What is our understanding of imperialism as anarchists? While various empires have existed and taken power over land and people, our current society is deeply influenced by European-dominated imperialism. England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain built empires in the Americas, India, and the East Indies from the 15th century. Russia, Italy, Germany, the United States, and Japan became imperial powers from the mid-19th century.
While the above nation states continue to assert imperial power in various ways, we do not just define imperialism in relation to them. We define imperialism today as both state and capitalist actors that not only seek territorial and political influence, but also work together to maintain their economic interests.
Imperialism looks like international and state corporations funneling profits of natural resource extraction and industrial human labour from the peripheries towards the ‘core’. There are capitalist corporations that are richer than whole countries, many of which are American-owned, which gives a unique ability for individuals or groups of capitalists to search for resources and workforces abroad in countries that haven’t established strong labour laws. Imperialism also looks like US-led wars that install dictators, launch bombing campaigns, while borders and police become increasingly militarised. It looks like the World Bank and the IMF, where these paternalistic institutions demand colonised countries to set up liberal democracy and neoliberal policy as conditions to receive loans, whilst UN ‘peace’ troops engage in sexual abuse of the local people.
American imperialism has been key to spreading the appeal of western ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’, ‘War on Terror’ Islamophobia, setting up surveillance technology and military bases around the world. While the Australian settler government is eager to support US interests and wars for regional power, Australia today is also a significant imperialist power. Australian imperialism involves not only the ongoing war and occupation on Indigenous nations here, but also its historical power grabs in Papua, New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu, and through establishing the Blackbirding slave trade. Australian imperialism means that there are still troops in places like Iraq, Egypt, Palestine and South Sudan. In addition, Australia has a military cooperation with Indonesia over West Papua, sends military ‘aid’ to the Philippines, ‘defends’ Nauru and the establishment of Australian detention centres there, and has intervened in East Timor, Solomon Islands, Tonga to suppress protests.
While rivalries between imperialist states and war-mongering narratives play out on mainstream media, these multiracial elites trade military and intelligence strategies to counter and undermine popular movements. Fascist ideas become increasingly visible, while prison, police, military funding gets beefed up. This is what we call multipolar imperialism, where there are multiple ‘poles’ of imperial power that mediate and amplify capitalist dynamics. So western ‘democracy’ is certainly not the antidote to non-western authoritarian governments, neither will we find our freedom in ‘free trade’ agreements, neocolonial strategies of influencing through technological development, and various forms of foreign education, nonprofit initiatives, and cultural propaganda that push elite interests.
A genuine anti-imperialist praxis should have an updated analysis on how states collaborate and develop their own repressive regimes of control. Even though western imperialisms like the US and Australia are still some of the largest forces around the world, imperialism is not just done by the West. We seek to critique western imperialisms without making justifications for other state powers, and disagree with authoritarian communist arguments that weaponise rhetoric around ‘sovereignty’ on behalf of capitalist authoritarian states to ‘challenge’ US imperialism. In reality, states like China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Vietnam, Iran, Ethiopia etc. are seeking either global or regional power too, and oppress Indigenous people in their regions. This campist framing of needing to take sides within or between nation states leads to amplifying fascist discourse.
So we will not side with any nation states, nor will we appeal to the Australian settler government to take action against other states. We disagree with arguments that call for leftists to deal with only “domestic” matters, because this argument remains in the domain of single issue politics. Neither do we want to limit ourselves to the framework of international human rights, since it maintains a western-controlled international law. For many pro-democracy movements that argue for ‘rights’, it either results in mild and temporary reform, or immense repression. We refuse to romanticise people’s self-sacrifice in becoming dissidents, and the idealistic tendency for dissident communities to campaign for western ‘democracy’. Instead, we want to encourage local diaspora communities to understand for themselves the limits of reforming a false ‘democracy’ and a reactive anti-communism.
Our organisation believes firmly that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach must be combated at every turn. Instead, we must try to out-organise reactionary components of social movements. This must be done through further solidarity efforts with anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movements around the world.
But for this to be coordinated and sustainable, there needs to be the building of revolutionary unions, mass organisations, and global confederations that can facilitate solidarity at a large scale, and for all of which power is to be delegated from the bottom-up. We believe in strengthening workers’ power and directly democratic self-organisation to interrupt the logistical networks of imperialist economies, and as anarchists we will fight for these to be as separate as possible from state actors. Our anti-imperialism is therefore invested in strategising at the intersections of imperialist power and capital, whilst also helping build bridges and points of leverage between workers and anti-imperialist movements.
