The Necessary Anti-Imperialist Struggle

Communist Party of Argentina | Ivana Brighenti

We are witnessing on a daily basis the continuity of the capitalist crisis and its maximum exponent, U.S. imperialism.
This situation deepens the view that the current world system is unstable, chaotic, endangers world peace and cannot be sustained in time as we know it.
The concentration of wealth, inequality, exclusion, hunger and unemployment, together with the effects of climate change, the unjust and speculative distribution of resources to alleviate the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the escalation of warfare provoked by NATO, confronts us with the urgent challenge of finding ways to overcome the conditions imposed by globalized financial capital that is leading all of humanity into the abyss.
This complex situation is taking place in the midst of a “naturalization” of the pandemic with thousands of contagions and deaths that continue to occur around the world.
A pandemic that not only has, as we know, health and economic consequences, but also on subjectivity, on the social and political fabric, whose dimensions are yet to be seen in depth.
In this context, the provocations by the USA and NATO against the Russian Federation have unleashed the conflict in Ukraine, a conflict that continues and has dangerous prospects for all humanity, and through which they seek to weaken the projection of a multilateral order and affect Russia as a power and as the main strategic ally of the People’s Republic of China.
We must always bear in mind the threat posed by the permanent expansion and growth of NATO towards the Russian border after the collapse of the USSR. In 1991 NATO had 19 members, today it has 30 and aspires to further expansion.
On the basis of actions such as this, the US, as the head of a capitalist system in crisis, seeks to sustain its questioned hegemony, its dented unipolar domination, with provocations, destabilizations and military interventions as it has constantly done throughout the 20th century and this 21st century.
In this strategy, manipulation carried out through the media and the falsification of history that has led to this situation plays a central role.
From Latin America and the Caribbean, as historically vital spaces for the U.S. in the construction of its world hegemony, we can give ample examples of these interference policies, carried out by the U.S. and its allies, through, for example, the unilateral sanctions implemented against Cuba and Venezuela, the aggressions against Nicaragua, the constant promotion of destabilizing policies within the framework of the so-called “soft coups” and the occupation of the Malvinas, South Georgias and the South Sandwich Islands and the surrounding maritime areas, where there is a NATO base, administered by the United Kingdom.
Today, a new international order is being disputed in the world. A dispute between unilateralism and multilateralism.
In this context, relations with China, Russia and the blocs and agreements they are promoting politically, commercially and financially, appear for the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean as alternatives to the pressures and conditions of the U.S. and the international organizations it controls, such as the International Monetary Fund.
We insist, in order to analyze the dimension and characteristics of the imperialist offensive on Latin America and the Caribbean, we must take into account the global context in which it is taking place, marked by the continuity of the greatest crisis in the history of capitalism.
A crisis that encompasses financial, energy, cultural and economic aspects, with strong consequences in humanitarian, environmental and food terms for a large part of humanity.
These factors, as a whole, constitute a single great crisis, all-encompassing and multifaceted: the civilizational crisis of capitalism, in the face of which we must build an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist alternative.
This crisis, although it has its center in the U.S., is not only a U.S. phenomenon impacting on the rest of the world, but it is also a global, systemic process, and its effects are manifested throughout the globe.
In the face of negationist discourses, it is important in this context to emphasize the continuity of the imperialist system, even in crisis, bearing in mind that the essential features of imperialism continue to exist.
The five fundamental features of imperialism identified by Lenin: the concentration of production and capital, the merger of banking capital with industrial capital, the predominance of the export of capital over the export of goods, the bid for the distribution of markets on a global scale among the great oligopolies backed by their States and the territorial distribution of the world among the great powers, “retain their validity, although their morphology does not necessarily repeat that which characterized them a century ago”, as Atilio Boron highlights in his book Latin America in the geopolitics of imperialism (Boron, 2014).
These have a strong penetration in our continent and despite the insistent and interested positions that recurrently seek to establish the idea that Latin America is a region that has no major relevance in U.S. policy, it is actually the most geopolitically important region for the United States.
This raises the historical recurrence and the urgency and importance of the anti-imperialist struggle throughout the world and in Latin America in particular.
