperialism revolved around his support for a better, pre-monopoly form of capitalism, i.e., Kautsky failed to see how imperialism can offer a true revolutionary break. As a theory, Ultra-Imperialism refers to a network and alliance of inter-imperialist control which if realized or enacted would cause greater chauvinism in the workerâs movement because it was a model of understanding imperialism fully forged with bourgeois interests. Kautsky was not adequately revolutionary in the face of imperialism and war because he believed that âpeaceful democracyâ could arise out of inter-imperialist rivalry. Lenin sees Kautskyâs Ultra-Imperialism as premised on the naive view that a future global system that would be analogous to a peaceful federated Christendom could arise and this would bring an end to imperialism. From these faulty revisionist positions on imperialism Kautsky maintained a non-decisive position relative to to the great culminating moment of imperialism, namely World War I. Kautskyâs indecision and implicit support for imperialism is represented in his infamous abstention from the vote for war creditsâan act which many interpret as effectively a vote for the war.
At this point it is essential that we define imperialism for Lenin. Most importantly, it is synonymous with âmonopoly capitalismâ and it entails 1) The concentration of production 2) The rise of banks to global monopoly dominance and 3) Colonial land acquisition. In this confluence, Lenin saw the primary contradiction of the capitalist system had moved to reside between an honest free trade conception of the global system of capitalism versus what it truly resembled which was cartel monopolies. Kautsky refused this primary contradiction in his theory of ultra-imperialism.
I think the most important modification to historical materialism that Leninâs theory of imperialism opens up is the claim that revolution must become proletarian. In other words, in the age of imperialism the proletariat emerges as the only class that can take the revolution to its next logical level. And this is why Lenin will suggest that it is the task of the proletariat to cultivate leadership not only in domestic settings in the context of production-based labor struggles but the proletariat must rise up globally to stand for the freedom of all oppressed people.3
We thus move from the necessity of class independence, which is a hallmark of the Marxist view of political organization, to a theory of revolution that proceeds on the strong claim that revolutions must be proletarian in conditions of imperialism. This poses a challenge to working class movement because it is now tasked with coordinating an international leadership inclusive of coalitions of workers from the Global South that are affected by imperialism. The âmoribundâ condition of capitalism in its monopoly stage sends the bourgeoisie into a tailspin of decadence and fragmentation. This decadence expresses itself at an ideological and cultural level that affects the worldview of the class system in such a way that the bourgeoisieâeven its softer more progressive variantsâcannot avoid participation in the imperatives that imperialism generates.
Imperialism, Cultural Regression and Decadence
Imperialist imperatives are made diffuse in intellectual and cultural life and the bourgeoisie inevitably shifts their worldview to accommodate war, brutality and social chaos. Art and culture begin to reflect worldviews of the human based on zero-sum logics of power, the possibility of social cooperation is pessimistically denied and competition is theorized as natural, no longer as socially generated by the market. This poses something of a paradox that I have identified in contemporary social life, namely that the ideology of tech oligarchs is opposed to competition but the ideology of competition is internalized in the wider culture as inescapable and natural. The volatility of the market and its violence tends to be directly avowed as such and this results in the fraying of social contracts based in welfare. The capitalist ruling class begin to openly question the efficacy of welfare politics. Culture enters a situation where the normalization of brutalism becomes an ideological necessity and this affects liberal intellectuals who tend to adopt a cynical indifference to these wider processes. Or in the case of reactionary intellectuals, they tend to directly avow perspectives that reflect imperialist imperatives, from open celebration of war.
The ideological crisis kicked up by imperialism contributes to the core problem of chauvinism we defined at the outset as the tendency to make the exploitation of workers normalized. In fact, the very division of the exploitation of wage labor and the domination of colonialism, which is is opportunistically deployed as an antinomy that the majority of bourgeois intellectuals claim cannot be reconciled. We can see the conceptual richness of the Marxist theory of imperialism that Lenin and later LukĂĄcs develop in this way that it helps us historically account for a political epistemology of the superstructure (art, literature, religion, culture more generally) and the ways it becomes saturated with, and driven by imperialist imperatives.
