The KKE/Trotskyist effort to redefine imperialism, & how it undermines the global workers struggle

To win the debate against the KKE’s “neither Washington nor Beijing” camp, what we need to focus on is the role of finance capital. Specifically what purpose finance capital has in the system of imperialism, and why Marxist economic analysis shows that it has an indispensable role in the imperial superstructure. In this debate, the goal of the KKE and the Trotskyist forces the KKE aligns with is to obscure the essential part that finance plays within imperialism; and the purpose of this obfuscation is to depict the present global conflict as an “inter-imperialist” conflict, instead of as the anti-imperialist fight which it actually is.

The deeper purpose behind this is to assist the reformist, opportunist, and wrecker forces that are tied to the KKE, such as the Trotskyist faction within Venezuela’s socialist movement. That this faction instigated a grievously damaging split in the Venezuelan workers movement proves this isn’t just a theoretical debate, it has very consequential implications. When the Trotskyists spun a false narrative about Maduro’s government having betrayed the workers, it greatly weakened the communist movement; and one of the core supporting ideas behind this narrative was that we must also take a “neither Washington nor Beijing” position. That all countries in the world have imperialist tendencies, as the KKE argues, and therefore we shouldn’t side with any countries resisting the U.S. hegemon.

It’s this notion that’s contained within all arguments which assert the USA is not today’s sole imperialist power. A recent example of this is the rebuttal that Greg Godels from Marxism-Leninism Today made towards Carlos Garrido’s article on why Russia and China are not imperialist. Within this piece, there’s a part where Godels challenges Garrido’s premise about imperialism having taken on a new form, yet in the process admits the imperial system has in fact become centralized within the United States:

The “transformation” that Garrido believes he sees is simply a reordering of the international system that existed before the war with New York now replacing London as the financial center of the capitalist universe. It is the replacement of the vast colonial world and the bloody rivalries and shifting alliances and hierarchies of the interwar world with the creation of a neo-colonial system dominated by the US and reinforced by its assumption of the role of guardian of capitalism in the Cold War. The monopoly capitalist base is qualitatively the same, but its superstructure changes with historical circumstances. The Bretton Woods system and the later discarding of the gold standard reflect those changing circumstances.

What I find interesting about this argument is that Godels does not try to find alleged examples of Russia or China engaging in imperialist actions. This is something that you consistently see liberals, anarchists, or right-wingers do when confronted with the question of whether we should align with these countries, but somebody can’t really do this when they have the theoretical knowledge that Godels shows he has. In the article, Godels explains why imperialism is not a policy but a system, so it would be contradictory for him to point towards this or that policy as proof of Washington’s rivals being imperialist. Therefore in order to win this debate from a Marxist perspective, the “neither Washington nor Beijing” camp needs to prove that finance—which as Godels concedes is centralized in the USA—isn’t synonymous with imperialism.

To make this argument, Godels attempts to refute Garrido’s statement that the bulk of imperialism’s profits come from finance:

Garrido’s misunderstanding of the international role of finance capital leads him to make the claim that “…the lion’s share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest.” At its peak before the great crash of 2007-2009, finance (broadly speaking, finance, insurance, real estate) accounted for maybe forty percent of US profits; today, with the NASDAQ techs, the percentage is likely less. But that is only US profits. With deindustrialization, industrial commodity production has shifted to the PRC, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other low-wage areas and the US has become the center of world finance. If commodity production sneezes, the whole edifice of fictitious capital collapses, along with its fictitious profits.

As all three volumes of Capital explain in great detail, commodity production is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and wage-labor is the source of value, not the mystifying maneuvers of Wall Street grifters.

The notion this argument depends on is that because of the difference between the illusory speculative financial profits, and the materially tangible profits that come from labor, finance is not necessarily a prerequisite to imperialism. Why, then, does Godels recognize that the imperialist superstructure has been reordered to center around New York? Why is it evidently impossible to dispute that the capitalist universe has come to revolve around U.S. finance, even when one rejects Garrido’s idea that imperialism has transitioned into a new phase? (Which is also true; Garrido is referring to how finance has taken on such a big role that the U.S. can solely use it as a tool for leverage.)

To properly see the argument Garrido was making here, it’s best to include more of what he wrote about that “lion’s share” idea:

Today, the lion’s share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest. The U.S. can run perpetual deficits without the normal constraints other nations face, effectively getting the rest of the world to finance its military spending and overseas investments. Instead of weakening the U.S., the deficits tie other countries’ financial systems to the dollar, reinforcing its geopolitical and economic dominance.

​The U.S. could print in less than a second more money than any country could produce in a span of years of real investment in labor, resources, and time. This is what imperialism is today. Its skeletal body are the global financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, institutions that only the U.S. has – in the last instance – control over. Neither China nor Russia could leverage these global financial apparatuses to enforce their so-called “imperial” interests. On the contrary, these institutions are often utilized by the U.S. as a weapon against them and their allies.

This context is essential to understanding why imperialism is synonymous with U.S. hegemony, and why the imperial system can’t be separated from finance. Lenin clarified that “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” After this division was completed, and the United States took on the role of the banking hub for capital in all other countries, the task of the workers movement changed. In this era, one of our foremost missions is to defeat U.S. dominance in particular, which would thereby cause the imperial system as a whole to unravel.

For this to happen, there will need to be a workers revolution in the United States; which pertains to a certain contradiction within our movement, that being the difference between the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle. These struggles are overwhelmingly aligned in their goals, but they are not one and the same. This reality is something that cynical actors like the KKE seek to exploit when they depict the countries fighting imperialism as not being worthy of the workers’ support; they act as if defeating U.S. hegemony should be de-prioritized due to the class contradictions within these anti-imperialist countries. This comes from the crude economism that prevails within the communist parties which have fallen into dogmatic thinking.

It’s useful to point out these economistic errors, but to build a political force that’s truly effective at waging all fronts of the struggle, we will need to reckon with the contradictions regarding class and anti-imperialism. I readily admit that this reckoning needs to happen among those who support multipolarity; far too much “multipolarist” politics disregards the class struggle, and behaves as if multipolar institutions such as BRICS will do the work for us. It is necessary to warn against this idealism. The biggest problem with the position the KKE takes towards the BRICS countries is that due to its treating these countries like potential incubators of imperialism, it acts as if their local capitalist classes are independent. Which is a notion that actually obscures the real danger they pose.

The risk is not that the national bourgeoisie in Russia, Iran, or other places will launch upstart imperialist projects, because they lack the financial capacity to do this. The risk is that they’ll sell their peoples out to the hegemon. It’s this danger that we need to focus on, and the only way we can address it is by building the workers movement. A key thing, though, is to not do this in an economistic way, but rather reach a synthesis that accounts for the anti-imperialist struggle. This is the balance that can let us win the ideological battle with the KKE’s camp, and act as effective leaders for the workers.

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