It is that beyond, as we said, the discourses still in vogue on the disappearance of imperialism, this continues to be the superior phase of capitalism, as Lenin had stated, and in its insatiable need to increase the plundering of the common goods and wealth of the entire planet, it acquires increasingly predatory, aggressive and violent features.
The resurgence of neo-fascist sectors throughout the world is a clear sign of this.
These actions demonstrate that the “negationist” discourses on the persistence of imperialism and which promote a reformist possibility, end up being functional to the attempts of reaffirmation, under new conditions, of this domination.
A central point in this negationist approach is to understand imperialism as a purely external factor and not to recognize its manifestations within each country through its ruling classes, partners and fundamental components.
The U.S. has placed competition for natural resources at the very center of its strategic planning and this makes imperialism redouble its efforts to sustain its influence in Latin America, in view of the failure of its policy to install a unilateral international order after the fall of the USSR, the much touted “American century”.
The deepening of cooperation between Moscow and Beijing through the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation and Good Neighborliness, in the political, economic, military, energy, scientific, technological and regional and global security spheres, together with the strengthening of regional Asian organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS and the implementation of its expansion with the BRICS “plus” of which Argentina will be a full member in 2023, and the project of the Belt and Road or new “Silk Road”, are warning lights for the US, and it is acting accordingly.
The scheme of the new world chessboard is at stake, the aspirations of the US are threatened in a process that David Harvey (2012) has described as “crisis in motion”, which gives an idea of the global magnitude of the same and that, beyond the moments of calm that may sporadically be reached at some point of the planet, simultaneously generate a deepening of the crisis in others, demonstrating the systemic nature of the same.
These tensions occur within the framework of a “globalization” which, as Aníbal Quijano (2000) has indicated, “is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and that of colonial/modern and Eurocentric capitalism as a new pattern of world power”. In this way, colonialism, under which the control of labor was established, configured the geographical distribution of each of the forms integrated in world capitalism, decided the social geography of capitalism through which all other forms of control of labor, its resources and its products were articulated.
With the pattern of world power centered in the United States, this division of labor at the level of regions continues to be structured on the basis of a center which, while seeing its hegemony eroded, absorbs more and more resources to sustain an impossible level of consumption in exchange for plundering the regions supplying these resources, whether renewable or not.
In this sense, U.S. imperialism has been deploying a multiple combination in its counter-offensive on Our America: military reinforcement and permanent threats with the proliferation of military bases, combined with a media and cultural battery that seeks to “normalize” and “naturalize” military penetration and ideological domination over our peoples, territories and corresponding strategic natural assets.
The challenges that this represents for communists around the world impose on us to act with determination and audacity and to readjust the areas of regional integration. In the dispute for multilateralism that is developing, communists, revolutionaries from all over the world must coordinate ourselves to act as a single fist against the attempts of U.S. imperialism to continue exercising its tutelage over a good part of our countries through its allies.
As Comandante Fidel Castro (1983) said so well in his time:
It has never been resigned submission or defeatism in the face of difficulties that has characterized us. We have been able to face with a sense of unity, firmness and decision, complex and difficult situations in recent years. Together we have made efforts, together we have fought, and together we have won victories. With that same spirit and determination, we must be ready to wage the most colossal, just, dignified and necessary battle for the life and future of our peoples.
This struggle to which Comandante Fidel Castro summoned us is still in force; it is the struggle against capitalism, against imperialism.
It is the anti-imperialist struggle in which we remain committed.

Bibliography

• Boron, Atilio (2014) Latin America in the geopolitics of imperialism. Ediciones Luxemburg, Buenos Aires.
  • Castro, Fidel (1983) The economic and social crisis of the world. Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, Havana.
    • Harvey, David (2012) “Interview of Atilio Boron at the IV International Meeting of Political Economy and Human Rights”. Universidad Popular Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_zzbg2Jfcg.
      • Quijano, Aníbal (2000) “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América latina” in La colonialidad del saber. CLACSO, Buenos Aires.