Recall LukĂĄcsâ critique of Nietzsche in The Destruction of Reason: âWhat Nietzsche provided was a morality for the socially militant bourgeoisie and middle-class intelligentsia of imperialism.â Nietzsche emerges as a prophet of reaction once the class system experiences the intensification of imperialism and this causes him to lose faith in the Bonapartist management of the state by Bismarck. Nietzsche predicts a coming era of great wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, and out of the resulting chaos could he develops a new ideal: absolute rule by the ‘lords of the earth’ over a henceforth compliant herd, the suitably cowed slaves.4 That the implicit support for doctrines such as the will to power are themselves shaped by imperialist conditions and imperatives is an argument made not only by LukĂĄcs but also by writers such as Ernest SeilliĂšre in his work ApollĂŽn ou Dionysos; Ă©tude critique sur FrĂ©dĂ©ric Nietzsche et l’utilitarisme impĂ©rialiste published in 1905. Nietzscheâs latent imperialist thought helps us better understand the Nietzsche myth and the Nietzsche cults that emerge after his deathâhis popularity is due, in large part to the fact that his thought lends credence and support for imperialist imperatives.
The Challenge of Class Consciousness in Imperialist Times
Because imperialism has the tendency to create what Lenin will refer to as âprivileged sections among workersâ, this becomes a problem not of the moral chauvinism of this privileged stratum but the claim seems to be that in class terms, chauvinism is primarily expressed by the dominance of the petty bourgeois world-outlook, which only reinforces the terrible trinity of chauvinism, revisionism and opportunism. How is the worker to face such conditions? Lenin offers a hint in an earlier text What Is To Be Done that
âTo become class conscious, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond. But this âclear pictureâ cannot be obtained from any book. When they learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life, they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. The worker must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real âinner workingsâ. The worker must know the strong and weak points of these classes and strata and must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws.â5
What Lenin is getting at here is the idea that one of the effects of capitalist social relationsâand here we do not need to offer up a âstagistâ theory of capitalism to rely on this pointâis that the primary contradiction of capital, as a binary locus of struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, does not appear immediately in an undiluted or pure form. Imperialism poses a challenge to the workers movement and to class consciousness because the fragmentation it foments works to obscure this primary contradiction by displacing it. As Domenico Losurdo points out in his work Class Struggles, there are three genus of class struggle: first there is labor exploitation of the proletariat, second there are colonial struggles (struggles that are an effect of imperialism) and thirdly there is the womanâs struggle.
Whatâs original in Losurdoâs taxonomy of class struggles is the way that these three forms of struggle do not magically appear in some evolutionist way but they are each embedded in historical materialism, stretching back to Marx and Engelsâ early work. Most notably, he show how the emphasis on oppression versus exploitation, a difference that would seem to only arise in imperialism is itself an embedded feature of the capitalist system whether imperialism is present or not. The unevenness of capitalist development results in a multiplicity of modes of production within the capitalist system, i.e., feudal and slavery persist. Marx and Engels construe of workers conditions as opressed,6 and the fact that this division between the exploited and the oppressed is so often taken as an unreconcilable difference is a reflection on the incoherence of a bourgeoisie that has normalized exploitation. This is why the most egregious effect of chauvinism is that it leads workers to view exploitation, social decay and deterioration of their living conditions as normal and âpar for the courseâ. It is important that we address the two tendencies of chauvinism, from its tendency to normalize exploitation and its refusal to form solidarity with oppressed peopleâs who face colonial domination.7
Postoneâs Anti-Anti-Imperialism
