Defining imperialism

As anarchists we define imperialism as involving either state and/or capitalist actors pursuing economic and political influence over other nations or regions.

Imperialism is a tool of capitalism, and an inevitable phase of capitalist development. US imperialism is a dominant global threat, and international institutions like the World Bank and IMF largely enforce or are aligned with US corporate and strategic interests. Today, there are also corporations richer than whole countries, giving them the ability to exploit resources, workforces and suppress labour laws, unions and environmental protections. Despite rivalries between states and capitalists playing out on mainstream media, they also collaborate to protect common interests, trading military and intelligence strategies to undermine popular movements.

While capitalists in the Global South might be dominated by international capitalists operating within their borders, all capitalists seek profit, power, influence, hegemony, and all require exploitation and expansion to secure profit and remain competitive. As such, we disagree with the Leninist stance that the ruling class only consists of capitalists in particular imperialist nations. Rather, capitalists and states of all nations constitute the ruling class because their interests and position in society conflicts with that of the working class.

Australian imperialism

Australia is a significant imperialist power, its expansionism began from the ongoing occupation of Indigenous nations here, towards historical power grabs in Papua, New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu. Australian imperialism today includes placing troops in Iraq, Egypt, Palestine and South Sudan, joint training with the Indonesian military who occupy West Papua, as well as intervening in East Timor, Solomon Islands, Tonga to suppress protests. The Australian government seems unwilling to depart from US interests in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, as well as their antagonising of nations like Iran. In addition, US oil and gas companies pay little or no tax while extracting billions in profit from natural resources. A gift to a bigger superpower the Australian government doesn’t want to piss off. This allegiance will be tested as the US careens toward fascism and makes demands of its allies and threats to its enemies.

On national liberation movements

Many national liberation movements in the Global South will ally with domestic capitalists to fight off imperialists. For the people, nationalism can be a tool of resistance to imperialist domination, but for capitalists it is a tool used to obscure class antagonisms and promote a false unity that benefits them at the expense of the working class.

In allying with domestic capitalists and forgoing class struggle, these movements are quickly pulled from their liberatory values and towards authoritarianism and profit-seeking: increased government repression, corruption, exploitation of local people, control and decimation of unions, disastrous economic policies, as well as civil war, mass imprisonment, torture, displacement, and extrajudicial killings. These injustices cannot be simply excused as moral failings of specific leaders, but are inevitabilities brought about by the realities of operating capitalism through a state in a globalised capitalist world.

Anarchists will organise within national liberation movements because we are anti-imperialist. Though, as anti-capitalists, our task within them is to argue that the international working class and peasantry should band together to fight both domestic and international capitalists, through popular class organisations that aim to wrestle back control over our lives and can birth democratic structures for a new society that is opposed to authoritarian rule.

Class struggle for all?

Though, as many Global South liberation movements learned, workers strikes alone are often violently opposed by occupying militaries. Where dock workers were slain while striking against Portuguese colonisers in Guinea-Bissau, the PAIGC abandoned class struggle for armed struggle. It would be remiss of anarchists to propose a strategy that didn’t take into account the violence wrought by imperialists and colonialists. In resisting US imperialism during the 1970s, anarchists in Uruguay correctly saw their workers movement as the central liberatory force, but managed to defend it against the unrestrained violence of the imperialists. Those who know this history can see that anarchists can maintain a class struggle orientation without it only being applicable in ‘western’ contexts, as some claim.

In not centering armed struggle, but class struggle, the working class can meaningfully build and maintain organisations through which to express their democratic political will. In Cuba, the state took hierarchical control of the unions to create a subservient working population, decimating the popular organisations that should facilitate the democratic will of the working class and turning them into an apparatus of control. This is antithetical to the anarchist vision of a democratic revolution lead by the working class itself, and anarchists who were the most organised force within the Cuban workers movement at the time paid the ultimate price for their commitment to workers’ democracy.

Rather than allying with states and arguing for their ‘sovereignty’ while they launch attacks that predominantly kill working class people, we ally with the working class in struggle around the world. Through our respective workers organisations, we can coordinate workers action across different continents, trapping imperialists in a vice grip between strikes by domestic workers and by international workers in solidarity. We can starve regimes of oil and guns by refusing their manufacturing or transport like dockworkers from various western contexts did, to embargo apartheid South Africa while struggles in the country were waged. Only with a truly internationalist strategy can a globalised imperialist capitalist system be ended for good.

This requires dispelling the myth that workers in the west have been bought off by the proceeds of imperialism. Not only is this not demonstrated empirically but some of the most militant workers within our context (Builders Laborers Federation) were the highest paid precisely due to their militancy. There is revolutionary potential in the working class, it just needs to be accessed through organising more effectively than reactionaries and nationalists, and that is not achieved through essentialising settlers or white workers.

Anarchists oppose campism

From where we are, it is necessary and practical to oppose the Australian state in its conquests here and elsewhere. While pursuing a commitment to revolutionary defeatism and anti-imperialist struggle, we will still take a principled stance of opposing all oppressors everywhere, because we stand with the international working class and not the states that oppress them.

The campist notion that nation states are waging a protracted anti-imperialist war for the liberation of all people on earth is an idealistic fantasy that should have ended with the Sino-Soviet split, though many on the left still bend reality to defend this fiction. While these arguments aren’t meaningfully defending the global south from imperialist attacks, by denying or justifying cruelty from non-western states, they are demonstrating to large portions of the working class that they can’t be trusted.

In reality, states like China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Vietnam, Iran, Ethiopia etc are seeking either global or regional power too, and oppress the working class, indigenous and ethnic minorities in their regions. People that anarchists will always stand with and act in solidarity with. Despite the social democratic reforms cemented by these regimes and parroted as propaganda by their supporters, to call these regimes ‘socialist’ is a disservice to all that suffer under them, and to all who genuinely fight for the establishment of a socialist world.