Moishe Postone offers a strong criticism of contemporary antiwar and anti-imperialist struggle on the left in his 2006 essay History and Helplessness. Postone argues that anti-imperialism perverts the perspective of capitalism and makes the object of struggle into a purely fetishistic object, i.e., for Postone anti-imperialist struggles have created a monstrous specter of moralism over all enemies to American imperialism. In his view, anti-imperialism makes a theoretical and practical error in that it reduces the analysis of the logic of imperialism to a purely subjective force of history. Postoneâs view of imperialism is similar to Leninâs conception in that he maintains that imperialism occludes the primary contradiction between labor and capital. But he believes that anti-imperialism has regressed to a fetishistic understanding of global development that puts an understanding of global capitalism in agentic terms and neglects the abstract and dynamic basis of capital.8
Moishe Postone
Anti-imperialism is thus flawed and in error in Postoneâs view because it relies on a subjectivism in its analysis of what drives imperialist dynamics. This subjectivism prevents the left from grasping the historical necessity of capital in its objective and what he often likes to emphasize as capitalâs impersonal forms of domination. Postone criticizes the sort of anti-imperialism that emerged in the counter-globalization movement and mobilizations against the war in Iraq. He effectively thinks that this form of anti-imperialism is drive by personal outrage that ends up developing an emotive and sentimental solidarity with the victims of U.S. imperialism and the dictatorial leaders of the enemies of the United Statesâall of this results in a binary moralist assessment of imperialism in which actors are fundamentally good or evil, albeit this is posed in secular terms. All in all, the left construes imperialism in a populist conception of the class struggle.
Postone identifies the historical basis of this particular agentic and populist anti-imperialism in the philosophical paradigms of existentialist and anarchist notions of realizing personhood through violence.9 Postone finds this legacy of existentialist moralism and violence as liberation in Sorel, Fanon, Pareto to be flawed because it attempts to pose a break with bourgeois society but not with capitalism. All of this amount to a moral revolt based in a personalization paradigm that the left cannot eschew in its anti-imperialist strategies and perspective. The historical touchstone of these errors is found in the New Left and its turn away from addressing exploitation but instead addressing alienation and bureaucratization. The fetish with violence is really an expression of a rage that conceals an impotence to adequately revolutionize capitalism, and these paradigms of liberation were fundamentally applied to a different historical context, i.e., the New Left worldview on imperialism has projected its own reaction to the bureaucratic stasis of the Fordist world onto the Global South. All of this conceals a profound political despair.10
The legacy of this framework of anti-imperialism has led to a construal of anti-imperialism in the form of a dualistic conception of âresistanceâ which does not think dialectics. By dialectics we mean to say that anti-imperialism, as Postone critiques it, does not grasp its own conditions of possibility or the historical context in which it is a part. At issue in anti-imperialism is thus a mis-recognition into the determining structural dynamics of capital and it is this ignorance that leads to a populist-fetishistic understanding of imperial conflict, one that pits the struggle as a battle of wills. Anti-imperialism results in a romanticism of the underdogs one that risks de-tethering the struggle from any positive political change whatsoever. For Postone, anti-imperialism is inevitably bound up with chauvinism because it has lost a properly dynamic perspective on capital.
Critique of Postoneâs Anti-Anti-Imperialism
Postoneâs diagnosis of anti-imperialism helps account for a very particular liberal form of anti-imperialism which has its common foothold in the 60s political epistemologies he rightly associates it with. But the truth is that, when read in relation to Lenin, Postoneâs critique of anti-imperialism leaves us wanting. He sounds more like Kautsky than he does Lenin, in that for Lenin the first sign of revisionism is the adoption of the perspective on society in an abstract sense, not that of labor or the proletariat. It is hard to see how a perspective on the non-agentic basis of capital can account for how imperialism is a distinct form of capitalism. Postoneâs otherwise sound historical diagnosis of reflexive liberal anti-imperialism is attentive to a contradictory basis that it has in history and how the forms of liberation of the 60s donât have neat commensurability with contemporary wars from the genocide in Gaza to the imminent war with Iran.
Postoneâs theoretical account of capital as a system of impersonal domination has its merits, but it seems that it does not help us to discern the means to integrate and forge solidarity with forms of domination that inevitably overlap with and must be thought in relation. The core distinction Postone identifies as one-sided in imperialism is already addressed in Lenin, namely that between a class assault on the system versus an assault on the system as understood as capitalist. What is missing in anti-imperialism is the latter and only the former remains the priority. But what is truly missing is how the workerâs movement can attain both perspectives a systemic and agentic perspective. To the latter, the problem revolves around how the integration and solidarity with forms of oppression that are endemic to imperialism can forge with the working class and avoid the liberal tendency to view these struggles as an unresolvable antinomy. As we saw above, this antinomy is a source of profound fragmentation, not necessarily due to the rise of labor aristocracy but primarily due to the total cultural transformation that imperialist imperatives inculcate. Perhaps the most important practical message Lenin offers in his critique of chauvinism is the way that he places the onus on the workerâs movement to shrug this binary off and pursue class independence that is capable of uniting these forms of struggle.
Postoneâs critique of the neo-romanticism of anti-imperialism is compelling to be sure, but it is dated to the pre-Occupy and pre-Sanders anti-Iraq war left. What Postone identifies is an irrationalism of liberal anti-imperialism that is irrationalist precisely in that it personifies imperialist conflict. Postone does not offer a means to rectify this issue other than through an abstract appeal to an analytic perspective limited to understanding. What is missing in Postone is a class analysis that is committed to a proletarian-centered politics. Leninâs strong claim that imperialism not only necessitates class independence but any revolution must be proletarianârequires a shift in the perception of the working class in regards to the totality of political and social relations.
All of these observations alert us to the fact that we must avoid any idealism of practice in the face of imperialism. The idealism of practice refers to the sort of subjectivism that Postone identifies as an inevitable outcome of imperial conflicts. Its effect, as Lenin argues, is that it makes the workerâs exploitation a non-issue in the face of imperialism. Today we face the challenge of building a politics led from the standpoint of the proletariat, and this is the same problem that Lenin and LukĂĄcs faced. The maturity of the working class movement in the time of Lenin and LukĂĄcs compared to our time is of course stark, however, in order to truly build a proletarian politics we must deploy multiple strategies, from civil society institution building, to political education, to party-building. A proletarian politics that aims to build the resolve of the working-class, to strengthen its capacity to act as a class, and to steer the proletariat towards the means to transcend capitalist politics requires not only a strident anti-imperialist position, it requires a confrontation with the cultural and philosophical problems imperialism inevitably provokes.
Notes:
1. Lukacs, Georg Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought Verso Books, p. 53
2. Kautskyâs positions on imperialism have been colored by Leninâs strident critique. But more charitable readings are worth studying. See my interview with neo-Kautskyist thinker Ian Szabo:
3. One year following Leninâs Imperialism text in the summer of 1920, the Congress of the Peoples of the East, which convened in Baku immediately after the Second Congress of the Comintern revised the slogan that was initially established in the Communist Manifesto and the Inaugural Address of the International Working Menâs Association end. The new slogan read: âWorkers of All Lands and Oppressed Peoples of the Whole World, Unite!â Domenico Losurdo is correct when he notes that the inclusion of âoppressed peoplesâ had now emerged alongside âworkersâ as fully-fledged revolutionary subjects and this inclusion is implied in Leninâs pamphlet on imperialism.
4. LukĂĄcs, Georg The Destruction of Reason, p. 337
5. Lenin, Vladimir What is to Be Done
6. Engels remarked that the emancipation of women is the natural measure of general emancipation.
7. Losurdo, Domenico Class Struggles p. 174
8. Postone, Moishe, History and Helplessness p. 96
9. Ibid, p. 106
10. My essay here is based on a talk I gave on the panel What is Imperialism, and Why Should We Be Against It on 3/16/25 at Georgetown University